October 31, 1984

She had been told to take the Sikhs off her personal guard after Amritsar and had refused. She said that if she did it, everything she had ever said about a secular India would be a lie. She had said the night before, at a rally in Bhubaneswar, that if she died in the service of the nation she would be proud of it, and that every drop of her blood would strengthen the country.

On the morning of the thirty-first she walked from her residence to her office through the garden. A film crew was waiting to interview her. Two of her guards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, were at the wicket gate. She said good morning to them. Beant Singh drew his revolver and fired three rounds into her abdomen; as she fell, Satwant Singh emptied a Sten gun into her. She was hit twenty-nine times.

She was sixty-six. She was taken to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and was dead on arrival, though it was not announced for hours.

What followed was worse than the killing. Over four days in Delhi and elsewhere, mobs went through Sikh neighbourhoods with lists of addresses. The official count is around three thousand dead; other estimates are much higher. Almost nobody has been convicted for it.