Assassination of Indira Gandhi and Massacre of Sikhs
On the morning of 31 October 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot dead by two Sikh security guards (Satwant Singh and Beant Singh) in New Delhi in retaliation for Operation Blue Star. The assassination triggered fulminant violence against Sikhs across north India. While the ruling party, Congress (I), maintained that the violence was due to spontaneous riots, its critics have alleged that the Congress members had planned a pogrom against the Sikhs. Senior Congress leaders such as Jagdish Tytler, H. K. L. Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar have been accused by Sikhs of inciting the mobs against them.
Other political parties, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) strongly condemned the riots. Two major civil-liberties organisations issued a joint report on the anti-Sikh riots naming sixteen important politicians, thirteen police officers and one hundred and ninety-eight others, accused by survivors and eye-witnesses. In January 1985, journalist Rahul Bedi of the Indian Express and Smitu Kothari of the People's Union for Civil Liberties "moved the High Court of Delhi to demand a judicial inquiry into the pogrom on the strength of the documentation carried out by human rights organizations.
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