Opinion Arent we secular?
Indira Gandhi had a foreboding of her own tragic death....
Indira Gandhi was Indias third prime minister to die in harness but the first to be assassinated. This dastardly act,made all the more ghoulish because she was gunned by two of her security guards,was not entirely unexpected,certainly not by her. For,when she authorised Operation Blue Star the storming by the Army of the holiest of the Sikh shrines,the Golden Temple at Amritsar that had been fortified into a citadel of secession by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and other Sikh extremists she knew that she had also signed her own death warrant.
Remarkably,since much earlier,she had also been convinced that she would have a violent death preferable to her over suffering in sickbed as her mother,grandfather and father had done. I had become aware of this as far back as 1972 when,presumably at her behest,I was invited to write a profile of the prime minister to be included in the press kit to be distributed at the first UN Conference on Environment,a subject close to her heart,at Stockholm some months later.
What happened the next year is best left to Fidel Castro to describe. On November 11,1973 the Cuban leader was in New Delhi on his way from Havana to Hanoi. An extremely pleasant banquet that Indira Gandhi gave in his honour was rudely interrupted by the stunning news from far-off Chile where it was still morning that Salvador Allende had been killed in a coup d etat. At that dramatic moment, recorded Castro 12 years later,Indira Gandhi,in a proof of her intimacy and confidence,said to me: What they have done to Allende they want to do to me also. There are people here connected with the same foreign forces that acted in Chile,who would like to eliminate me.
A sanitised version of what she had said to Castro so bluntly in private,she was to repeat publicly often. As constant as her warnings against the foreign hand was her refrain that they wanted to do her in. But she took care never to identify who they were. By innuendo and insinuation,however,she left little doubt that the accusing finger pointed to the CIAs department of dirty tricks.
Although even before the crisis in Punjab there were threats to her life soon after her return to power in 1980,a youth named Ram Bulchand Lalwani was sentenced to three years imprisonment for throwing a spring knife on her at a public meeting in New Delhi Blue Star was central to Indiras assassination. To flush out the terrorists and secessionists from the Golden Temple had turned out to be tougher than expected. Tanks and artillery had to be used. Casualties were very high. The Akal Takht was reduced to rubble. Even Harmandir Sahib was damaged slightly. Sikhs all over the world were outraged and the extremists exploited this to the hilt,threatening each day that they would make short work of the prime minister,her son and his children.
In June 1984,Indira Gandhi had no option but to launch Blue Star. But her monumental mistake was to allow such a situation to develop. She had let her reckless son Sanjay,and Giani Zail Singh,first Union home minister and then President,to build up Bhindranwale who quickly turned into a Frankensteins monster,just as our Pakistani friends are now discovering that the terrorists they had nurtured are today turning on them.
Without going over too many gory details of the way Indira Gandhi was killed on the narrow pathway leading from her home to her office,separated by a fence broken by a single wicker gate it is necessary to underscore some of the most disgraceful features of the heart-rending happenings on that melancholy morning.
Since she was going to her office to give an interview to actor Peter Ustinov for the BBC TV,she had unfortunately dispensed with her bulletproof vest. This was all the more reason for the security men accompanying her to do their duty and surround her. But that was not to be. They were merrily ambling behind her,while only her trusted aide R. K. Dhawan walked by her side when Beant Singh and Satwant Singh fired those fateful shots. And then,to their eternal shame,the security men fled to save their own skins.
Ironically,this was precisely what Indira had predicted sometime earlier. As concern about her security had mounted,Ramji Nath Kao,the legendary spymaster so trusted by her that she had recalled him from retirement to be her security adviser,went to her to seek permission to landscape the lawns of the prime ministers house (PMH) to lessen the impact of any explosives thrown over the boundary walls. She had laughed and said: Kao Sahib,please stop worrying. When they come to kill me,nothing would help. Those supposed to protect me would be the first to run away.
Much else that happened on October 31,1984 was no less reprehensible. An ambulance permanently stationed at the PMH was unavailable because its driver had gone for his tea break. The profusely bleeding Indira was therefore taken to AIIMS in an Ambassador car.
Utterly shocking,indeed incredible,was the joint presence at what became the khooni wicker gate of both Beant and Satwant. The prime minister had vetoed a top-secret proposal by the director of the Intelligence Bureau to exclude all Sikhs from her security staff. On the file,she had written just three words: Arent we secular? But she had endorsed Kaos mandatory directive that no two Sikhs should be posted at the same spot anywhere in the precincts of the PMH. Satwant Singh overcame this problem blithely by pretending that he had upset stomach and needed to be near the loo close to the wicker gate!
None of this,however,can excuse the abominable anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination. A quarter of a century later some of the perpetrators of that pogrom have yet to be brought to book. And all the instruments of the Indian state remain as incompetent,casual and corrupt as they were then.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
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