In her memoir "Belonging: A Journey of Love", Sonia Gandhi laid bare the chilling premonition that gripped her family weeks before an assassin blew up former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991. Just two months prior, her son Rahul—then a college student in the United States touring alongside his father—delivered a blunt warning to his mother: "If something isn’t done about Pa’s security, I know I’ll soon have to come back for his funeral."
That prediction turned into brutal reality on a Tamil Nadu rally ground when a woman detonated body-strapped explosives under the guise of offering a garland, killing Rajiv Gandhi and 14 others. The lethal breach followed a consequential political call made a little over a year earlier, when the V.P. Singh government stripped Rajiv of his Special Protection Group (SPG) security ring. A high-level committee had met the previous December and resolved that the specialized SPG detail must continue unless a fresh threat audit justified a downgrade. But no review ever took place. The state dismantled the elite proximate protective ring and handed responsibility to local police forces instead.
Sonia Gandhi recalled the sudden shattering of domestic calm that Tuesday night at their New Delhi residence. Rajiv was out on the campaign trail; Priyanka was dressing in her room for a friend's birthday party. Then came urgent, stumbling footsteps down the corridor. Priyanka entered pale, breathless, her face drained of color. She spoke in fragmented bursts about Madras and a bomb. The words refused to cohere.
"Sahab is no more," Rajiv's private secretary Vincent George stammered over a crackling telephone line moments later. Sonia collapsed. Grief broke open the house as staff members wept and the children's nanny, Ongmu, wailed in the hallway. Yet Priyanka held her ground. She shielded her mother from the escalating chaos, fielded frantic calls, and confronted officials to demand immediate passage to Madras aboard the aircraft sent to collect her father's body: "If you don't allow us, we'll make our own arrangements. But we will go."
Rajiv Gandhi's remains were flown to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi, where the family honored his pledge to donate his eyes, mirroring the final wish of his mother, Indira Gandhi. The revelation reopens an agonizing chapter of modern Indian history, laying bare how political decisions stripped away high-level protection despite clear warnings of an imminent catastrophe.