Gunfire at the family home
The account appears in Belonging: A Journey of Love, scheduled for publication on November 10, 2026. HarperCollins India is publishing the memoir in India; Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House, is handling the US edition.
Sonia describes hearing what sounded like firecrackers as she prepared to bathe on October 31, 1984. Indira had just left for her office in a building beside the family home. The children's nanny, Ongmu, pounded on the bathroom door, crying and pointing toward the garden.
Two of Indira's bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, shot her as she walked toward the adjoining office at her official residence on Safdarjung Road in New Delhi. The assassination took place at about 9:20–9:30 a.m. and was carried out in revenge for the Indian Army's Operation Blue Star at the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Running toward Akbar Road, Sonia saw a white Ambassador moving slowly and her mother-in-law being lifted into it. Inside, she crouched on the floor opposite Indira. Her mother-in-law's eyes were open, and blood covered her sari and chest. Sonia recalls trying to call to her but being unable to speak.
The journey to the hospital
Without a siren, the car struggled through traffic and stopped at red lights. Sonia describes further delays at the hospital gate and the crowded emergency department, where they were initially told to wait. Once staff recognized them, Indira was put on a trolley.
Sonia wanted to remain with her mother-in-law, but staff took her to a nearby room while the medical team worked. Still in her dressing gown and shivering, she tried to remember where Rajiv was and worried about getting their children home safely from school.
After hours of waiting, she sought an answer from a doctor, who shook his head. Indira was declared dead at 2 p.m.
Sent home to fetch clothes for Indira's body, Sonia encountered men who tried to halt her car, striking its windows and shouting words she could not understand. At the house, Rahul and Priyanka clung to her in tears. Black-uniformed commandos had abruptly collected them from school, and they had been asking where their father and grandmother were. Sonia writes that she could not stay to comfort them because Rajiv was on his way to the hospital.
Rajiv's return and the succession
Rajiv had been attending a political rally in West Bengal when police stopped his cavalcade with a message from Delhi: a serious accident had occurred, and he needed to return. He traveled by air through Calcutta to Delhi. A BBC bulletin told him that his mother was gravely wounded; although nobody directly told him she had died, Sonia writes that he understood.
He arrived in Delhi at 3:30 p.m. and went directly to the hospital. When they met, he told Sonia that he had been asked to take office as prime minister. She describes shock and anguish, followed by desperate pleas for him to refuse for his own sake and their children's.
Sonia warned that he would also be killed. His response, she recalls, was: "They will kill me anyway."
Indira's body was brought home and placed on the floor of the dining room, which had been cleared, with her feet facing south according to Hindu custom. At about 6:30 p.m., Rajiv was sworn in as India's prime minister. Recalling the more than 30 bullet holes in her mother-in-law's body, Sonia writes that she already feared her husband would meet the same fate.
Violence and later assassinations
Anti-Sikh mob violence spread across India in the days after Indira's assassination, particularly in Delhi. The Indian government's official death toll is 3,350; other sources estimate that between 8,000 and more than 16,000 Sikhs were killed. Members of the ruling Congress party were widely accused of instigating the violence, accusations also reported by the BBC.
Other guards shot Beant Singh dead at the scene of Indira's killing. Satwant Singh and co-conspirator Kehar Singh were sentenced to death and executed on January 6, 1989.
Rajiv was assassinated at an election rally in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, on May 21, 1991. A suicide bombing killed 17 people, including Rajiv and the bomber, 22-year-old Kalaivani Rajaratnam, known as Dhanu, who belonged to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
