Mani Shankar Aiyar

Although the author and Rajiv Gandhi overlapped at the Doon School and Cambridge, Mani Shankar Aiyar was far too senior to Rajiv at school and far too impecunious at Cambridge to have more than a nodding acquaintance with the future prime minister. Even though Rajiv Gandhi invited him into the PMO in March 1985, and put him in charge of the PM's tour programmes, speech writing, and his cultural and Panchayati Raj initiatives, Aiyar was firmly excluded from all other political and policy matters! Nevertheless, despite never having been Rajiv Gandhi's confidante, a bond between them grew to the point where the PM albeit with considerable reluctance permitted Aiyar to resign from the IFS for an alternative career in politics with the Congress Party. This book is thus the outcome of the author's research and reflections on Raj iv Gandhi as the PM and as a person, written some three decades after his brutal assassination.