When the pager went off that Wednesday morning, Dr I K Dhawan — then surgeon in-charge at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)— immediately started preparing for a disaster, perhaps a riot or a bus accident. “We were expecting a rush in the casualty section, but never did we think that the emergency could be the Prime Minister getting shot,” he said, speaking to The Indian Express from his office in Sitaram Bhartia Hospital, which he has been associated with since 1996.

In 1984, AIIMS had just installed a paging system, which beeped relatively softly in case of an emergency and more loudly if the situation was even more serious. The pager was introduced as part of the larger disaster management programme, due to the volatile situation caused by insurgency and Operation Bluestar. But the loud beep on the pager on October 31, 1984, was not something the doctors had factored in during their preparations.

Dr Dhawan had started his shift at 8 am that day. “I was operating on a patient when the pager sounded. I was instructed by the medical superintendent to prepare the operating theatre (OT) as madam had been shot,” he recalls. “Mrs Gandhi was covered in blood when I first saw her being wheeled in. It was only in the OT that we realised that someone had sprayed her with bullets,” he added.

“Mrs Gandhi was immediately put on a heart-lung machine while we gave her a blood transfusion. We opened her chest cavity and stomach but a lot of vital organs had been damaged. She had lost a lot of blood,” he added. She died minutes later.

... contd.