Such is the jigsaw of memory that looking back on that momentous day, October 31, 1984, and its calamitous aftermath, the oddest pieces first come to light. I covered the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the anti-Sikh riots that followed to write the cover story “End of An Era” for India Today together with Raghu Rai’s haunting, imperishable images in colour and black & white. The first thought that hindsight delivers is how much has changed in these 25 years — New Delhi was a different city, India another country, and the cast of characters and brand of politics were quite distinct.
There was not much VIP security cover then. It was possible to brave the gathering crowd outside the All India Institute of Medical Sciences to catch a glimpse of the “crumpled, bird-like figure on a hospital stretcher, cloaked in a bloody bed sheet”; access to the prime minister’s residence at 1 Safdarjung Road remained unfettered till that afternoon. Although the assassination had occurred early, as Mrs Gandhi made her way from her house to an adjoining garden where British actor-cum-journalist Peter Ustinov was waiting with a BBC crew to interview her, it was not till nearly six in the evening that All India Radio and Doordarshan announced her death, a fact widely known in the city by then. Rajiv Gandhi was addressing political meetings in distant West Bengal (and President Zail Singh was on a tour of North Yemen); in the confusion, an IAF helicopter was sent to bring Rajiv back, he was seen glued to the BBC on his Sony transistor for confirmation of the news.
With the exception of Sonia Gandhi, many key figures of that day have gone — Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao, even Jat leader Charan Singh, who sat bunched up outside the hospital’s eighth floor operation theatre. Sonia had accompanied her mother-in-law’s blood-stained body to the hospital and when Rajiv arrived at about 3.30 pm, she met him sobbing uncontrollably, certain of the event’s finality. When Maneka arrived with four-year-old Feroz Varun, he asked, “Is dadi very old?” and his mother had to clamp his mouth shut.
For the three days that Mrs Gandhi’s body lay in state at Teen Murti House, Delhi was gripped by a bipolar disorder. On the one hand it was a place of official mourning, with VIP visitors being led in through a side entrance — Amitabh Bachchan keeping an unobtrusive vigil, industrialists Bharat Ram, Swaraj Paul and HP Nanda, like the Bollywood Kapoors, arriving in limousines, Dhirendra Brahmachari advising on religious ritual and Jagdish Tytler shouting slogans. And on the other, it was a place consumed by unspeakable violence: “As the feverish days of anti-Sikh hysteria snowballed into nights of wanton horror, the government momentarily perished with the leader.”
The worst scenes of homes being torched and Sikh families terrorised that I witnessed were in the lanes of Paharganj near the railway station and in the south Delhi neighbourhood of Bhogal. Personal moments in a reporter’s account, however, are necessarily jettisoned in an effort to piece together the bigger picture. I recall that, between juggling copy deadlines, my colleague Coomi Kapoor and I worried about the safest place for our Sikh neighbours and friends and that there was a demand for cricket caps to replace turbans. Khushwant Singh had been taken by friends to the sanctuary of the Swedish embassy, but the late writer Patwant Singh’s charity hospital and house in Gurgaon were burnt down.
The day after the assassination, I noted, was metaphorically the blackest the capital had seen in recent history, but weather-wise it was the loveliest, when the October days are sunny but cool and the evenings balmy. Everyone of my generation remembers where they were the day Indira Gandhi was killed. But for those of us who were there in the midst of it all, it is a memory impossible to erase, frozen forever in time.