Kin of Indira Gandhi Killer Elected : India: Voters seem finally to have lost faith in the family that has ruled the country for decades.

Five years after bodyguard Beant Singh shot and killed Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, his wife, Bimal Kaur Khalsa, on Tuesday was declared a member of the Indian Parliament.

The assassin’s father, Sucha Singh, was also declared a winner in the parliamentary elections that ended Sunday.

In perhaps the ultimate rebuke to four decades of dynastic rule, voters in the north Indian state of Punjab delivered equally huge parliamentary victories for the two men accused of masterminding the assassination. Both campaigned from prison cells.

As the final returns were counted, the political opposition continued its horsetrading in an effort to form a minority government that is expected to be unveiled today or Thursday.

Clearly, the voters had repudiated one of the longest-serving political dynasties in the modern world.

“To borrow a phrase from the old British Empire, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has just presided over the liquidation of a dynasty,” analyst Rajni Kothari said.

He referred to the man who inherited the leadership of the ruling party from his mother, Indira, and his grandfarther, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister after independence in 1947.

“As far as Mrs. Beant Singh is concerned,” Kothari said, “her victory certainly is an assertion of that anger toward the ruling family.”

There were other symbols that India’s increasingly sophisticated voters finally have lost faith in the family that has ruled virtually since independence.

Maneka Gandhi, the 33-year-old widow of Indira Gandhi’s late son Sanjay, also scored an overwhelming victory, seven years after her mother-in-law threw her out of the house and publicly declared her “family enemy No. 1” for challenging party policies.

Arun Nehru, a cousin of Rajiv who publicly split with the family two years ago, also won a seat in Parliament.

But as symbols go, analysts said, the victories of the relatives of Indira Gandhi’s assassins are the most dramatic.

All are members of the Sikh community, which for the past decade has been torn apart by a secessionist movement in the state of Punjab, where Sikhs predominate. And at least half of those elected to Parliament in Punjab are either members of or sympathizers with the Sikh secessionist movement. One is a terrorist who has confessed to numerous public bombings and at least one airline hijacking.

Beant Singh and Satwant Singh (no kin), his accomplice in the killing of Indira Gandhi, were both Sikhs. One was killed by other guards just after the shooting and the other was hanged last year.

Hindu mobs took to the streets after the assassination and thousands of Sikhs were killed. But in the five years that Rajiv Gandhi has been in power, no one has been convicted in connection with the riots. Several members of the Gandhi party, the Congress-I, are believed to have been involved, and at least one of them was defeated in last week’s voting. Many Sikhs said they were voting against the ruling party as a way of protesting.

“The vote, you see, is also an indication that the Sikhs are still in great anguish,” the analyst Kothari said. “It is an assertion against the ruling family that declares: ‘You have not yet punished the guilty. You have only hanged the assassins.’ ”

Kothari is one of many analysts who see the election of secessionists and the family and friends of assassins as something more than symbolic. They say it is a potentially positive sign for the strife-torn state of Punjab, where fighting over the secession issue has left thousands dead in recent years.

“Certainly some of the voting is a severe rebuke to the ruling family, but the fact that it took place in the parliamentary process and not in street killings is very reassuring and encouraging,” he said. “This will isolate the very hard core of the terrorists.”

Kushwant Singh, a Sikh newspaper columnist and political analyst, agreed.

“I don’t think this can be construed as a vote for Khalistan or any other such thing,” said Singh, who is considered a moderate on the secessionist issue.

“This is just a very angry vote,” he added, describing the victory of Beant Singh’s wife as “terribly symbolic.”

And Kothari added the best indication that the Punjab results auger well for the state’s future was in the conduct of the election itself.

“In an election where a record number of killings, fraud and vote rigging took place almost everywhere else in the country, one must note that the most peaceful poll of all was in Punjab,” he said.

“So, in Punjab, it was not just a vote for change. Strange as it may seem, I really think it was a vote for peace.”