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Indira Gandhi wasn’t related to Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, but she did have something in common with him. They were both assassinated for religious reasons.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 31, 1984--
Indira was prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977, and again from 1980 to 1984. She led the country to victory over Pakistan in the Bangladesh Liberation War and was responsible for India becoming a nuclear power. Not just the good kind of nuclear that creates clean energy, but the kind where you stick fission-explode-toys to missiles and point them at people you don’t like. For the pedants, yeah they also had fusion ones. Worth noting is that her father was India’s first PM. To date, she is the only woman to attain the top political position in the country. Motivations for her murder arose out of something called Operation Blue Star.
The fuck was Operation Blue Star? Since 1982, Militant Sikh preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and several of his armed followers had occupied the Golden Temple in the city of Amritsar, his goal being to create an independent state within India. In June of 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi authorized a military operation for the Indian Army to remove Bhindranwale and his followers by force. Continues below …
I’m drawing a blank on turning the assassination of a head of state into a quirky request for money, so how about you just pay me? Use the green button.
It was a bad idea, and it did not go well. Approximately 10,000 Indian troops were sent in to remove a little over 200 militants. But the militants were well-armed with anti-tank weaponry and rocket propelled grenade launchers. The resulting fight lasted 24 hours and a lot of people died, including hundreds of innocent Sikh pilgrims. Bhindranwale was one of those killed in the fighting. But the dying had just begun.
The outcry from Sikhs echoed around the world as an attack on their religion and desecration of a sacred temple. Many Sikh soldiers deserted, and civil servants resigned in protest. Then, as an act of revenge, on October 31, 1984, two of Prime Minister Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards assassinated her with their service weapons as she was on her way to an interview with actor Peter Ustinov for a documentary he was filming. The killers immediately dropped their weapons and surrendered. One was taken by guards into a private room and killed a few minutes afterward, and the other, along with an accomplice, were found guilty and executed via hanging in 1989.
Sikhs make up less than 2% of the population of India, and the outrage at the assassination led to a mass pogrom in which many thousands of Sikhs were murdered. And the killing likely was state sanctioned. Only hours after her assassination, Indira was succeeded as prime minister by her son Rajiv Gandhi. It’s believed that many in the Indian Congress were behind the massacres of Sikhs across the nation, totaling about 8,000 deaths in all.
Indira Gandhi has been defined as one of the most powerful women of the 20th century, but was also corrupt and guilty of creating a culture of nepotism in her government.
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