The day Mrs Gandhi was shot: A reporter's diary

Indian Express

01-06-2025

Four decades since one of the most tragic, violent events witnessed in post-Independence India — the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her security guards — a new memoir comes with fresh revelations.
Dr Sneh Bhargava was appointed Director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) on October 31, 1984 — the very day Indira Gandhi was felled by a fusillade of bullets fired by her security guards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh.
In her recently released memoir, The Woman Who Ran AIIMS, the Delhi-based Dr Bhargava, now 95, graphically describes the horrific morning when 'the ink was not even dry on my appointment letter' but there, on the eighth-floor operation theatre of AIIMS, a desperate team of surgeons was fighting a 'losing battle' as they tried to save the Prime Minister's life. And for almost four interminable hours, they kept up a 'charade' that attempts were afoot to frantically try and resuscitate Mrs Gandhi.
The pall of gloom of the fateful morning, the muffled wails emanating from some of the country's most powerful who lined the eighth-floor of that AIIMS corridor, have remained fresh in my mind too. I was there.
I recall rushing to the PTI teleprinter in the Nehru Place office of Delhi Recorder, the magazine where I was a trainee reporter then, and reading, incredulously, the 'takes' of the Prime Minister being shot. I argued with another trainee reporter who wanted to stay in office and follow the story. 'No', I said, and zipped off towards AIIMS. As it turned out, I was among the very few reporters who managed to break several security cordons and reach the eighth floor. I remained there, just a fly-on-the-wall.
By the time I left AIIMS in the evening, riots had broken out close to the hospital. Taxi stands had been burnt down. The reprisal had begun.
Over several years, I kept in touch with the Indira Gandhi assassination case: I covered the trial in Tihar Jail; wrote several cover stories for Sunday, the magazine to which I had moved.
In the minutes after the Prime Minister's killing, Beant Singh, the older of the two assassins, was killed by agitated guards posted at the Prime Minister's residence. Satwant Singh, the younger constable, was still alive but a predicament the media faced those days was that there was not a single photograph of Indira Gandhi's surviving assassin. I 'scooped' the picture.
Days later, Satwant Singh's father, Trilok Singh, who would often travel to Delhi to meet his son's lawyers, once mentioned that when Satwant was recruited to the Delhi Police, he had got his service photograph taken at a photo studio located near Qutab Minar. When he went back to his village, Trilok Singh even got me the reference number. I located the studio, handed its owner the number and simply 'ordered' a set of passport-sized photographs of Satwant Singh.
By 1990, I also wrote a book for Penguin simply titled, The Assassination of Indira Gandhi. The first chapter of that book, too, has all the minute details of the tragic drama that played out at AIIMS on October 31, 1984, and the brutality of the gunning down of Indira Gandhi.
In her book, Dr Bhargava confirms that Indira Gandhi was brought in with no pulse and despite that, they put her on the heart-lung machine ( a cardiopulmonary bypass machine) and tried to revive her. She writes, 'The perfusionist was a young Sikh. The moment he heard the doctors mention that her killers were Sikh, he fled the operation theatre to save his life. The doctors had to bring in someone else.'
In fact, Dr Bhargava has made it evident that even in the eighth-floor operation theatre that fateful morning, there was an apprehension that Sikhs would be targeted. She now writes about her fears, 'There was a lot to do. A huge crowd might storm the gates of AIIMS to catch a glimpse of Mrs Gandhi or barge into the premises to kill the first Sikh they saw… A bloodbath against Sikhs could not be ruled out. Sadly it did come to pass in the days that followed…'
Perhaps the most important disclosure from the chapter on Indira Gandhi's assassination is the fact that just before he was whisked off to be sworn in as Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi ('he looked shocked but composed') told Dr Bhargava that he had 'warned' his mother about one of her Sikh security guards. The reason he gave her: 'because he looked suspicious'. One does not know which of the two assassins — Beant Singh or Satwant Singh — Rajiv was referring to or what he did about his suspicion.
The writer, Executive Editor (News & Investigations) with The Indian Express, was a trainee reporter for Delhi Recorder in 1984