Meet Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister who was assassinated by her guards

On a sunny morning 37 years ago, on her way to her office on foot, Indira Gandhi, India's third post-independence prime minister and the first woman to hold that position in India, was assassinated by her guards with more than 30 bullets she killed on the spot.

On the morning of Wednesday, October 31, 1984, while on her way to meet British actor Peter Ustinov, who was filming a documentary for Irish television, Indira Gandhi, "The Iron Lady of India", was assassinated at approximately 9:10 am in the garden of the Prime Minister's house in New Delhi. .

The assassination was carried out following the Indian Army's "Operation Blue Star" by order of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (not related to Mahatma Gandhi), in June 1984, and the Sikh Golden Temple was destroyed, by her bodyguards Satwant Singh and Bent Singh, both From a Sikh, more than 30 bullets were fired at them at close range.

After her assassination, her son, Rajiv Gandhi, succeeded her as prime minister after the leaders of the Indian National Congress nominated him to be their representative in the upcoming elections, which he won by a very wide margin. However, the fate of Rajiv was not different from that of his mother, as he was also assassinated in 1991 while campaigning.

The main motive behind the assassination

In 1980, after free and fair elections, Indira Gandhi returned to the prime ministership for the fourth time. She held the post of prime minister for three consecutive terms between 1966 and 1977, and the fourth term between 1980 and 1984.

During the last four years of her existence at the head of power in India, Gandhi faced the extremist Indian Sikh party, which organized demonstrations all over India for an autonomous Sikh state in the "Khalistan" region, armed its members and turned the Golden Temple in Amritsar into a powerful fortress. Indira ordered The regular Indian forces attacked and seized the temple in a military operation dubbed "The Blue Star".

An Indian army attack in June 1984 killed hundreds and completely destroyed the temple, which created motives for the Sikh community to assassinate Indira Gandhi in retaliation for the excessive force she used against them, which happened after she was thrown more than 30 bullets by her Sikh guards in a garden her home in the same year.

But the aftermath of the assassination was very brutal. In the four days after her assassination, India was engulfed in a riot that killed more than 3,000 Sikhs in New Delhi and an estimated 8,000 across India.

Its upbringing and political life

Born Indira Gandhi on November 19, 1917 in Allahabad, she was the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, who sought to form a united nation among many religious, ethnic and cultural factions after the country gained independence in 1949.

After her father's death in 1964, Gandhi was elected to Parliament for the first time and held the Ministry of Information in the Ministry of Lal Bahadur Shashtri, Nehru's successor.

Following Shashtri's death in 1966, Indira was elected President of the Indian Congress Party and then Prime Minister, and was the first woman to become Prime Minister in India and the second woman to hold the position of Prime Minister in the world after the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka.

It is noteworthy that her political career was volatile from its highest levels after India's victory over Pakistan and the occupation of Bangladesh in 1971 to its lowest levels after its expulsion from office in 1977 after the declaration of a state of emergency in 1975, during which civil liberties were suspended and political opponents imprisoned. Although many criticized her for being authoritarian, the majority of the population supported her because of her extensive social programmes, her contribution to building a strong army for India and the production of the Hindu nuclear bomb.

Indira was famous for her inclination towards the idea of ​​non-alignment in the scope of cooperation with Gamal Abdel Nasser and Marshal Tito, as she showed her support for the Palestinians in their resistance and rejected normalization with Israel.

Her son, Rajiv, succeeded her

Following the murder of Indira Gandhi, the National Party Congress leaders nominated her son, Rajiv Gandhi, to be Prime Minister, and he was out of politics until the death of his younger brother Sanjay, whom Indira was preparing to succeed her.

In the period following his mother's assassination, Rajiv succeeded in leading the party to sweep the elections and became the seventh Prime Minister of India and the third of the Nehru family.

Despite his wide popularity, the "Bofors" scandal stabbed his honesty in mid-1987, resulting in his party's defeat in the 1989 elections.

On May 21, 1991, while campaigning in Sriperumbudur, Rajiv faced the same fate as his mother. He was assassinated there with a bomb after a Tamil Tiger volunteer detonated the bomb she was carrying and killed Rajiv with others.