NEW DELHI — Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi spent her final months methodically preparing her family for her assassination after ordering the military assault on the Golden Temple in June 1984, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi disclosed in her memoir released Tuesday.
She knew the bullets were coming. In 'Belonging: A Journey Of Love', Sonia Gandhi documents how a relentless wave of death threats engulfed the Prime Minister's residence immediately after Operation Blue Star. The former premier began issuing precise instructions to her kin on how to carry on once she was gone. She pulled her young grandson Rahul aside with a singular directive: be brave, and do not cry.
Wheels had been set in motion weeks earlier. Before giving the final clearance for the army operation, Indira Gandhi took her grandchildren, Rahul and Priyanka, to her ancestral home in Kashmir—a quiet sojourn Sonia Gandhi describes as a grandmother’s deliberate farewell.
The retribution struck on October 31, 1984. Two of Indira Gandhi’s own Sikh bodyguards fired a volley of rounds at point-blank range along the pathway of her official residence. Sonia Gandhi rushed into the garden to find her mother-in-law collapsed on the pavement, fatally wounded. She died that morning.
Planned to crush an armed separatist campaign led by preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Operation Blue Star unfolded between June 1 and June 8, 1984. Army units stormed the sanctum sanctorum of Sikhism in Amritsar to eliminate Bhindranwale and his heavily entrenched cadres. The operation achieved its tactical objective. Yet it ruptured the national fabric, triggering visceral outrage across the Sikh community that culminated in the prime minister's murder and the retaliatory pogroms across Delhi and northern India, where mobs slaughtered more than 3,000 Sikhs.
The book's release has reopened bitter historical fractures. Leaders of the Shiromani Akali Dal swiftly pushed back against the memoir’s narrative of personal grief, demanding accountability for the thousands of families devastated by the military offensive and the sectarian bloodshed that followed.