Assassination of Indira Gandhi



Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated at 9:30 a.m. on 31 October 1984 at her residence in Safdarjung Road, New Delhi. She was killed by her Sikh bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, in the aftermath of Operation Blue Star by Indian Army between 1 and 8 June 1984 on the orders of Gandhi. The military operation was to remove Sikh militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and other Sikh separatists from the Golden Temple of Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, Punjab, the holiest site of Sikhism. The military action resulted in the death of many pilgrims as well as damage to the Akal Takht and the destruction of the Sikh Reference Library.

Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards led to the 1984 Sikh massacres which were instigated by political figures from the Indian National Congress, who orchestrated pogroms against Sikh populations throughout India. Four days of mob violence resulted in the destruction of 40 historic Gurdwaras and other important Sikh holy sites. Official Indian government figures put the death toll at 3,350 while other sources have quoted that between 8,000 to 16,000 Sikhs were killed.

Operation Blue Star
Operation Blue Star was a large Indian military operation carried out between 1 and 8 June 1984, ordered by Indira Gandhi to remove leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his militant Sikh followers from the buildings of the Harmandir Sahib complex in Amritsar, Punjab. This attack killed around 5,000 innocent pilgrims, men, women and children, many of whom were Sikhs, and the Indian Army suffered around 700 deaths with most of 80-200 militants dying as well. The Operation also caused serious damage to two of holiest Sikh shrines the Golden Temple and Akal Takht. The military action resulted in the death of many pilgrims as well as damage to the Akal Takht and the destruction of the Sikh Reference Library.

The perceived threat to Gandhi's life increased after the operation. Accordingly, Sikhs were removed from her personal bodyguard detail by the Intelligence Bureau for fear of assassination. Gandhi feared that this would reinforce her anti-Sikh image among the public, however, and she ordered the Delhi Police to reinstate her Sikh bodyguards, including Beant Singh, who was reported to be her personal favourite.

Assassination
At about 9:20 a.m. Indian Standard Time on 31 October 1984, Gandhi was on her way to be interviewed by British actor Peter Ustinov, who was filming a documentary for Irish television. She was accompanied by Constable Narayan Singh, personal security officer Rameshwar Dayal and Gandhi's personal secretary, R. K. Dhawan. She was walking through the garden of the Prime Minister's Residence at No. 1 Safdarjung Road in New Delhi towards the neighboring 1 Akbar Road office. Gandhi was not wearing her bulletproof vest that day, which she had been advised to wear at all times after Operation Blue Star.

Gandhi passed a wicket gate guarded by Constable Satwant and Sub-Inspector Beant Singh, and the two men opened fire. Beant fired three rounds into her abdomen from his .38 (0.38 inch) revolver; then Satwant fired 30 rounds from his Sterling sub-machine gun after she had fallen to the ground. Both men then threw down their weapons and Beant said, "I have done what I had to do. You do what you want to do." In the next six minutes, Border Police officers Tarsem Singh Jamwal and Ram Saran captured and killed Beant, while Satwant was arrested by Gandhi's other bodyguards along with an accomplice trying to escape; he was seriously wounded. Satwant Singh was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for killing Gandhi. He was hanged in 1989, along with accomplice Kehar Singh.

Salma Sultan gave the first news of the assassination of Gandhi on Doordarshan's evening news on 31 October 1984, more than ten hours after she was killed. It is alleged by the Indian government that Gandhi's secretary R. K. Dhawan overruled intelligence and security officials who had ordered the removal of policemen as a security threat, including her assassins.

Beant was one of Gandhi's favorite guards, whom she had known for ten years. Because he was a Sikh, he had been taken off her staff after Operation Blue Star; however, Gandhi had made sure that he was reinstated. Satwant was 22 years old at the time of the assassination, and had been assigned to Gandhi's guard just five months previously.

Gandhi was taken to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi at 9:30 a.m. Doctors operated on her. She was declared dead at 2:20 p.m. The postmortem examination was conducted by a team of doctors headed by Tirath Das Dogra, who stated that 30 bullets had struck Gandhi from a Sterling sub-machine gun and a revolver. The assailants had fired 33 bullets at her, of which 30 had hit; 23 had passed through her body, while seven remained inside. Dogra extracted bullets to establish the identity of the weapons and to correlate each weapon with the bullets recovered by ballistic examination. The bullets were matched to the weapons at CFSL Delhi.

The Indian government ordered a national mourning from November 1 to November 12 with flags half-masted and canceled entertainment and cultural events and offices closed for several days. Pakistan and Vietnam declared three days of mourning. Bulgaria declared a day of national mourning.

Funeral
Gandhi's body was taken in a gun carriage through Delhi roads on the morning of 1 November to Teen Murti Bhavan, where her father stayed and where she lay in state. She was cremated with full state honors on 3 November near Raj Ghat, a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, at an area named Shakti Sthal. Her elder son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, lit the pyre.

Among the foreign dignitaries who attended the state funeral were:

Aftermath
Over the next four days, 8,000 Sikhs were killed in retaliatory violence. Other sources record 16,000 deaths of Sikhs.

The Justice Thakkar Commission of Inquiry, headed by Justice Manharlal Pranlal Thakkar, set up to probe Gandhi's assassination, recommended a separate probe for the conspiracy angle behind the assassination. The Thakkar Report stated that the "needle of suspicion" pointed at R. K. Dhawan for complicity in the conspiracy.

Satwant Singh and co-conspirator Kehar Singh were sentenced to death. Both were executed on 6 January 1989.

A Punjabi movie titled Kaum De Heere (Gems of the Community) highlighting the roles/lives of the two guards that assassinated Indira Gandhi was set to be released on 22 August 2014, but was banned by the Indian government for five years.