Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins have been released by the Supreme Court to the protest of the Congress despite being forgiven by Sonia, Priyanka and Rahul. Let political pundits hammer out if this too marks a separation of party from dynasty. But anyone over 30 will have a personal memory of the day when obscure Sriperumbudur blasted into global notoriety. Here’s mine. And two more.
On a balmy early morning of May 22, 1991, I had stepped out of my Simla Hotel, when the headline on the pavement newspaper slapped me across the face with icy force. Those grisly images of a wannabe-again PM identifiable only by his sneakers would start trickling out later; that first day’s papers dared only those of the detritus of the bombed out election-meeting venue. Sprinting back to our room, I began the desperate hunt for passage home for me and my kids safer than the original one via Delhi. My brain was both spurred and addled by the bloodlust which had followed the assassination of his mother a scant seven years ago.
The killers were from another country, he wasn’t as ‘big’ a ‘tree’, and the earth didn’t ‘shake’ so violently with his ‘fall’; we escaped with only a scratched-out itin. But, in the midst of the search for flights, I suddenly remembered the week’s column that I’d filed beforehand. Horror!, it was called ‘Vote a way to go.’ Another was hastily written, and, not yet computer-comfy, I managed to telex it to the Delhi office in time.
October 31, 1984, and another morning of stunned disbelief. Getting into the Calcutta Statesman office where I then worked, i was accosted by a wild-eyed stranger babbling incoherently about the prime minister being shot. Rushing in to check, the editor’s secretary, Dhun Tata made a slit-throat gesture before I could even ask. Once again personal and professional concern collided. The flippant cover story of the Sunday Miscellany, which I handled, had to be totally scrapped. With hours to deadline, I filled the section with evocative photographs from Raghu Rai’s A Life in the Day of Indira Gandhi, our own publication so no problem of copyright. The last was one of the fond grandmother waving indulgently to a curly-mopped little Rahul, which we captioned, ‘Goodbye To All That.’
The personal was more harrowing. Our dear Sikh friends were making a short halt with us after their Darjeeling holiday. Fortunately, they weren’t on the train back to Bombay, but, turbaned Indrapal and Harbinder along with their two small patka-ed boys were out wandering in the New Market maze. No mobile phones then to track them down. Police contacts were activated to locate and escort them home to our flat – where they were kept confined for a week. Chafing at the continuous TV visuals of Mrs Gandhi lying in state, and, worse, the condemnatory loop of her Sikh killer-guards.
Rewind four years to yet another surreal morning. The news of Sanjay Gandhi hurtling down from the sky greeted me as I entered the Statesman for my first day at work there on June 23, 1980. My entry was termed ‘auspicious’; after all this was one of the only two papers which had dared criticise the Emergency orchestrated by this ‘extra-constitutional authority’.
Pandit Nehru alone died in his sleep in 1964. His legacy is being assassinated every day.
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Alec Smart said: “In Bali, G20:20 vision was missing.”
Content retrieved from: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/erratica/dying-dangerously-three-violent-gandhi-deaths-a-personal-recollection/.