Gandhi Assassinated During Crucial, Violent India Election : Terrorism: A dozen others are also killed when a bomb goes off during a campaign stop by the former prime minister. Rioting erupts, and voting is postponed.

Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated late Tuesday when a powerful bomb ripped through his election party as he was receiving flower garlands and gifts at a rural campaign stop 24 miles from the south Indian city of Madras.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the murder. Early today, India’s election commission postponed the rest of the voting for Parliament scheduled for Thursday and Sunday until June 12 and 15. The first day of voting was Monday.

Officials in New Delhi said the blast was caused by either a time bomb or remote-control device. The murder came as the 46-year-old Gandhi was nearing the end of a desperate and intensive personal campaign to resurrect his long-ruling Congress-I Party in the crucial national parliamentary elections.

Eyewitnesses said Gandhi was killed just moments after he stepped from his bulletproof car and crossed a red carpet toward the wooden dais in the remote village of Sriperumbudur for one of the hundreds of rural campaign meetings he had staged throughout the country during his hard-fought parliamentary crusade.

Those at the scene saw a brilliant flash and heard a deafening explosion. The crowd of about 10,000 screamed and scattered, many of them injured and soaked with blood. Security men sealed off the area and began searching for Gandhi’s body.

Witnesses said the left side of Gandhi’s face was torn off in the explosion and that senior police personnel apparently identified him largely from his clothing.

At least a dozen others also were killed. Scores more were reported wounded and rushed to nearby hospitals.

The Press Trust of India news service said police believe that the bomb was set off by remote control. A Congress-I Party spokesman said the bomb was hidden in a bouquet of flowers offered to Gandhi as he approached the dais for his speech.

Violence erupted throughout the area when news of the assassination spread, leaving hundreds of vehicles smashed and mobs roaming the rural roads south of Madras seeking targets for their anger.

Alerts were issued by police and paramilitary forces in states throughout India’s deeply polarized and violence-torn north after news reports of the assassination, which came against the backdrop of India’s bloodiest election ever.

Gandhi represented the third generation of an elected dynasty begun by his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi’s mother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by Sikh separatists while serving as prime minister in 1984.

Gandhi’s body was flown to New Delhi from Madras this morning in an Indian air force plane. It was to be taken to the New Delhi shrine called Teen Murti Marg Bhawan, the house where his grandfather lived, where it will lie in state with full national honors.

A day of national mourning was declared for today, with all government offices, schools and universities ordered closed in honor of the slain leader, who had served five years as India’s prime minister until he led the Congress-I to defeat in November, 1989.

An emergency Cabinet meeting of India’s caretaker government was scheduled for today, and most analysts feared widespread bloodshed as news of the murder spreads across the deeply divided and heavily armed Indian heartland.

After a high-level security meeting in New Delhi, police and paramilitary troops were deployed throughout the capital just before midnight, concentrating a large armed force around Gandhi’s posh New Delhi home.

But most of the Indian nation was asleep at the time of the assassination, exhausted by the brutal summer heat and, to some extent, by the widespread carnage reported Monday in the first day of voting in elections.

Most of India’s 840 million people learned of the death of their former leader only after they awakened this morning.

Those who heard the state-run All-India Radio and the British Broadcasting Corp. announce the news at about 11 p.m. reacted with shock. “My god,” said one police officer. “God help India. God help us all.” A truck driver starting off on a late-night run from New Delhi to Calcutta just shook his head and said: “Very sad. Very sad. A tragedy. India is falling apart. Democracy is dead.”

Appeal for Calm

India’s President Ramaswami Venkataraman and its caretaker prime minister, Chandra Shekhar, who is opposing Gandhi’s party in the polls, appealed for calm during what both called “this hour of trial for the Indian nation.”

Several hours after news of the assassination reached New Delhi, party leaders began flooding Gandhi’s home, meeting in emergency session after offering condolences to Gandhi’s Italian-born wife, Sonia. Before dawn, scores of supporters began gathering outside the Gandhi home, shouting slogans such as, “Long live Congress-I!” and “Death to the CIA!,” a frequent target of the Socialist Party.

Reporters accompanying Gandhi on his final campaign journey Tuesday night said that he had stopped while en route to the Sriperumbudur village meeting to place a garland of flowers around a statue of his mother, who was killed nearly seven years ago when members of her Sikh bodyguard opened fire on her with machine guns in her New Delhi garden just six months after she had ordered an army assault to clear out separatists who were holding the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

The younger Gandhi, who took power immediately after his mother’s death and later ordered another army raid on the Golden Temple, similarly had headed a death list drawn up by Sikh extremists, who have been fighting for an independent homeland in India’s Punjab state for nearly a decade.

Tuesday’s assassination took place in India’s deep south, in the state of Tamil Nadu, which is more than 1,600 miles from the Sikh shrine in Punjab and which is the traditional stronghold of Sri Lanka’s Tamil insurgents.

The heavily armed Tamil Tigers consistently have used powerful remote-controlled bombs during their struggle for an independent state in northeastern Sri Lanka, the island nation located just 23 miles off the Tamil Nadu coast. And Gandhi, who once supported the Tigers in their insurgency and sent tens of thousands of Indian troops to protect the Sri Lankan Tamils, later withdrew the peacekeeping force and launched a crackdown on the Tigers’ bases in Tamil Nadu.

Official sources in New Delhi refused to speculate on a possible motive for Gandhi’s slaying, which came amid the most violent election campaign in Indian history, a bloody marathon of executions and riots culminating in a staggered three-day vote originally scheduled to take place within a one-week period. More than 50 were reported killed in brutal religious and political clashes throughout north India on Monday.

In all, more than 200 candidates, party workers and voters have died since the campaign began six weeks ago, when Gandhi launched a crusade against a rising tide of grass-roots Hindu fundamentalism, a force now being harnessed by the Hindu-revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party in an attempt to form the first Hindu fundamentalist government in India’s 44 years of independence.

Hindus, drawn to right-wing revivalists’ calls that they unite around a crusade to build a temple to a Hindu demigod on the site of an ancient Islamic mosque, have grown more hostile toward India’s 100 million minority Muslims. Most of Monday’s election deaths came in clashes between the two religious communities.

Heavy Schedule

Hinduism’s ancient caste system also has emerged as a key election lightning rod, with several parties, among them Gandhi’s, campaigning on a platform to establish quota systems for India’s low-cast untouchables. Nonetheless, dozens more died in election battles between the untouchables and high-caste landlords who used firearms and clubs to prevent them from casting ballots.

Less than two hours before his death, a haggard Gandhi, clearly exhausted from a bone-crushing campaign schedule that took him to virtually every state in the vast nation, held a brief press conference in the Tamil Nadu state capital of Madras, where he again told reporters that Bharatiya Janata is a “dangerous party for the secular traditions of our country.”

But opinion polls conducted before the elections began indicated that Gandhi’s party would fail to win a clear majority for the second consecutive time, largely because of the unprecedented popularity of the Bharatiya Janata party, and Gandhi told reporters Tuesday night that he would speak of possible coalitions only after all the votes were counted.

It was unclear how Gandhi’s murder will affect the outcome of the election, which has been billed as a critical test of India’s foundations as a secular and socialist democracy.

In elections held just two months after his mother was gunned down on Oct. 31, 1984, Gandhi and the Congress-I were catapulted to an overwhelming victory largely attributed to a massive wave of sympathy for the 106-year-old party that had been the cutting edge of India’s drive for independence from Britain.

Political Snake Pit

Gandhi, a former airline pilot, inherited the reins of power most reluctantly, and the snake pit of Indian politics began to consume his youthful, idealistic government almost immediately after he took office in early 1985. Bolstered by the huge mandate, Gandhi attempted to streamline India, instituting a range of economic reforms that included attempts to open the long-protected socialist economy to free-market ideas.

Ultimately, though, his regime was seen as one of incompetence and continued corruption, with particular focus on allegations that he took tens of millions of dollars in bribes from a $1-billion purchase of artillery from a Swedish firm.

The negative image helped drive the Congress-I from power 18 months ago and, for Gandhi, the past six weeks of campaigning were a last-ditch endeavor to save both his party and his own political future.

Even before the assassination, Gandhi’s 80-hour-a-week campaign schedule was described as “suicidal” and “mad” by several reporters who tried to cover it. Constantly windblown, hoarse and disheveled, the ever-smiling leader emerged from helicopters, cars and aircraft, sometimes piloting them himself, tossing garlands back to the crowd as souvenirs, bantering with villagers and forever signing autographs.

Tens of thousands of admirers turned out in village after village. Women swooned and swarmed him as Gandhi fought his way through great crowds. Seeing this, many observers concluded that he was steering his once-disgraced party back to a position of power and that at least it would emerge as the largest single party after this week’s polls.

But now, with no clear successor to the Congress-I dynasty--Gandhi’s son is not even a teen-ager yet--the historic party is left in a vacuum. Most of the Congress-I leadership has long been Nehru family devotees with no clear image, and Gandhi had personally so dominated the current campaign that it all but excluded the emergence of any potential successor.

Still, with two full days of polling remaining, in which more than half the 545 seats in Parliament are at stake, several analysts speculated early today that the Congress-I may once again benefit from a wave of sympathy similar to that of 1984.

Widespread Violence

Already, widespread murder, arson sprees, gun battles and massive election fraud have countermanded the polls in scores of polling stations. During tours of the worst-hit northern states during Monday’s polling, a Times reporter and other journalists found that Gandhi’s Congress-I shared in the blame for the violence and intimidation, along with the other three major national parties.

In addition to the BJP, they are the Janata Dal of former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh, and the Smajvadi Janata Party of Chandra Shekhar, who replaced Singh in November when Singh’s government fell, then went on to lose his own mandate three months later.

The first to react to Gandhi’s killing, though, was the BJP, whose party secretary V. K. Malhotra called it a “tragic murder” that was “very bad” for the nation’s future, adding that it came at a “crucial juncture” in the country’s history. The party’s vice president, K. L. Sharma, said he suspected a “deep-rooted conspiracy” behind the bombing, but he declined to be more specific.

Most of the nation’s political leaders saw the assassination as the ultimate attack on India’s already badly fraying democracy.

Sobbing, long-time Congress-I figure Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the party’s leader in Calcutta’s state of West Bengal, told reporters, “Our enemies have succeeded in creating chaos. I have lost all interest in my life.”