Indira Gandhi: Death in the Garden

Indira Gandhi's assassination sparks a fearful round of sectarian violence

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As news of the Prime Minister's death began to spread through New Delhi, there were screams, weeping and tearing of hair, but mostly the kind of stoic acceptance that Indians tend to show in times of sorrow and pain. "She's gone," they told one another, rarely using her name, because in India, "she" meant Indira. All around Connaught Place, the capital's commercial center, there was the sound of steel shutters slamming down as shop after shop closed for twelve days of mourning. By late afternoon, New Delhi had become a ghostly city of empty streets. Flags were lowered to half-staff. On television, prayers were offered by priests and holy men representing India's main religions and sects. Patrols were quietly posted around the darkened Sikh temples to protect them from attack. From Amritsar, the five Sikh high priests at the Golden Temple expressed their "shock" and "deep grief over the assassination. In the hours that followed, the calm gave way to fights and rioting between Sikhs and Hindus all across India.

Rajiv Gandhi had been driving toward the last meeting of his campaign tour in West Bengal when a police Jeep intercepted his Mercedes to deliver a message: "There's been an accident in the house. Return immediately to Delhi." Instantly, Rajiv told his aides to rush to the nearest airport. At 12:30 p.m., while Rajiv waited for a helicopter to take him to Calcutta, he switched on his transistor radio to hear the BBC relay the news that his mother was in critical condition. Some of the Congressmen in his party burst into tears, but Rajiv told them, "Don't worry. She's tough."

Scarcely five hours after the assassination, Rajiv Gandhi arrived from Calcutta aboard a special airliner that had been sent to fetch him. Only then did he learn that his mother was dead. The security protecting him as he stepped down from the aircraft was unprecedented in the country's history. Sharpshooters were positioned all along the route to the hospital. He was greeted there by sobbing Cabinet ministers, but he remained outwardly cool. Only recently he had said that he did not expect to take over his mother's role for "a long, long while." He had added, "I am happy to stand in her shadow and help to get her re-elected to another term, and still another after that." Suddenly, however, all his reckonings had changed. That evening, less than twelve hours after Indira's death, the elders of the Congress (I) Party chose Rajiv Gandhi as their new leader. As under the British parliamentary system, he thereby automatically became India's seventh Prime Minister. He is the third member of the House of Nehru, which has run India for 33 of its 37 years of independence, to hold that office.

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