Widow Named to Gandhi Post but Is Seen as Reluctant : India: Italian-born Sonia Gandhi has campaigned for her husband but has said she would never enter politics. Fearful New Delhi is patrolled by troops and police.

Shocked and terrified Indians all but deserted the streets of their capital on the first day of official mourning Wednesday as slain leader Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress-I Party moved swiftly to cash in on a political windfall of sympathy by naming the former prime minister’s widow to replace him as the party’s president.

But Italian-born Sonia Gandhi was strongly resisting the leadership post, according to sources close to the family. Although she has campaigned intensively for her husband in his rural home district in recent weeks, the 43-year-old widow has never held public office, and in her rare interviews she has stressed that she would never accept an offer to enter politics.

The widow, who spent the day in traditional Hindu mourning beside the coffin of her husband, made no public statements on the nomination Wednesday. Most analysts saw the move as a clear indication of the power vacuum left in a party long criticized for its reliance on dynastic politics rather than merit.

The latest political intrigues came on a day of widespread fear in the capital. Army trucks packed with soldiers patrolled the largely deserted thoroughfares, and tens of thousands of riot police and paramilitary forces also were deployed throughout the city in an effort to head off any attempt at vengeance for Gandhi’s killing.

The only other signs of life were the thousands of weeping and chanting mourners, who made their way on foot through the blistering heat to pay their last respects at Gandhi’s coffin.

Violence flared, killing at least six, in isolated pockets of India’s deep south, where the last of three generations of elected rulers known as the Nehru dynasty was blown up late Tuesday by an assassin’s bomb at a campaign rally.

But in New Delhi--where in 1984 more than 2,000 Sikhs were beaten, burned and stabbed to death in revenge by Congress-I supporters after Gandhi’s mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards--most residents kept to their homes throughout the day and night.

All foreign embassies were closed, with official warnings to all foreigners to remain indoors. All schools, shops and offices were closed, and the city’s public transport was shut down to avoid a repeat of New Delhi’s darkest day. As a result, those who ventured out went on foot, and virtually all of them seemed headed for the monument where their former prime minister was lying in state beginning in the early afternoon.

Spokesmen for the government and for the Congress-I have said the bomb that killed Gandhi and at least 15 others was concealed in a floral bouquet handed to him as he arrived to address the rally at Sriperumbudur, 24 miles from the southern city of Madras in Tamil Nadu state.

Police in Madras said a security guard in the village where Gandhi was killed reported seeing a woman hand him a bouquet of flowers just seconds before the explosion.

On Wednesday, however, the Press Trust of India news agency quoted sources in the Interior Ministry as saying investigators now believe that the bomb may have been strapped to the body of a female assassin who approached Gandhi, detonated the device and died in the explosion.

The assassination climaxed the most violent and cynical elections since India’s independence in 1947. It forced a postponement of the rest of the three-stage elections, which began Monday in a torrent of killing and vote fraud and added to a campaign death toll already exceeding 200 nationwide.

Gandhi’s badly mangled body was sealed in a teak coffin Wednesday morning, covered with the tricolored Indian flag--orange for sacrifice, white for purity and green for growth--and placed in the foyer of the monument called Teen Murti Bhawan, the former home of Gandhi’s grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru.

The coffin, thickly covered with rose petals of red and lavender and funeral garlands of marigolds and lilies, sat on a simple white bier, placed precisely on the spot where Indira Gandhi lay in state when India’s democracy, now 44 years old, was last threatened by a spiral of bloodshed.

Standing nearby, both wearing traditional white Hindu mourning dress, were Gandhi’s daughter, Priyanka, and his now-powerful widow, whose election to party leadership means that there is a chance, however small, that she may someday be prime minister. The move by the party leadership is clearly meant to consolidate what analysts expect to be a massive sympathy vote for the party when polling resumes next month in India’s parliamentary elections.

As the steady procession of mourners passed by, their lines stretching hundreds of yards in several directions, most of them sobbed, some gaped in stunned silence and others shouted such slogans as, “Rajiv Gandhi, you are immortal!” and “As long as the sun and stars remain, you will not be forgotten!”

In the street outside, thousands of mourners formed a human sea that washed against the large iron gate leading to the shrine, forcing riot police to fire dozens of tear-gas canisters to keep them at bay.

Gandhi’s cremation rites, which will take place beside the funeral pyre of his mother on the banks of New Delhi’s Yamuna River, were scheduled for late Friday afternoon to allow as many mourners as possible to visit the shrine.

Tempers flared in the afternoon heat, with Gandhi’s more militant supporters often chasing Westerners away and shouting, “Death to you and the CIA!”--a reflection more of their frustration at not knowing who to blame than a widespread belief that the U.S. intelligence agency was involved.

Although there was widespread speculation over the assassins’ identity, no firm leads emerged Wednesday.

K. Ramamurthy, Congress-I leader in Tamil Nadu state, told a press conference Wednesday that he could not rule out the involvement of ethnic Tamil separatists in the nearby island nation of Sri Lanka, where the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam have used powerful remote-control bombs to assassinate national leaders in their campaign for a separate state.

The Tamil Tigers, who originally operated from bases in India’s Tamil Nadu state, are furious with Gandhi for signing an agreement with the Sri Lankan government that sent tens of thousands of Indian troops in to crush the Tamil rebellion.

An editor at an English-language weekly newspaper in San Francisco said he received a call from a man in Sacramento claiming responsibility for the assassination on behalf of the Tamil Tigers. However, in statements issued in London and the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo on Wednesday, the group denied any involvement in the attack.

Officials in New Delhi, where thousands of migrant Indian Tamils were in dread of a possible backlash Wednesday, took pains to knock down the Tamil Tiger theory.

India’s deputy interior minister, Subodh Kant, announced that investigators from the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI, were in Madras, working with India’s intelligence agency, called the Research and Analysis Wing.

Kant also reported that, aside from the stray incidents of arson and police gunfire that left six dead in the south, “the situation in the country is well under control.”

Experienced observers in New Delhi attributed the relative quiet to two factors: the memory of the carnage of 1984 and the fact that, unlike the earlier assassination, the government has yet to blame anyone for murdering Gandhi.