The story
On the morning of October 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot as she walked through the garden of her residence in New Delhi to a television interview. Her two bodyguards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, both Sikhs, fired at close range. She died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Beant Singh was shot dead on the spot, and Satwant Singh and a co-conspirator, Kehar Singh, were hanged in 1989.
The killing came five months after Operation Blue Star, the army's assault in June 1984 on the Golden Temple at Amritsar, to remove Sikh militants under Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, which caused many deaths and deep anger among Sikhs. In the next four days mobs, some led or aided by local Congress politicians according to later inquiries, killed Sikhs in Delhi and other cities. The government's own figures give about 2,700 deaths in Delhi and over 3,000 in India as a whole, while other counts are higher, and the police were widely accused of failing to protect victims. Her son Rajiv Gandhi, then 40, was sworn in as prime minister that evening. In the election of December 1984 Congress won about 404 seats, the largest majority in the history of the Lok Sabha. Many Sikhs have campaigned for decades for convictions of those who led the violence.
Why it mattered
- Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister and led Congress to its largest ever majority in December 1984.
- The 1984 anti-Sikh violence became a lasting wound in Sikh-Hindu relations and a continuing issue of justice.
- The Punjab insurgency continued into the early 1990s, with enormous loss of life.
- Rajiv Gandhi signed the Punjab Accord with the Akali leader Harchand Singh Longowal in 1985, and Longowal himself was assassinated a month later.
Sources
Drafted by AI (Claude) from the sources above and checked against them by AI; no historian has reviewed this page. Spot a mistake? Suggest a correction. How pages are made
Community notes
Loading notes…