1948. Three bullets were sprayed.
1984. Twenty two bullets were fired.
Mahatma Gandhi and Indira Gandhi were assassinated; India lost two statesmen in a space of thirty six years.
Indira Priyodorshini Gandhi, only daughter of Jawharlal and Kamla Nehru, was born in a year the world saw its first Communist revolution in Russia. Hundred years back.
Indira loved her mother whom nobody loved in the family. It was only after Mahatma showed affection to Kamla that Jawharlal took his wife seriously and started loving her. But Jawharlal spent majority of his time in jail. So Kamla was uncared for.
After the death of her mother, when Indira was little over twenty, a man came to her life. Firoz Gandhi.
Firoz left her and the mortal world when Indira was barely forty three.
Nothing was left to Indira now, except father and politics.
She attended to both of them. And she rose to heights.
Silencing her critics in the Congress party, she emerged as a real face of Congress. She reconstituted Congress as Congress(Indira).
Silencing the rest of the world, she snatched independence for Bangladesh and won midterm election overwhelmingly.
Silencing democracy literally, she invoked Emergency in 1975.
She was silenced by the Indian polity in the general election in 1977, only to come back to power again in 1980.
She sent army to the Amritsar golden temple to arrest the unrest fanning from there.
The Shikhs felt insulted. Her personal bodyguard Satwant Singh was removed from duty by security hierarchy.
It was Indira who revoked the order. She believed in a country like India no community should be discriminated with.
Indira’s body was torn-apart by the blazing guns of Satwant and Beant Singh.
Indira gave her life for believing and protecting the pluralism of her country.
Rabindranath Tagore, whom she was sent to by Jawharlal in 1933 in his Viswabharati University, might have had an abiding influence to sing the unity song in diversity.