A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India

by Josy Joseph

In a bright yellow cotton sari with a black-and-white border, feet clad in a pair of simple black slippers, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi walked into the pleasant New Delhi morning. She walked, as was her wont, briskly along the pathway from her residence to the next bungalow, where Peter Ustinov, the Academy Award–winning actor and columnist, was waiting to interview her. She was running late by thirty minutes. As she crossed the wicket gate between the two compounds at 9.20 a.m., Sub-inspector Beant Singh, who had been guarding her for almost a decade, turned and shot her. When she collapsed to the ground after taking three bullets, Satwant Singh, a twenty-one-year-old who had been with the prime minister’s security for just ten months, fired thirty rounds at her. The two men dropped their guns, and one of them reportedly shouted, ‘I have done what I had to do. You do what you want to do.’ The two Sikh bodyguards were taking revenge on Gandhi for ordering the Indian Army into the Golden Temple, the highest temporal seat of their religion, to flush out armed Sikh separatists in summer that year.