2 Sikhs Hanged in Slaying of Indira Gandhi

Two Sikhs were hanged this morning for the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whose death triggered a wave of separatist violence that continues to plague India.

Kehar Singh, 54, and Satwant Singh, 30, were pronounced dead less than half an hour after they were taken from their tiny cells on death row and marched to the chilly, rain-soaked gallows at New Delhi’s Tihar Central Jail.

Two panels of five Supreme Court justices Thursday turned down last-minute appeals by Satwant Singh, the only assassin who survived, and Kehar Singh, convicted of helping plot the murder.

Satwant Singh, a former bodyguard of Indira Gandhi, and Kehar Singh, a former government clerk, are not related. Like all Sikh men, they take the Singh name.

Appealed to Rajiv Gandhi

Hours before the executions, human rights activists and opposition politicians appealed to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to spare the lives of the men convicted in his mother’s death. There was no response.

Indira Gandhi was gunned down Oct. 31, 1984, apparently in revenge for an army raid she had ordered five months earlier on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest Sikh shrine. More than 1,200 people were killed, most of them Sikhs, in the raid to rout Sikh militants from the temple.

As Indira Gandhi lay dying, other guards opened fire, killing bodyguard Beant Singh and wounding Satwant Singh.

Kehar Singh, Beant’s uncle, was arrested a month later and charged with helping to plot the assassination, which caused anti-Sikh riots in northern India by members of the Hindu majority.

Fearing that today’s executions could trigger a new outbreak of communal violence, Indian authorities placed heavily armed security forces on maximum alert in the capital and the northern states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, where Sikh militants have been waging a bloody, six-year-old campaign for independence.