Earlier, at 9 a.m., I had been in my office in the radiology department discussing some cases on what I presumed would be a fairly routine first day as director. In fact, the pro forma meeting confirming me as director was underway at that time. A radiographer burst through the door, his white coat flying.
‘Come quickly, Madam!’ he screamed. ‘The prime minister is in casualty! Quickly. I saw Dr Safaya (Dr A.N. Safaya, the medical superintendent) running to her too.’
Knowing hospital protocol, it was unthinkable that a prime minister could come to the hospital without prior notice. I frowned, sensing something was terribly amiss. The panic on the radiographer’s face was so wild, I rose to walk quickly to the casualty department, which was only a short distance from my office, to see what the uproar was about.
As I entered through the swing doors, I heard loud wailing. Mrs Gandhi’s personal secretary R.K. Dhawan and her political advisor Makhan Lal Fotedar wept. I walked past them to the staff at the desk and saw her. In the confusion of the moment, I had no idea how many other patients were in the casualty ward and what they could see. Mrs Gandhi’s daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi was also there. The only words she managed to say were, ‘She has been shot’, before breaking down. Some resident doctors stood in a huddle, in a state of shock. I saw the signature grey streak in her black hair and the pronounced aquiline nose. Mrs Gandhi’s saffron-coloured sari was soaked in blood. Dhawan and Fotedar moved outside into the anteroom. Within a minute, senior surgeons Dr P. Venugopal and Dr M.M. Kapur were at my side to examine her, having been pulled out of the operating theatre to come to casualty.
‘What can we do for her?’ I asked. She had no pulse. Dr Venugopal suggested putting Mrs Gandhi on the heart-lung machine in the operating theatre to switch off the functioning of her heart and lungs while the doctors could see if they could revive her. ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s go,’ I said, asking Dr Safaya to run down the corridor and hold the lift. Mornings are a busy time, with OPDs running, and we did not want to be hopping up and down waiting for the lift to come. Moving the prime minister into the operating theatre was not only the best for her medically, it was also the safest for everyone because a sea of people could be expected to descend, very soon, on the hospital the moment the news spread, and it would be impossible for the few security guards on duty to maintain order.
Once she had been taken to the eighth-floor operating theatre, I informed my predecessor, the outgoing director, Dr H.D. Tandon, who was in the boardroom to attend the meeting being held to confirm my appointment as his successor. Since the ink was not even dry on my appointment letter, the health minister, B. Shankranand, who had also arrived in the casualty department, asked us both to take charge of the emergency, along with Dr Safaya.
There was a lot to do. A huge crowd might storm the gates of AIIMS to catch a glimpse of Mrs Gandhi or to barge into the premises to kill the first Sikh they saw. Rioting outside the hospital had already started – revenge for Mrs Gandhi’s assassination by her two Sikh bodyguards, the news of which had already started trickling out. They had pumped her body with bullets as she crossed the lawn of her residence in revenge for Operation Bluestar – when the army had stormed the Golden Temple, a Sikh holy shrine in Amritsar, in the first week of June, killing over 400 people. A bloodbath against Sikhs could not be ruled out. Sadly, it did come to pass in the days that followed. Apart from preventing the violence from spilling over into AIIMS, some order had to be maintained to manage the comings and goings of the entire political class and members of Mrs Gandhi’s Congress Party.
We cancelled all elective surgeries. Staff cleared the pre-operative ward on the seventh floor to make space for the deluge of mourners who were expected. All patients on the seventh and eighth floors were moved to other wards. Dr Safaya busied himself collecting blood from all the hospitals in Delhi. Mrs Gandhi’s blood group was B negative – a rare group – and we had only a few bottles of it in the fridge. It finished within minutes. The doctors then used O negative blood, which is a universal donor, and Dr Safaya desperately called around all the hospitals asking for O negative blood.
Blood was being pumped into her, but it was a losing battle. She was losing copious amounts of it. Of some 33 bullets that had been fired at her, some had passed through her body while others remained lodged inside. The bullets had shattered her right lung and liver, causing very heavy bleeding. As the surgeons tried to staunch the bleeding, bullets kept tumbling out and clattering to the floor. Dr Venugopal had to change his scrubs three times – they were drenched in so much blood. The perfusionist (the person who operates a heart-lung machine) kept transfusing the blood into the vein in her neck but it kept gushing out, spilling down to the shattered lung and abdomen. The perfusionist was a young Sikh. The moment he heard the doctors mention that her killers were Sikh, he fled the operating theatre to save his life. The doctors had to bring someone else in.
We were told that we had to put off announcing her death until her son, Rajiv Gandhi, President Giani Zail Singh and others, such as P.C. Alexander, her principal secretary who was in Bombay, could arrive in Delhi. Rajiv Gandhi was in West Bengal on an election tour and arrived before Giani Zail Singh, who was on a state visit to North Yemen. There was to be no power vacuum. Rajiv Gandhi had to be sworn in the moment he returned. Until then, our job, for the next four hours, was to keep up the charade that we were trying to save her life, when in fact she was dead when she was brought to AIIMS.
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Sonia Gandhi and her children, Rahul, 14, and Priyanka, 12, arrived and were seated in the anteroom of the operating theatre. She was in shock. The children looked bewildered and frightened. Sonia started to have an asthma attack. I happened to know her personal physician, Dr K.P. Mathur, and called him to ask what medication he normally gave Sonia. We administered it and she recovered. As she sat inside, the corridor outside was swarming with politicians and their wives wanting to meet her and offer their condolences. As a new person arrived outside, I would ask her ‘yes or no’, meaning should I let them in or not.
Often, I had no idea who they were. She shook her head or nodded. Rahul and Priyanka were later sent to the home of the Gandhis’ family friend, Teji Bachchan, to be looked after while Sonia remained in my charge. She related how R.K. Dhawan, Mrs Gandhi’s personal secretary, was the only person with Mrs Gandhi, along with Constable Narayan Singh and her personal security officer, Rameshwar Dayal, when her personal bodyguards showered her with bullets. A fully equipped ambulance was stationed at the residence, but finding no driver (who had popped out for tea), Dhawan picked her up and put her in her white Ambassador car, which was driven to AIIMS, where she was handed over to the stunned staff on duty in casualty.
At around 5.20 p.m., Zail Singh reached AIIMS. He looked both shocked and fearful since her killers were Sikh. When Rajiv Gandhi arrived, he met Sonia briefly in the hospital before he was whisked away to be sworn in as India’s sixth prime minister. He looked shocked but composed. Later, he told me that he had warned his mother about one of her Sikh security guards because he looked suspicious. He did not stay long with his mother’s body. The entourage around him whisked him away to be sworn in.
I suggested to Sonia that she should go home to get a change of clothing for Mrs Gandhi for when she would be placed in the gun carriage to be carried from AIIMS to Teen Murti House, where the body was going to lay in state for two days. We tried to embalm her body, but all our efforts failed – the embalming chemical, when we injected it into different main arteries, kept oozing out. We had to give up and decided to focus only on keeping her face in shape, and for some reason, the arteries there retained the embalming liquid.
It was our responsibility to keep the body cool and in proper condition. Professor Gopinath provided a special cooling mattress that is used during cardiac surgery when the patient’s body temperature has to be kept low. The mattress is stuffed with chipped ice, the patient’s body is placed on this mattress, which keeps the patient’s body cold. The nursing staff gently transferred Mrs Gandhi’s corpse to this mattress.
Around 4 p.m., Gautam Kaul, ACP Police, Delhi asked me if all the medico-legal formalities had been completed. I was taken aback as I had had no time to think of the formalities. The day’s events had been overwhelming. Kaul said he needed a post-mortem report (we had kept only the operation theatre notes and report), appropriate photographs (we had none) and a ballistic report (which we also did not have). I had to contact a ballistic expert on Lodhi Road to get this report made.
By now word had spread of the prime minister’s assassination. The AIIMS campus was swarming with people filling the lawns and clambering onto car roofs and tree tops. I had to call the security officer, K.C. Bhatia, to come up to the eighth floor via the dumb waiter of the hospital, which was only used for carrying goods and food, so that I could give him the address of the ballistics expert to bring him from Lodhi Road to the eighth floor of AIIMS. ‘Use any vehicle you can get hold of and bring him here as soon as possible’. Somehow the ballistics expert managed to push his way through the crowd outside the hospital and come up to the operating theatre via the dumb waiter to write his report after examining the X-rays. If Gautam Kaul had not advised me to organize this report, my colleagues and I would have cut a very sorry figure at the inquest that followed.
This excerpt from Sneh Bhargava’s ‘The Woman Who Ran AIIMS: The Memoirs of a Medical Pioneer’ has been published with permission from Juggernaut Books.