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Amid the mangle of flesh and torn limbs was the garland offerer herself, apparently a suicidal assassin. Her back had taken the full force of the explosion, and her head had been sent flying nearly a dozen feet into the photographers' compound, where it was later discovered with face intact. As investigators reconstructed the crime, she had worn a brace of the kind usually associated with victims of back pain. But the girdle seems to have packed three to five sticks of cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, a powerful plastic explosive commonly used for demolition work.
Suspicions zeroed in at once on the Tamil Tigers, a combat-hardened band of guerrillas who have been fighting for a separate state in northeast Sri Lanka. Notoriously dedicated and vengeful, the Tigers have mastered terrorist bombing to a degree still unknown among India's own insurgents. Gandhi, whose mother's policies had done much to whelp and teethe the Tigers, earned their enmity in 1987 when he co-authored a peace plan for their offshore island republic. Instead of surrendering their arms, the Tigers fought Indian peacekeeping troops in hit-and-run warfare with extensive casualties.
In the atrocity's immediate aftermath, Gandhi supporters on streets across , India wanted to strike back but lacked clear-cut targets for their fury. As the news reached the capital that night, roving groups of young men with stubbly faces and mean looks converged on No. 10 Janpath, Gandhi's home in the heart of New Delhi. They were a rough, ill-clad bunch, much the sort that had gone berserk after Indira's murder and slaughtered thousands of Sikhs around the capital. Their mood worsened as the night wore on, and they beat up several cameramen for no apparent reason. Some chanted slogans blaming the CIA and called for an attack on the U.S. embassy. Others randomly pointed to V.P. Singh one minute, the ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) the next.
Later Sonia Gandhi, 44, and her 19-year-old daughter Priyanka quietly escaped from the residence and flew to Madras on an Indian air force plane to claim Rajiv's body. The rest of India was in shock. By government order, shops and offices remained closed, and security forces patrolled the capital. A crucial decision came when elections commissioner T.N. Seshan put off the second and third main rounds of voting for a month. Election-related mayhem had taken 229 lives across the country even before Gandhi's assassination; in its wake, 26 more people died. A week of national mourning was proclaimed, and Gandhi's body was laid to rest in state in Teen Murti House, the spacious dwelling that had been the residence of the colonial armed-forces chief under the British Raj.
Gandhi had spent most of his boyhood in Teen Murti (Three Statues) after Nehru had taken it over as the prime ministerial residence. Now the Nehru Memorial, it was the house in which Indira Gandhi had served her father as hostess during the early years of independence. It was an era in which Rajiv and his younger brother Sanjay saw most of the world's major political figures trip through: Presidents and kings, commissars and emerging Third World statesmen. One anecdote relates that the young Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama were missing at the house during a visit. The spiritual leaders of Tibetans were found in the backyard playing around a wigwam with the Gandhi boys.