Indira Gandhi was India’s third prime minister to die in harness but the first to be assassinated. This dastardly act, made all the more ghoulish because she was gunned by two of her security guards, was not entirely unexpected, certainly not by her. For, when she authorised Operation Blue Star — the storming by the Army of the holiest of the Sikh shrines, the Golden Temple at Amritsar that had been fortified into a citadel of secession by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and other Sikh extremists — she knew that she had also signed her own death warrant.

Remarkably, since much earlier, she had also been convinced that she would have a violent death — preferable to her over suffering in sickbed as her mother, grandfather and father had done. I had become aware of this as far back as 1972 when, presumably at her behest, I was invited to write a profile of the prime minister to be included in the press kit to be distributed at the first UN Conference on Environment, a subject close to her heart, at Stockholm some months later.

What happened the next year is best left to Fidel Castro to describe. On November 11, 1973 the Cuban leader was in New Delhi on his way from Havana to Hanoi. An “extremely pleasant banquet” that Indira Gandhi gave in his honour was “rudely interrupted by the stunning news from far-off Chile where it was still morning” that Salvador Allende had been killed in a coup d’ etat. “At that dramatic moment,” recorded Castro 12 years later, “Indira Gandhi, in a proof of her intimacy and confidence, said to me: ‘What they have done to Allende they want to do to me also. There are people here connected with the same foreign forces that acted in Chile, who would like to eliminate me’.”

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