What a difference twenty-five years makes. A quarter of a century ago, the television screen (black and white) was frozen in time. For three days, Doordarshan, the sole channel then, remained stationed at Teen Murti Bhavan where Indira Gandhi’s body lay in state. The shehnai mourned in the background, while dignitaries and the public filed past.

Finally, on November 3, the coverage moved out with Mrs Gandhi’s funeral cortege to the cremation ground. Close your eyes and still vividly see Rajiv Gandhi standing amidst the smoke and flames of the lit pyre, his eyes inscrutable, his features numb.Those two images — Mrs. Gandhi’s body lying in state and Rajiv Gandhi standing by her funeral pyre — perhaps helped shape our responses to both individuals at the time. Mrs Gandhi laid so low, so tragically, filled you with sadness, distracted you from the violence of the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi which Doordarshan, to its shame, did not show; Rajiv Gandhi, handsome but stoic in his personal loss made one’s heart go out to him. Could we have voted for anyone else in that landslide Congress victory of December 1984?

On October 31, 1984, DD was the last one to give us the news of Mrs Gandhi’s death. That was typical and expected: nobody turned to TV for the latest news, then; it was radio and BBC that told us what happened in our own backyard. Think it was Salma Sultan who first announced it on DD’s evening news, more than 10 hours after she was shot.

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