On what marks Rajiv Gandhi's birth anniversary, August 20, Congress MP Dr. Shashi Tharoor paid tribute to India's youngest Prime Minister, calling him the man who 'built India its bridge to the 21st century' — a leader whose brief tenure left a technological imprint the country is still living inside.

The Youngest PM Who Bet on Computers

Rajiv Gandhi served as Prime Minister from 1984 to 1989, stepping into office at 40 — the youngest person ever to hold the post. In an era when most Indian government offices still ran on typewriters and red tape, his administration made a deliberate, almost contrarian wager on technology as the engine of national transformation.

Tharoor's post names telecommunications, computers, and 'thinking about the future' as the principal legacies of that tenure — and the record backs him up. C-DOT (Centre for Development of Telematics) was established in 1984, tasked with building indigenous telecom technology at a time when India had fewer telephone connections than Manhattan. The Computer Software Policy of 1986 opened the sector to liberalisation and actively promoted IT exports — a quiet policy move whose downstream effects would eventually produce the Bengaluru software boom of the 1990s and beyond.

A Foundation Laid Before 1991

The standard story of India's economic transformation begins with the 1991 liberalisation. But Tharoor's tribute — and the Congress party's recurring political argument — is that the intellectual and institutional groundwork was laid a full decade earlier, under Rajiv Gandhi's watch. The argument carries weight: without the software export framework of 1986 and the telecom infrastructure push of the mid-1980s, the 1991 reforms would have had far thinner soil to grow in.

It is a framing that fits a broader pattern. Congress leaders have consistently used Rajiv Gandhi's anniversaries to anchor the party's identity as the force that first oriented India toward the digital future — a claim that carries particular resonance in parliamentary debates on digital infrastructure, where the lineage of policy choices matters.

Tharoor's Place in That Lineage

Few Congress voices carry this argument with more personal credibility than Dr. Tharoor, himself a former UN Under-Secretary-General and a writer whose books have engaged directly with questions of technology, governance, and India's place in the modern world. His tribute is not a routine party post — it is a reminder, from someone who thinks in decades, that consequential leadership is often only legible in hindsight.

As India's digital economy now ranks among the world's largest, the anniversary offers a moment to trace the line back to a Prime Minister who, in Tharoor's words, was 'hugely inspiring, and consequential' — even if history has sometimes buried that chapter beneath louder events.

The bridge Rajiv Gandhi began building in the 1980s is the one India is still crossing.