At least 700 people are believed to have been killed throughout the country, although the government has issued no official figures for fear of inflaming communal passions. There were widespread reports of other clashes as the unofficial death toll in New Delhi alone rose to more than 400. While the government claimed to have brought under control the mob rampages against Sikhs over the killing of Gandhi on Wednesday by two Sikh security guards, arsonists turned a predominantly Sikh south Delhi truckers' neighborhood into an inferno of blazing trucks this morning. The tranquility of the cremation spectacle was offset only partially by the presence of thousands of infantry soldiers and armed paramilitary security forces around the pyre and the approaches to it, vividly underscoring the fear of Hindu-Sikh violence that kept many mourners from attending the funeral. "From elements you come, to elements you return," Hindu priests chanted in Sanskrit as official mourners circled the pyre and fed the flames with sandalwood dust and cups of ghee (clarified flammable butter). Gandhi, who led India to freedom from British rule, and the slain prime minister's father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was India's first prime minister, also were cremated.Īs Brahman pundits (those learned in Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy) chanted Vedic hymns and family members climbed the 10-foot-high platform to heap wooden logs atop the slowly smoking pyre, a collective moan of grief arose from thousands of mourners, followed abruptly by stillness as orange tongues of flames leaped higher. November 4, 1984Īssassinated prime minister Indira Gandhi was consigned to the flames of a Hindu funeral pyre today as a grieving India reeled from four days of sectarian violence that ranked among the worst since independence was won 37 years ago.Īs hundreds of thousands of followers strained for a glimpse of the cremation and millions more watched on television, Gandhi's son and her successor to the leadership of the world's largest democracy, Rajiv, walked around the funeral pyre seven times with a flaming torch in his hand and turned the sandalwood bier into a sheet of fire.Ī three-volley rifle salute reverberated across the Yamuna River basin near the place where Mohandas K. Washington Post Foreign Service Lena Sun of the Washington Post Foreign Service contributed to this report.
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