Security Tight as Gorbachev Lays Wreath at India Memorial

As teams of Soviet KGB agents in stocking feet surrounded the Raj Ghat memorial here, site of a recent assassination attempt, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Wednesday placed a ceremonial wreath honoring the late Indian independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, father of nonviolent civil disobedience.

Police kept thousands of Indians who came to view the Soviet leader and his wife, Raisa, several hundred yards from the memorial, on the bank of the Jamuna River at the spot where Gandhi, known as the Mahatma, was cremated after his assassination in 1948.

The precautions taken by the Soviet secret police agents--who were required to remove their shoes at the memorial as a sign of respect--reflected the generally intense security surrounding the four-day Gorbachev visit to New Delhi, his first to a Third World nation since becoming Soviet Communist Party general secretary 20 months ago.

Shortly after noon Wednesday in the old walled-city section of the Indian capital, a Muslim-majority sector, police arrested 50 Afghan refugees after they began to rip down posters picturing Gorbachev and his wife and banners honoring the visit.

The demonstrators, some of the 6,000 Afghan refugees living here since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, shouted, “Allahu akbar!” (God is great) and began tearing down the posters after worshiping at a mosque in the old city. They were first attacked by Indian Communist workers and then beaten and arrested by police.

Most Afghan refugee leaders here remained under house arrest Wednesday. Several posters condemning Gorbachev and demanding that the Soviets “Stop Barbarian Acts in Afghanistan” were pasted on city walls Tuesday night by a group calling itself the “Islamic Unity of Afghan Moujahedeen.”

Gorbachev arrived Tuesday along with several hundred KGB agents and at least 12 bulletproof Zil limousines flown here on special planes. The Soviet leader is housed in a special wing of the presidential palace under control of the KGB, or security police, which has shown disdain for Indian security procedures.

“Remember,” one Soviet official said, referring to the 1984 assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, “this is a country where the prime minister was killed by two of her own security staff.”

The Raj Ghat memorial visited by Gorbachev on Wednesday was the site of an Oct. 2 assassination attempt on the current Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, who is the son of Indira Gandhi but no relative of Mohandas Gandhi. Following the practice of earlier visiting dignitaries, Gorbachev and his wife planted a tree on the memorial grounds only a few yards from the spot where a gunman hid in the October attempt.