1984: India's Guilty Secret Paperback – November 20, 2017

Indeed, just a few years earlier, Mrs Gandhi had declared a state of Emergency in India. When, in June 1975, the Allahabad High Court disqualified her from the Parliament for electoral malpractice, Gandhi’s response was unequivocal. She used her extraordinary powers to launch a crackdown on civil liberties, arresting thousands of political opponents and dissenters (Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, avoided arrest by disguising himself as a turban and beard-wearing Sikh). With the media censored, elections suspended and laws rewritten to allow her to rule by decree, Gandhi became the de facto dictator of India.

The Sikhs of Punjab were firm opponents of the Emergency. Led by the Akali Dal party, the largest and most influential Sikh political party, they began a nationwide protest styled the ‘Campaign to Save Democracy’. Faced with arrest, some Sikh leaders took refuge in the complex containing the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Harmandir Sahib—popularly known as the Golden Temple of Amritsar. Out of an estimated 140,000 arrested and held without trial over the twenty-one-month-long Emergency, Sikhs numbered some 40,000 or 30 per cent of the total—something Mrs Gandhi would neither forgive nor forget. When elections were finally called in 1977, Gandhi was heavily defeated. She lingered in the political wilderness until 1980, when she staged a remarkable return to power.

For both Mrs Thatcher and Mrs Gandhi, the challenges of leadership and their somewhat confrontational styles led to very real threats to their lives. For Mrs Thatcher, this took the form of an Irish Republican Army bomb that detonated at a Brighton hotel on 12 October 1984. The blast took the lives of five people and came within a whisker of claiming her as its sixth victim.

A mere nineteen days later, Mrs Gandhi would undertake the short stroll from her official residence to her office. Accompanied by a small contingent of aides, officials and bodyguards, she walked through well-manicured gardens to meet Mr Ustinov: ‘Everything was ready, the tea was poured, she was coming towards us (from her nearby house),’ he would later recollect.

The serene morning atmosphere was abruptly shattered by what one of the Indian cameramen at first dismissed as firecrackers. The sound of birdsong gave way to a deafening burst of machine gun fire. Struck by over thirty rounds, the Prime Minister dropped to the ground where she lay, bleeding profusely.

To the surprise of everyone, her assailants were not intruders lurking behind bushes but two of her own bodyguards—both turbaned Sikhs. She was rushed to hospital at 9.30 a.m. but, after sustained attempts to save her life, she was pronounced dead later that day. The assassins claimed their actions were in retaliation for Operation Blue Star, the Prime Minister’s contentious decision to send the Indian army into the Golden Temple of Amritsar earlier that year to bring to heel Sikh dissidents who had occupied fortified parts of the temple precincts. Military commanders had assured her that the operation would be a relatively simple exercise aimed at ridding the complex of the alleged terrorists; however, it proved to be anything but a simple operation.

The attack took place on 6 June, one of the shrine’s busiest days. The number of civilian deaths ran into hundreds, possibly thousands, as innocent Sikh pilgrims lost their lives in the bloody military action, in which tanks were used to fire a barrage of explosive shells at the temple complex, undertaken without warning or evacuation. True to form, Gandhi drew upon many of the same tactics she had used during the Emergency. A media blackout was imposed in Punjab for Indian and foreign journalists. With constitutional rights suspended, human rights abuses inevitably followed.