Mrs. Gandhi's Assassination at Hands of Sikh Guards Produces Power Vacuum --- in the Emotional Aftermath

After Indira: India's Congress Pary Moves to Unify Nation Under Rajiv Gandhi --- Mrs. Gandhi's Assassination At Hands of Sikh Guards Produces Power Vacuum --- In the Emotional Aftermath This article was prepared by Suman Dubey in New Delhi, With additional reporting by David Ignatius in Washington And Lawrence Ingrassia in London 1 November 1984 The Wall Street Journal (Copyright (c) 1984, Dow Jones & Co., Inc.) The assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi leaves India with a dangerous leadership vacuum at a time when the country, beset by domestic turmoil, needs a firm hand more than ever. The question now is: Can her son Rajiv fill the vacuum? Mrs. Gandhi's death at the hands of two of her own bodyguards at 9:20 a.m. Wednesday thrust Rajiv Gandhi, who is 40 years old, into the crucible while he still is a relative political novice. The iron-willed Mrs. Gandhi had dominated the political life of the world's largest and most discordant democracy for the better part of two decades. Analysts in India and abroad seem to agree that the Congress Party's unanimous decision to appoint Rajiv as her successor probably offers the best hope under the circumstances of containing domestic pressures as he tries to establish his own leadership. Mrs. Gandhi's assassins, identified as members of the Sikh religious sect, were fired on by other bodyguards after they attacked her with light machine guns. A government spokesman said one attacker was killed and the other seriously wounded. The prime minister was murdered clearly in retaliation for her controversial action last June in ordering the Indian army to invade and take over the holiest of Sikh shrines, the golden Temple in Amritsar. All members of the Sikh minority sect were removed from her security detail after the Amritsar hostilities, but she had reinstated them. She often had complained to her staff members about the excessive attention she felt they gave to her personal security. "I've lived with danger all my life," she told a British interviewer a few weeks ago. "And it makes no difference whether you die in bed or you die standing up." Only the night before her death she said at a political gathering she didn't fear assassination. "If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation," she said. That sort of realistic, unromantic view of life was characteristic of Mrs. Gandhi. "Beneath that smooth, soft exterior there is in fact a very tough and when necessary a ruthless iron lady," former President Richard Nixon said of her this summer in an interview with the Journal. At the time of her death, Mrs. Gandhi was flirting with many dangers: sectarian friction (which she at times manipulated with a forthcoming election in mind); demands for greater autonomy from many parts of the Indian federation, most notably the Sikh- dominated Punjab state; dissension within her political party; and edginess between India and Pakistan. All this had given rise to fears, more often expressed abroad than here, that Mrs. Gandhi's India was in the process of disintegration. But Indians take a more philosophical view -- that the very vastness and diversity of Indian society are strengths. In addition, India's powerful and traditionally apolitical army and its ponderous bureaucracy are sources of cohesion. Although Rajiv Gandhi lacks his mother's stature, he probably can count on an outpouring of sympathy to buy time and perhaps election to a full term as prime minister. In Washington and London, the initial assessment of officials and experts was that -- in the short run at least -- India will emerge stronger if Mrs. Gandhi's son wins general support among India's political factions. "It's our best judgment that for the next six months to a year, political prospects in India will improve because there will be a rallying in the Congress Party and in the army," said one U.S. analyst. "This will give Rajiv a chance to prove himself. The opposition, which was so focused on Mrs. Gandhi, will have trouble unifying." "There could be a salutary effect on the political scene in India by uniting people," said Peter Pendsay, an editor of the Indian Weekly in London. "When Mahatma Gandhi (no relation to Mrs. Gandhi) was killed in 1948, it definitely led to unity and there was less bloodshed due to communal violence. One sincerely hopes that (Prime Minister Gandhi's) sacrifice will lead to greater unity." Nevertheless, most experts expected Hindus to retaliate against Sikhs in the immediate, emotional aftermath of the assassination. Indeed, hundreds of persons were reported injured and a few killed in New Delhi and elsewhere as mobs attacked Sikhs and burned vehicles and shops. Army troops patrolled Calcutta and Agartala and were on alert in New Delhi, the capital; curfews were in effect in several cities. Outside New Delhi's All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where Mrs. Gandhi had been rushed after the shooting, an agitated crowd of perhaps 100,000 persons attacked turban-wearing Sikhs and set fire to cars and buses. "Kill the Sikhs! They have killed our mother," some in the crowd shouted. The best judgment here is that emotional outbursts against the Sikhs can soon be contained by police, perhaps with the aid of curfews where needed. Otherwise, the disciplined Indian army can step in to quell major disturbances. The army has an officer corps almost one-third Sikh. "Obviously, there has been a lot of smoldering feeling (about the Golden Temple attack) even among Sikh officers," says a State Department expert in Washington. "But now they will want to prove that they can be trusted." The outbursts aren't expected to continue. What will endure, in the view of political observers in India, is the plethora of domestic political problems that were weakening Mrs. Gandhi's position as she prepared for parliamentary elections in mid-January. If those problems taxed Rajiv's politically tough mother, they are likely to be a trial by fire for him. The biggest problem, in fact, is the party that Rajiv now heads, the Congress (I). The "I" stands for Indira. Mrs. Gandhi, the daughter of India's first post-colonial prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had been grooming Rajiv to run the party for her while she attended to matters of state. Her previous choice to continue the family dynasty had been Rajiv's younger brother, Sanjay, who died at the age of 33 in a 1980 plane crash in New Delhi. Sanjay was a political natural. But Rajiv, now thrown into the leadership, has seemed to lack those instincts. He was a pilot for Indian Air Lines, pleasant but shy to the point of stammering before groups. At first he resisted his mother's efforts to get him into politics. "I don't like all this," he once said to state ministers who gave him marigold garlands and touched his feet in the worshipful way Indian leaders are treated. But while his political apprenticeship now has been cut short, he seems to have grown more self-assured and comfortable with political leadership. By the time of Rajiv's political debut in 1981, the Congress (I) Party had become a conglomeration of conflicting factions that no one seemed able to control. Factionalism persists and may be worsening. There are conflicts between Sanjay loyalists and newcomers brought in by Rajiv (Sanjay's widow announced prior to the assassination that she would oppose her brother-in-law for his seat in the coming parliamentary elections); there are also conflicts between the politicians of Mrs. Gandhi's generation and Rajiv's supporters. The January elections -- it isn't certain if they will proceed as planned -- were expected to help sort out these conflicts and give Rajiv a more solid parliamentary representation of his own. But that was to be under the stewardship of Mrs. Gandhi. She might also have dealt with the regional strong men who were beginning to challenge her central rule. Opposition appeals to regional and local interests in a country of 740 million people, 26 major languages, four major religions and numerous communities and castes have been costing the Congress Party support. It remains to be seen if Rajiv can or will wish to continue his mother's tactics of setting Hindus against minority sects so as to gain election support for the Congress Party. Political observers say Mrs. Gandhi had whipped up North Indian Hindus against Moslems and Sikhs for political ends. In the south, she tolerated use of Indian soil for support of Sri Lankan separatists because that cause was popular in the Madras region. Mrs. Gandhi also had been fanning feeling against India's traditional enemy, Pakistan, claiming that its president, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, had aided the Sikh separatists in Punjab, which borders Pakistan. President Zia, in an apparent effort to calm feelings, was among the first to send condolences after Mrs. Gandhi's death. Foreign experts were unanimous in predicting that Pakistan will avoid provocations against India, especially in light of pre-assassination speculation that India might make a pre-emptive strike against facilities in which Pakistan is thought to be developing a nuclear weapon. Some experts noted that Rajiv previously has made strong statements about the Pakistanis. "Rajiv has tended to be more hawkish than his mother and sounded impatient about pussyfooting around (with the Pakistani effort to build an atom bomb), but, of course, that was before he was head of government," says Peter Lyon, the executive secretary of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. But Mr.

Load more