Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, members of Indira Gandhi's personal security detail, fire dozens of rounds into her as she walks through her garden in New Delhi, killing her instantly. The assassination was retaliation for Operation Blue Star, the June 1984 army raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar that killed hundreds of Sikh militants and civilians, and it triggered anti-Sikh riots that killed thousands in the days that followed.
Indira Gandhi had been warned. Advisers urged her to remove Sikh officers from her security detail after Operation Blue Star, the assault she had ordered on Sikhism's holiest site to flush out militant separatist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. She refused, reportedly saying she would not discriminate against an entire community for the actions of a few.
On the morning of October 31, 1984, as she walked from her residence to an adjoining office building to be interviewed by British actor Peter Ustinov for a documentary, her own bodyguards Beant Singh and Satwant Singh opened fire at close range. She was hit more than 30 times. Beant Singh was killed on the spot by other guards; Satwant Singh was captured, tried, and later executed.
The assassination unleashed horror: in the days that followed, mobs across India, particularly in Delhi, hunted down and killed an estimated 3,000 to 8,000 Sikhs in organized pogroms, often with the complicity or inaction of police. Her son Rajiv Gandhi, sworn in as prime minister that evening, would later say of the riots, 'when a big tree falls, the earth around it shakes' — a remark widely condemned as justifying the violence.