Gandhi's Assassination Research Articles

(Un)dead past of 1984 Sikh massacre in Jaspreet Singh’s Helium

ABSTRACT Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination followed the 1984 state-sanctioned massacre of Sikhs. This historical violence haunts survivors, and its mediation in cultural texts reshapes the interplay between history and memory, voicing forgotten narratives. However, the complex historical agency and collective silences on the 1984 Sikh genocide leave its cultural and literary representations undertheorized. Jaspreet Singh's Helium (2013), serving as a cultural archive, delves into the haunting legacies of this genocide, highlighting its role in memorializing historical loss. Applying hauntology and Agamben's homo sacer, this article investigates how spectral wounds reveal dystopic violence, excluding Sikhs from legal protection.

Performing Peace: Gandhi's assassination as a critical moment in the consolidation of the Nehruvian state

AbstractThe consolidation of the Nehruvian state's sovereignty after Independence is traced here as a contingent event which was tightly linked to the impact of Gandhi's assassination and the mourning rituals which followed his death in 1948. The Congress was able to use the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of Gandhi's ashes to assert the power of the state and to stake the Congress Party's right to sovereignty. This intersected with localized and religious expressions of grief. Gandhi's death therefore acted as a bridge, spatially and temporally linking the distant state with the Indian people and underscoring transitions to Independence during the process of postcolonial transition from 1947–1950.

The Soviet Union's Partnership with India

The relationship between the Soviet Union and India was a hallmark of the Cold War. Over nearly forty years, Soviet-Indian relations passed through three distinct periods, coinciding with the ascendance of three extraordinary pairs of leaders, each extraordinary for different reasons—Jawaharlal Nehru and Nikita Khrushchev, Indira Gandhi and Leonid Brezhnev, and Rajiv Gandhi and Mikhail Gorbachev. The rise and decline of a political dynasty in India paralleled the trajectory seen in the Soviet Union. None of the periods ended well—the first in debacles with China, the second with Indira Gandhi's assassination, the third with the demise of the Soviet Union. The relationship in its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s was the product of a unique set of circumstances during the early Cold War. In the end, however, the relationship proved to be little more than a sideshow in the larger drama of the Cold War.

The Re-emergence of the Tamil Nadu Factor in India's Sri Lanka Policy

The Tamil minority in Sri Lanka have traditionally exerted a sympathetic pull on their co-ethnics in Tamil Nadu. This has inevitably influenced India's policy towards Sri Lanka. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 changed this pattern and the popular sympathy for Tamil militancy ebbed considerably in its aftermath. However, the spontaneous reactions by the political parties of Tamil Nadu to the Sri Lankan government's indiscriminate air attack on Tamil majority areas since mid-2006 and the flight of refugees to India indicate that Tamil Nadu may have resurfaced as an important factor in India's Sri Lanka policy. For New Delhi, it can neither afford to see the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) strengthen its foothold by taking advantage of influx of refugees, nor can it be a silent spectator to the humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka as the Government of Sri Lanka appears determined to find a military solution to the ethnic problem. There is, therefore, a need to analyse the re-emergence of the Tamil Nadu factor in the post-Rajiv Gandhi assassination phase.

Gandhi and le gandhisme: Writing Indian Decolonisation and the Appropriation of Gandhi 1919–48

As research by Markovits (2000) has shown, and contemporaries conceded, European writing on Indian moves towards ending the British colonisation of the subcontinent is invariably distilled into one discrete form of representation: le gandhisme and Gandhi. The present article, by examining this colligation of the story of Indian decolonisation to the biography of one man, will reveal a nexus of texts which illuminate a distinctive French-language tradition of writing India. Periodising Indian decolonisation from 1919 (when metropolitan writers first took an interest in Gandhi's hartal or general strike) to 1948 (Gandhi's assassination), its primary focus is how Gandhi's French contemporaries represented and, indeed, appropriated him. By similarly considering texts produced outside this period, the article reveals that certain strategies of representation are pervasive, and that the conflation of the story of Gandhi with the narrative of Indian decolonisation is an important reference point within French cultural production.

Religion and conflict in India: A Sikh perspective

The author was caught up in the violence against Sikhs following Mrs Gandhi's assassination in 1984. She places this in historical and religious context, describing the desire for an independent Sikh state, the impact of partition, the role of Sikhs in independent India from 1947 to the present, the appointment of the first Sikh prime minister, the rise and decline of Sikh fundamentalism and militancy, the continuing debates over Sikh identity and the ‘true spirit of Sikhism’.

Vinayak & me: Hindutva and the politics of naming

This article examines political and intellectual influences of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (published in 1923) on the development of nationalism in India. The article argues that contemporary political concerns about national identity raised in India have historical links that go back to Savarkar's text, especially the discourses on the politics of naming. The article considers the implications of these writings on one of Savarkar's disciples: Dr Dattatrey Parchure, an individual who had acquired notoriety for his role in Mohandas K. Gandhi's assassination in 1948. By examining Dr Parchure's life-story, the article shows how transformations in the family, the medical profession, masculinity and religion were directly intertwined with an emergent Hindu nationalism. But more specifically, the article examines Dr Parchure's decision to name children Vinayak as a way of evoking a mental image of Savarkar as an icon in everyday life and to propagate the ideals of Hindutva . The article posits that the politics of figures like Dr Parchure and Savarkar reflect a conjuncture in the development of nationalism in India during the colonial period, and their legacies continue to influence the making of today's post-colonial nationalism.

Bangladesh in 1984: A Year of Protracted Turmoil

By the standards of trial and tribulation set elsewhere in South Asia and the world at large during 1984, events in Bangladesh could perhaps claim only passing attention. The seemingly endless minisaga of efforts to return the country to electoral rule, in many ways a replay of its history over the past decade, paled beside the drama of India's Punjab and the Gandhi assassination. And compared to the heartrending images of famine in Ethiopia flashed electronically around the globe, who knew or even cared that Bangladesh was experiencing its worst floods in ten years? In these respects it seemed to be much the same old story in Bangladesh, by now long bereft of its capacity to draw the eyes of the world. At the onset of 1984 the martial law regime of Lt. General Hussain Muhammed Ershad, who had proclaimed himself president of Bangladesh in December, was within three months of completing its year. His government could claim reasonable progress toward meeting many of the objectives it had set for itself soon after its inception. Not the least of these were concrete steps taken toward administrative and judicial decentralization, in which the time-honored second tier of local government, the thana, was upgraded to the status of upazilla, or subdistrict, endowed with enhanced administrative functions and becoming the primary locus of the civil and judicial court system. Between November 1983 and February 1984, 460 thanas were designated as upazillas and the court system at that level had begun to operate. Consistent with the projected reorganization plan, sixty-four new administrative districts had been created out of the old subdivisional unit of administration. A key goal of the Ershad regime had been the disinvestment of government-owned industries, and by March 1984 it was asserted that thirty-three jute mills, twenty-five textile mills, and

Class, Communalism and Official Complicity: India after Indira

The reign of terror which engulfed the Sikh community throughout India following Indira Gandhi's assassination has at least temporarily subsided. The respite from daily reports of escalating violence enables us to reflect about the causes of the cataclysm. Many observers believe that the violence was inevitable: the government was paralyzed by the outpouring of rage against Sikhs once the identity of the assassins was publicly known. We would reverse the causal sequence: by their inaction and in some cases outright incitement, political authorities virtually sanctioned mob destruction. The government's abdication of responsibility becomes more comprehensible in light of the personalization of political power and the concomitant erosion of effective, autonomous political institutions under Mrs. Gandhi.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.