The assassination of Indira Gandhi, on the last day of October 1984, just ahead of the general elections, had a cataclysmic effect. It is common wisdom that the RSS worked for the Congress party in the December 1984 elections. Whatever be the case, the Congress won 414 of 545 seats in the Lok Sabha, its biggest ever win that has never been bettered. The BJP was routed as it could merely win two seats. Atal Bihari Vajpayee also lost. The BJP merely got around 7 per cent of the votes against the Congress’s 49 per cent. Reading the writing on the wall, Atal had decided to abandon New Delhi, the
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