India’s Rahul Gandhi says he fears assassination

Rahul Gandhi, who is expected to lead the ruling Congress party into next year's polls, and whose grandmother and father were both assassinated when he was a child, has warned he too could be slain.

NEW DELHI // India’s Rahul Gandhi, whose grandmother and father were both assassinated when he was a child, has warned that he too could be slain, as he accused his election rivals of sparking “communal fire”.

The 43-year-old, expected to lead the ruling Congress party into next year’s polls, also told a rally on Thursday of how he had been friends with the bodyguards who killed his grandmother Indira when she was premier.

“My grandmother and father were assassinated and tomorrow I also may get killed; but I just don’t care,” Rahul, who is vice-president of Congress, said in a strikingly personal speech in the northern state of Rajasthan.

The notoriously shy Gandhi has often appeared reluctant to follow in his forebears’ footsteps but now seems to be opening up about his personal tragedy as an election tactic against the Hindu national opposition.

Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 in revenge for an army assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, while Rahul’s father Rajiv was assassinated in 1991 by Tamil suicide bombers.

“What does the BJP do? They spark communal fire .... Then we have to go to the people to put the fire out,” said Rahul in excerpts shown on Indian television.

“It takes years to forget anger but it takes only minutes to ignite anger within someone.”

Opinion polls show that Congress – even with Rahul in charge – is likely to lose power in the elections due by next May with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) opening up a commanding lead.

The BJP’s candidate for prime minister is Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat who was at the helm of the state when some 2,000 people – mainly Muslims – were killed in communal riots in 2002.

Investigations cleared Mr Modi of any personal responsibility but one of his former ministers was jailed for life for instigating the killing of 97 Muslims in one of the most notorious episodes of the riots.

While he did not mention Mr Modi by name, Rahul did refer to the bloodshed in Gujarat and accused the BJP of spreading “divisive ideology for their narrow personal gains”.

The BJP reacted furiously to the speech with several senior figures accusing him of hypocrisy given the record of communal violence under Congress’s near-decade rule.

A BJP party spokesman said Rajiv Gandhi had incited a deadly backlash against Sikhs following Indira’s assassination when he said it was only natural to expect the earth to “shake a little” after “a mighty tree” falls.

“If political parties are responsible for riots, then what does Congress have to say about the 1984 riots in which all those killed belonged to a particular religion?” said Sudhanshu Trivedi.

*Agence France-Presse