Security for Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his entourage was extra-tight and the Special Protection Group was not taking chances. Coming as it is, the controversy, during the course of a general elections, which is more than tumultuous and could swing any which way, today’s plethora of media is vitiating the political discourse with unverified and fake news, opinions. But the entire episode is chronicled in the print publications of those times, copies of the news clippings of which are available online.

But, of course, none of those print news publications were digging out the facts from those days to throw light on the actual happenings, till goaded, so polarized had not only the electorate but also the media become, another legacy of the Modi era, which when taken into the reckoning will be no less a blot than the jaunts at public expense of a Congress Prime Minister.

That said, a caveat or two is called for: Even a Prime Minister is entitled to a vacation and who he takes along with him is his right/choice. Two, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at that time faced a clear and present threat to his life thanks to his advisers who placed him in awkward and illogical situations not the least of which was to push him into the Sri Lanka/LTTE snake pit.

To date, the Prime Minister’s security follows him wherever he goes, and no questions asked. And was not it a travesty that finally, at the end of the day, Rajiv Gandhi fell to an LTTE suicide bomber? The gory and scheming details of which were also chronicled in newspapers of those days of 1991, a good five years after Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘Bangaram Holiday’ made headlines and gossip.

One of the journalists who gave a piece by piece account of Rajiv Gandhi’s Bangaram vacation was Indian Express reporter N Madhavan Kutty, who went on to become Kerala bureau chief of the Indian Express and is now considered as the “right hand man” of Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. Kutty wrote a revealing report in the IE of January 23, 1988, which gave a bird’s eye view of a Prime Minister holidaying in a remote Lakshadweep island, which was sanitized for the VVIP visit, including keeping a check on flies!

Kutty enumerated the total number of “guests”; how many of them were “foreigners”, hailing from which countries, and how many “private” boats and Indian Navy ships were in the vicinity of Bangaram for the duration of the holiday; how the inlands themselves were quarantined, out of bounds for other visitors. The Indian Express on May 9, 2019 “outted” the articles published by it those days and N. Madhavan Kutty’s “The Holiday That Was” is one of them.

For the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi now to rake up Rajiv Gandhi’s holidays 32 years after the events may stand on Modi’s ‘national security’ election plank, but to think and say that the Indian establishment of that time did not take into consideration threats to India and to the people of India when the Prime Minister took a few days “off” cannot be anything other than naïve. If that is so, then Prime Minister Narendra Modi has in the last five years left “India” to fend for herself numerous times when on his foreign tours. And Bangaram was/is “India”, not “Tokyo”, “London” or “San Jose”.

Leaving “India unattended” was never in an Indian Prime Minister’s brief, and no Prime Minister ever did so. Most heads of state prefer to keep their patriotism close to their chests, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi loves to flaunt it on his 56” chest. Does that make him any bigger a nationalist than his predecessors is one of the issues on which a divided electorate will/have vote/voted in 2019!

A certain Ayeshbi of Kalpeni Island in the Lakshadweep archipelago, who was 19 in 1988 when Rajiv Gandhi holidayed in Bangaram, had this to say on her Whatsapp status on May 10, 2019: “Modi the Divider!” Does that mean somebody journalist will pen “The Holiday That Will Be” on Narendra Modi sailing into the sunset post May 23, 2019? Wait for a division of votes. Till then clear the aisles. (IPA Service)