Explained: Why Olof Palme matters – to Sweden, the world and India

The journalist had discovered that Engstrom worked in a building close to where Palme was shot dead at close quarters on February 1986, as he was walking back home with his wife late at night after watching a film at a Stockholm cinema.

Peterson also found that Engstrom, who had presented himself as a witness to the killing, might have had a political motive. Engstrom worked at a shooting club, so he was no stranger to weapons. He was friendly with a former military man, a gun salesman who detested Palme for his socialist politics. Engstrom was rightwing too, Peterson had found.

Engstrom, who was born in Mumbai in 1934 after his parents moved to British India – his father worked for an engineering firm and they returned to Sweden when he was 12 – committed suicide in 2000, when he was 66 years old.

Earlier this week, the prosecutor who reopened the case in 2017, said: “Engström is deceased. Therefore I am not able to start proceedings or even interview him. That is why I decided to discontinue the investigation.”

Palme and his world – a defining moment for Sweden

The assassination of Palme shook Sweden, and has been described as a defining moment in how the country saw itself, and its place in the world. It was Sweden’s first political killing in nearly 200 years.

Palme himself was Sweden’s first global politician who spoke for non-alignment during the Cold War, an anti-apartheid activist who funded the African National Congress, and a champion of anti-colonial liberation movements. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was a friend of Palme’s political mentor Tage Erlander.

Flowers placed by a memorial plaque showing the place where Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot dead in February 1986, in Stockholm, Sweden, on Wednesday, June 10. (Photo: AP)

Palme belonged to an elite family, studied in America, and some years after his return, ascended to the leadership of an entirely blue collar party.

He led the Social Democrats for 16 years from 1969 until his death, with two terms as Prime Minister – he was killed in the fourth year of his second term.

Palme and his party are associated with the modern Swedish welfare state, with its generous old age pensions and child care benefits, free education and health.

On the international stage, he was unafraid of taking positions on big issues of that time. He angered the US by taking a position against its war in Vietnam. Swedish commentators trace the country’s independent foreign policy to the positions he took, especially on the Vietnam war. Sweden stayed away from joining NATO.

In 1975-76, as an elected member of the UN security Council, Sweden went against the US by voting for a weapons embargo on South Africa, and for PLO’s participation in the United Nations. He involved himself in efforts to resolve the middle east conflict.

In India, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi declared a day of mourning for Palme, whose friendship he inherited from his mother Indira Gandhi. Indira, Palme, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and the leaders of Mexico, Greece, and Argentina joined hands to a form a new grouping called the “Six-Nation Initiative”, which Rajiv joined after becoming Prime Minister.

A road in Delhi is named after Palme, as in cities across the world in developing countries. He was posthumously awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Peace Prize in 1987.

At home, he was a controversial and polarising politician – Swedes loved him or hated him, depending on their politics. He was a people’s leader and walked among them, literally, to emphasise that there was no difference between him and them.

Swedish public life changed after his killing. In a report about the investigation into his assassination in The Guardian last year, Imogen West-Knight wrote that regardless of their political persuasion, all Swedes saw his killing as symbolic of something deeper: “It was as if the killer wanted to destroy the idea of modern Sweden itself”.

His death coincided with the end of the glory days of the Socialist Democrats in Sweden. Some would it was his policies that led to a backlash against the party. The far-right Sweden Democrats was established two years after he died. In the 2018 election, the party won 62 seats, 13 more than in the 2014 election. The Socialist Democrats polled their lowest ever votes in the 2018 election, even though they still remain the single largest party in the Swedish parliament with 100 seats and formed the government with the help of the Green Party, and outside support from the Centre Party, Liberals and Left Party.

After the murder: writings, including the Bofors link

While the police botched up the investigation from Day 1, their inability to crack the case all this time shattered the confidence that many Swedes had in their police and judicial system, and spawned a number of private investigations – of which journalist Thomas Peterson’s was one – and many conspiracy theories.

Some even attribute the wave of crime fiction writing in Sweden to the country’s obsession with the Palme assassination. The late Stieg Larsson, author of the Millennium Trilogy, is said to have been conducting his own investigation into the killing and its purported links to a conspiracy hatched against him in South Africa because of his symapthies for the ANC.

One theory behind the assassination, which found a lot of purchase in India, was linked to the Bofors controversy.

Jan Bondeson, author of Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme, wrote in his book that Palme, through his friendship with Rajiv Gandhi, had helped the Swedish arms company Bofors secure the howitzer deal with India.

According to Bondeson, he was killed because he came to know that behind his back, Bofors had given bribes in India to sweeten the deal, through a UK-based front company called AE Services.

📣 Express Explained is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@ieexplained) and stay updated with the latest

But the police have been held responsible for letting the case slip. There was first a wild goose chase behind an alleged Kurdish connection to the killing; three years after the killing, police arrested a man called Christer Petterson, who was later released for want of any evidence.

And even though Engstrom has now been named as the “probable” killer, it seems that the mystery of whether he was acting alone or as part of a larger conspiracy is likely to continue.