The day all hell broke loose
LEAFING through one of my old diaries, I stopped at a page marked with a red asterisk. It was the last day of October 1984. I was posted at an obscure village, Bhutti, in the interior of Himachal Pradesh. A pleasant sunny morning. I was sitting alone in the branch manager’s cabin with an oversized glass window, through which verdant hills were visible under a clear blue sky, with a glimpse of the Sutlej river flowing down below. Going through the official correspondence, I was half listening to the running commentary of an India-Pakistan cricket match on a transistor.
Suddenly, the commentary was stopped and the match was abandoned. I picked up the transistor and frantically searched radio stations to know what had happened. The BBC gave me the news. Indira Gandhi, our Prime Minister, had been assassinated at her residence by her Sikh bodyguards.
The news left me stunned with disbelief. The day’s newspaper was lying on the side table, with a photo of Mrs Gandhi on the front page. She had addressed a rally at the parade ground in Bhubaneswar on October 30. Her words had acquired a prophetic resonance in the light of the news just heard: “I have lived a long life and I am proud that I spent the whole of my life in the service of my people. I shall continue to serve until my last breath, and when I die, I can say, every drop of my blood will invigorate India and strengthen it.”
A magnificent woman like her deserved some dignity in her death. The previous night, I had been watching The Godfather on a video cassette player. In the movie, the dreaded Don Vito Corleone dies of a heart attack while playing with his grandson. Thus, a man with an extremely violent and criminal life gets a peaceful death, even though in a fictional narrative. And here, Mrs Gandhi, a passionate champion of peace and disarmament, had been gunned down.
In the evening news, the inimitable Salma Sultan appeared on Doordarshan to read the news with its gory details. Then there was an unending sequence of homage, comments and condolences from the people who mattered. There were apprehensions that this assassination would trigger a wave of widespread mob violence against the Sikh community. Rumours of sporadic incidents were also coming from remote areas of Himachal. But my village was too obscure and insular to get affected by the event, I reassured myself.
But I was proved wrong. The next morning, our bank guard, a Jat Sikh from Haryana, reported on duty with a haircut and a clean-shaven face. Seeing my wide-eyed surprise, he said with a sheepish grin, “The people in this small village are quite unpredictable, they can be swayed by emotions and turn violent any time. My life is precious to me, sir!”
His calm face reflected no cowardice or fear, it simply glowed with honesty and practical wisdom.
