Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [85]
The wheel of destiny was turning. In a few weeks’ time, Keswani’s round face would appear on all the world’s television screens. He would become the youngest reporter ever to receive the Press Award of India, the highest possible distinction accorded to a journalist of the subcontinent.
32
The Vengeance of the People of the Kali Grounds
Not for the world would she have missed her meeting with the ordinary people of India. Every morning before leaving to perform her onerous duties as prime minister of the world’s most populous democracy, Indira Gandhi received those who came to seek a darshan, a visual contact, with the woman who embodied supreme authority. The encounter took place in the rose- and bougainvillea-laden garden of her residence on Safdarjang Road, New Delhi. For the sixty-seven-year-old patrician who for seventeen years had ruled over a fifth of humanity, such morning gatherings were an opportunity to immerse herself in the multifaceted reality of her country. Draped in a sari, she would move from group to group, speaking first to peasants from the extreme south, next to a delegation of railway workers from Bengal, then to a group of young schoolgirls with long braids, and thereafter to a squad of barefoot sweepers who had come from their distant province of Bihar. The mother of the nation had a few words to say to each group. She read the petitions presented to her, responded with a promise and posed graciously for souvenir photographs. As in the days of the Mogul emperors, the most humble parts of India had, for a moment’s interlude, daily access to the seat of power.
That morning of Wednesday October 31, 1984, promised to be a splendidly clear, bright autumn day. A soft breeze rustled the leaves of the neem trees in the vast garden where a privileged few waited to receive their morning darshan. They were joined by a British television crew who had come to interview the prime minister. On the previous evening, Indira had returned from an exhausting electoral tour of Orissa, the native state of most of the refugees in Orya Bustee. In the presence of the thousands of followers who had come to hear her, she had concluded her speech with surprising words. “I don’t have the ambition to live a long life, but I am proud to live it serving the nation,” she had said. “If I were to die today, each drop of my blood would make India stronger.”
At eight minutes past nine, she walked down the three steps from her residence into the garden. She was wearing an orange sari, one of the three colors of the national flag. On passing the two sentries on either side of the path, she pressed her hands together at her heart in a cordial namaste. The two men wore traditional Sikh beards and turbans. One of them, forty-year-old Beant Singh, was well known to her; for ten years he had formed part of her closest bodyguard. The other, twenty-one-year-old Satwant Singh, had been in her service only four months.
A few weeks earlier, Ashwini Kumar, former director general of the Border Security Force of India, had come to see Indira Gandhi to express his concern. “Madam, do not keep Sikhs in your security service,” he had urged her. He had reminded her that Sikh extremists had sworn to get back at her for the army’s bombardment and bloody seizure of the Sikhs’ most sacred sanctuary, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. On June 6 of the previous year, the attack had killed 650 Sikhs. Indira Gandhi had smiled and reassured her visitor. Indicating the figure of Beant Singh in the garden, she had replied, “While I’m fortunate enough to have Sikhs like him about me, I have nothing to fear.” Skeptical, the former police executive had insisted. Irritated, she ended their meeting. “How can we claim to be secular if we go communal?” she demanded.
On that thirty-first of October, she had scarcely finished greeting the two guards when the elder pulled out his P-38 and fired three bullets point blank into her chest. His young accomplice promptly emptied the thirty rounds in the magazine of his Sten gun into her body. At least seven shots