Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in Tamil Nadu on this day in 1991 by the terrorist organisation Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Rajiv Gandhi was born in Bombay on August 20, 1944.
When India gained independence and his grandpa, Jawaharlal Nehru, became Prime Minister, he was just three years old.
Rajiv Gandhi is said to have spent his early years in New Delhi’s Teen Murti House with his grandfather.
He attended Welham Prep in Dehradun for a short time before transferring to the residential Doon School.
After that, Rajiv Gandhi attended Trinity College in Cambridge and Imperial College in London. He took a mechanical engineering course.
At Cambridge, Rajiv Gandhi met Sonia Maino, an Italian student studying English.
In 1968, Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi married in New Delhi.
With their two children, Rahul and Priyanka, Rajiv and Sonia resided at Indira Gandhi’s mansion in the national capital.
Rajiv Gandhi passed the Delhi Flying Club’s admission exam and got a commercial pilot’s licence after returning to India from England.
He then went on to work for a domestic national airline as a pilot.
Following Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, Rajiv Gandhi assumed leadership of the Congress party.
Rajiv Gandhi was India’s youngest Prime Minister at the age of 40.
Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi’s mother, was eight years older when she first became Prime Minister in 1966, while Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi’s grandfather, was 58 when he became free India’s first Prime Minister.
Rajiv Gandhi, India’s youngest Prime Minister at the time, was 46 when he was assassinated by a female suicide bomber during an election campaign.
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