2 to Be Hanged Today in Indira Gandhi Slaying

India’s Supreme Court rejected appeals Thursday by the two Sikhs condemned for the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and ordered that they be hanged today in the central prison’s courtyard.

Panels of five justices each turned down pleas by Satwant Singh, the only assassin who survived, and Kehar Singh, convicted of helping plot the murder.

The condemned were ordered executed at the maximum-security Tihar Central Jail, where the last hanging was in 1984. They are not related; members of the Sikh faith have Singh--which means lion--as part of their names.

A third Sikh, Balbir Singh, also was arrested, tried and convicted on conspiracy charges and sentenced to death, but the court overturned the conviction last August for lack of evidence.

Slain by Bodyguards

Indira Gandhi was shot down by members of her personal guard Oct. 31, 1984, in the garden of her home in New Delhi. She was killed in apparent retaliation for an army raid she ordered five months earlier to rout Sikh militants from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest shrine of Sikhism. More than 1,200 people were killed in the fighting there, most of them Sikhs.

As Indira Gandhi lay dying, other guards opened fire, killing guard Beant Singh and wounding Satwant Singh. Beant Singh is revered as a martyr by many Sikh militants.

Kehar Singh, a government clerk and Beant’s uncle, was arrested a month later and charged with helping plot the assassination, which caused anti-Sikh riots in northern India by members of the Hindu majority. More than 2,700 people were killed, nearly all of them Sikhs.

Police and soldiers were put on maximum alert Thursday in New Delhi and in the northern states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab--where Sikh militants are waging a six-year-old separatist war--in case violence accompanies the hangings.

Security was increased at bus and railway stations, often targets of Sikh extremists.