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In this special report, India Today Group Chairperson and Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie recounts the magazine's inception in 1975 during the dark times of Emergency.
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00:00For me good journalism is the truth well told. That was the motto which we
00:16followed. When somebody pitched a story, had to answer these three questions. Why
00:23now? Who cares? What next? And will you get through to the reader? Inidre brought
00:29the news into people's homes in a very attractive manner. Every time the week ended and India
00:34Today was about to hit the stands, it quickened the pulse. And we were just trying to do better
00:40journalism, learning from some of the best in the world. We did historic issues and I
00:45discovered that nothing comes for free. So you have to find a way around. For me, India
00:51Today represented the discovery of India. The entire country for a long time didn't
00:57really know what had happened. The age of Mrs. Gandhi. The Socialism, License Raj, India
01:04was going in a different direction.
01:14I was one of those kids who didn't know what they want to do with their lives.
01:18And my dad, he said, you need to have a profession. He said, you better become a
01:23chartered accountant. I was soon after school shipped off to London and became a
01:29chartered accountant in India. I actually hated accounting. I came back for a holiday
01:33and my father said, you know, I've set up this Thompson Press. Why don't you go and
01:38take a look at it? I sort of got involved and I saw so many things going
01:43wrong there. I didn't go back to it again. I soon realized that the only way for
01:49Thompson Press to make money was to start having your own work. I was always
01:54interested in current affairs. My idea was that India needs Indian characters. From
01:58that, it grew the idea that you should have a magazine. So we got into publishing of
02:04some kind. Soon after that, my sister, Madhu Treyan, she came to help to set up the
02:11magazine. As it happened that she got pregnant and she left within six weeks. And I
02:17was handling the magazine. So India Today started there. And then I really find what
02:24I really love to do. My philosophy was produce a good editorial product. The
02:32money will follow. I'm Sunil Sethi. I was one of the founding team of India Today in
02:391975. It was just absolutely tiny startup. Just four of us. And we really started from
02:48scratch. We edited our stories. We went to the press. We looked at the galley proofs. We
02:56proofread. We took our own pictures. And we made up the pages literally from A to Z.
03:02India.
03:03India.
03:04This is Billy Bob. So I was the first employee. We were all in our early 20s. You know, and
03:12we had no idea of serious journalism. But we had to learn on the job, which we did. Looking
03:18back, it seems sort of suicidal, let me say, to start a news magazine in the middle of the
03:25So there was a lot of turmoil happening at that time.
03:32It was the age of Mrs. Gandhi.
03:36She tentatively began as Nehru's daughter.
03:39She really grew in enormous stature.
03:44What she did have was absolute grit, stamina, and a capacity to manipulate people.
03:53Brothers and sisters, the President has had a dream of the past.
03:58There is no reason for this.
04:02You will all be attracted to the public and public,
04:07who is still living in that time,
04:10when I started to perform some pragati shil for the birth of India.
04:16A call was given to commence an agitation in every part of India.
04:22Which government could possibly tolerate a situation of this kind,
04:30when not only the people have been asked for revolt,
04:34but it is said that the army and the police should treat this as their own struggle.
04:39And that was a historical occasion for me.
04:44J.P. has said that this government has been destroyed.
04:48J.P. has said that this government has been destroyed.
04:51Therefore, this government doesn't have to accept any law of this government.
04:56And that was a historical occasion for me.
04:58J.P. has said that this government has been destroyed.
05:03Therefore, it doesn't have to accept any law of this government.
05:07They have also addressed the paramilitary organizations of police.
05:11J.P. has said that J.P. has prepared the armed forces to revolt.
05:18When we got locked,
05:20the government will tell us that the government will be elected.
05:26So, our government will be elected.
05:29We will be elected.
05:31We will be elected.
05:33We will be elected.
05:35J.P. has said that this government will be elected.
05:38J.P. I and my colleagues used to be brought to the court.
05:40We were 22 of us.
05:42And as we were…
05:44Every morning we had to be brought to the court when the trial began
05:47or earlier when dates were taken.
05:50At that time,
05:52plus a chain with which two policemen chained themselves to me
05:59and similarly to other colleagues.
06:01That was Mrs. Gandhi's way of telling you that,
06:04you know how I can crush you.
06:07The emergency was declared
06:09and there was complete pandemonium in the Times of India office.
06:13People didn't know what to do.
06:14We were not used to censorship of the press.
06:18And this has been…
06:19We were given notices that nothing was to publish
06:23unless it had been cleared by the censor.
06:25When I discussed it with great lengths
06:28and she wouldn't agree with me at all,
06:30she said there can be no emergency,
06:33no press freedom with emergency.
06:37They have to go to the line.
06:40It was the censorship of the… of the press.
06:42So it was done in kind of subtle way.
06:45A lot of journalists were just given press handouts.
06:49That was the time where they were watching the press very carefully.
06:56I get a… get a call from South Block.
06:59One gentleman called Mr. Mohammed Yunus,
07:02very close to the Gandhi family.
07:04He called me and my dad to South Block,
07:06sat us down and threatened us.
07:09You have a press, we can shut it down and so forth, right?
07:13That was the kind of mood in the emergency at that time.
07:17That period, I mean, when we'd finished writing,
07:21would actually take printed copies to the censor.
07:26These were bureaucrats, you know, in the INB ministry.
07:29And they marked stuff that we couldn't print.
07:32One of the staff, Shirley Joshua,
07:34her maid, we got her maid to wear her best shadi.
07:40And we had a freelance photographer to shoot it.
07:44I had that pallu.
07:47And it said, the emergency.
07:49Now you see it, now you don't.
07:51By the time we launched the magazine,
07:53it was December 75.
07:55This is in the middle of the emergency.
07:57And then Mrs. Gandhi lifted the emergency in 1977.
08:00And the general elections were called.
08:03Then, of course, the floodgates were opened.
08:09When we came to jail,
08:12we didn't think that we would be again.
08:15Because the state machine,
08:17which was the government,
08:19was the power of the government.
08:24Indra Gandhi itself was a personality.
08:27And when she stood up to talk,
08:29everybody would listen to her.
08:30She had a tremendous leadership role.
08:35Lakin.
08:36Salute to the Indian masses.
08:38It was people's election.
08:41Well, the founding team was bright, young, energetic,
08:46was willing to go out wherever the news was,
08:49and told it the way they saw it, without any filters.
08:53And they told it well.
08:55And so for people like me to cover that election was extremely exciting.
09:02To be able to profile and see up front some of the great mavericks of Indian politics.
09:09And the way we wrote about them, not being overpowered by them.
09:13We would talk about Chauji Charan Singh breaking down in the middle of a conversation with the editor.
09:19We would talk about Sanjay Gandhi being the balding, monosyllabic princeling of India.
09:27And the historic catastrophic defeat of Indira Gandhi and the Congress party was just grist to the mill.
09:39Huge shock for her.
09:40She even lost her deposit.
09:42And suddenly this great lady who was dominating Indian politics was diminished in many ways.
09:49And I asked her, Mrs. Gandhi, ye kya hua?
09:53She said, feedback nahi tha.
09:56Because she'd been told the feedback she got was that she was very popular and would sweep the polls.
10:03This is her own government information agencies.
10:09So I said to her, Mrs. Gandhi, feedback kaise ota?
10:11Ne presko to ban kati ya.
10:13The vanquishing of Indira Gandhi and what happened in 1977 were the turning point in the magazine.
10:21It was absolutely a historic moment for Indian democracy.
10:27After the emergency, we just went hammer and tongs with all the stuff which happened during the emergency,
10:34which was suppressed.
10:36I was not a journalist at all.
10:39It was an emergency which forced me to become a journalist.
10:42Though I joined India today after the emergency was lifted,
10:45it was a surprise to see that India has brought out a special issue on torture.
10:51It gave people pictorially and textually the context in which the emergency was imposed.
10:57We had already had the information.
10:59We had met a lot of people.
11:01We had spoken to a lot of relatives, friends,
11:04wives, husbands of people who were tortured.
11:09It connected society with politics.
11:13It connected administration, misuse of authority, dictatorship, everything.
11:17But it captured everybody else, the young people who had not seen what kind of suffering
11:21the nation had gone through during the emergency.
11:23That was the benchmark for future journalism.
11:28And after that, Kissa Kursi's story was written there.
11:31I remember writing that story, cover story, because I followed him every day.
11:35So this was a movie made by not a very well-known filmmaker, Mr. Nahata,
11:41who went to court saying that my film has been destroyed.
11:45Censors at that time saw it.
11:47There was a lot of resemblance in there to Sanjay Gandhi.
11:51The movie was loosely based on him.
11:53Sanjay Gandhi was a very mysterious figure.
11:57His rise to power was, of course, thanks to his mother,
12:00who completely sheltered, protected, and promoted him.
12:04But there came a time when he really began to rule his mother.
12:10And worse, rule the party and the Congress.
12:14The INB minister, Mr. V. C. Shukla, sent original film prints to the Maruti factory,
12:39which Sanjay had just started.
12:41And the prints were burnt at the factory.
12:45Then they found the driver who had taken into the factory and questioned him.
12:50Since it was about Sanjay and it was his factory, he got arrested.
12:57And he spent a couple of days in jail.
13:01And then, of course, he was out on bail and then the case started.
13:04One of the things about India today was the fact that it had no agenda.
13:11You couldn't slot us that we were one way or the other.
13:15We just went from issue to issue, literally.
13:18People who wanted to tell stories in long-form journalism
13:24came to the magazine.
13:25They got attracted by it.
13:27And everybody did everything.
13:29So it was a team completely meshed with each other in terms of the way they worked.
13:35And the magazine was a fresh item which came in people's reading habits.
13:40And this was very apparent.
13:42The moment you read the magazine, you got this sense of freshness.
13:46That it was something that was chasing change.
13:49You know, I wanted to be a part of that change.
13:52I'm Inderjeet Badwar.
13:55And I was with India today for most parts of three decades.
13:59And when we did a very hard-hitting political story, the magazine soared.
14:04I mean, you could see that it was all newsstand sales.
14:07And then there was a Janta period.
14:09Janta Party was a mixture of so many parties who never really got along
14:13and all the time were fighting and quibbling with each other.
14:16And it was great for news.
14:18And we just reveled in it.
14:19When we were in the emergency, what happened to us in the country,
14:25we took it and took it.
14:27We didn't take it and took it and took it.
14:29That's why the government started to become the government.
14:32A gaggle of parties that had come together purely with the idea of taking out the Congress.
14:38But very quickly they fought because of their ideological contradictions between the BJP
14:43or that time the Jansang and its approach towards religion and the Hindutva
14:48board that we now know of and the left that felt that this was an extreme position.
14:52So very quickly the ideological differences began to surface.
14:57You had this fight between Jansang and Muradji Desai.
15:01And because of that, Muradji Desai had to resign.
15:04And at that time, Mrs. Gandhi played a very smart game.
15:07She told Jansang that she would support it.
15:10And she did.
15:11And that's how Jansang came to power for those few months.
15:14The Janata Party fell apart.
15:16Chandran Singh was Prime Minister at that time.
15:20Then the big turning point also was the 1980 election.
15:24The general wisdom, conventional wisdom there was that the Janata Party would come back.
15:29Mrs. Gandhi had been completely kind of, image had been devalued.
15:33But there was an indication that she may be on her road back.
15:37All of us went out, I went out to cover one party.
15:41Somebody else went out to cover another party.
15:44So we covered the changing politics of India.
15:47And you must remember, India today was setting another benchmark.
15:50It has started the first opinion poll in the country.
15:55One gentleman, Pranoy Roy, came to my office.
15:58And he said, I've got an opinion poll.
16:00Everybody else was predicting that Mrs. Gandhi would lose.
16:03And he predicted she would be back.
16:05We said, okay, we'll take the risk.
16:07And he came out bang on.
16:09And that's when a lot of the credibility of India Today got built.
16:14That, okay, this is a magazine to be taken seriously.
16:21Back came Mrs. Gandhi into power.
16:22A very changed, very chastened, Mrs. Gandhi.
16:27The vengefulness had gone.
16:29And I think a part of this was also happening because India Today had played a very
16:33critical role shaping public opinion at the time.
16:40Then, after that, suddenly, Sanjay Gandhi unfortunately died in a plane crash.
16:46And I remember I wrote the cover story and I remember being attendant at the covering Sanjay's
17:02last rites and his funeral.
17:05And it is for the first time that people saw this iron leader, her face,
17:16absolutely crumpled in grief.
17:19At the end of the cover story, I posed the question that the whole world used to ask,
17:26what would Sanjay Gandhi be without his mother?
17:29Now, everybody is asking, what will she be without Sanjay?
17:35He was going to be the heir.
17:36He was going to run the government.
17:40And Mrs. Gandhi brought in Rajiv Gandhi, who became kind of being trained by her.
17:46It changed Indian politics in that sense.
17:52So, India was going towards the socialist route.
17:55And it was not a good time economically.
17:59That was a time when you had to wait for a telephone connection for years on end.
18:04You had to wait six, seven years for a scooter.
18:08It was an economy of scarcity.
18:10Everybody adjusted to it. There's a certain sense of resignation.
18:18And then Mrs. Gandhi came and, you know, nationalized the banks, got rid of privy purses.
18:25Fortunately, we are one of the finest business journalists India has ever had, I think.
18:29So, TN9 reported all the changes which were happening in India at that time.
18:34He was a good writer to explain complicated economic issues in simple language.
18:41The government controlled everything.
18:43They didn't want too much private industry.
18:46And it wasn't working.
18:47So, this was an economy marked by shortages and controls.
18:51You had price control on paper, cement, tires, cars.
18:54Anything you could think of had price controls, distribution controls, export controls, import controls.
18:59So, in the early 80s, the first initial slow steps to sort of get away from all this began.
19:06In a way, the India story began to open up.
19:12The big family groups at that time, who traditionally were dominating Indian industry at that time.
19:18The Birla's, the Mafatla's.
19:20There were stories to be told there about how their families were being managed.
19:24You know, there were a whole bunch of business groups that were individual family-led enterprises.
19:30And they reached a stage where the next generation was coming in to business.
19:34And there were conflicts.
19:37There was a lot of tension.
19:38So, there's a whole range of stories to do with all of this.
19:41And slowly, slowly, I think new entrepreneurs came up.
19:44I remember we ran a cover on Growth Kings.
19:47And it had these four cards.
19:50You know, the Aces of Kings Diamonds.
19:53There were businessmen who were coming into prominence and rising.
19:58Nobody had heard of Vijay Maliya's father, Vital Maliya, at that time.
20:01Because he very quietly operated to get this monopoly on the brewery and liquor business.
20:06So, we put him as one of the four on the cover.
20:10And then, when we won the World Cup, all of India rejoiced.
20:16It was a great cover to carry.
20:19I have the copy of that magazine.
20:20And 1983 was an event that all of us of a generation remember it.
20:25Kapil Day was like this superstar.
20:27Almost the antithesis of what Indian cricketers had been like till then.
20:30He was the hero there.
20:32I just felt that, can we put everybody together and make them believe.
20:37Once you start winning the matches, the team start believing.
20:42When the team start believing, we can win it.
20:45That was the change.
20:46Yes, I think it was a miracle if you really ask.
20:51Because it was such a big event, it was like a tidal wave almost that came.
20:56And you just felt happy.
20:57You were just delighted.
20:58And we had photographs of the team coming back and meeting the Prime Minister.
21:02It changed everything.
21:03So there's a lot of coverage of what is happening in Indian society at that time.
21:08The South was very important for us.
21:10It was an English reading audience.
21:13Well, MGR was the big dominant force there.
21:17And of course, the DNK was there.
21:18Karan Ali was there.
21:19So these two great politicians, right, battling it out in the South.
21:24I remember Suheed Sadie doing an interview to MGR through the door.
21:29He was a man of very few words, who was hard to read because in many cases he had those dark
21:36glasses.
21:37But what was interesting was get the reactions of what the public felt about him.
21:44And get an interview with Jay Lalitha, his great co-star, a very glamorous figure,
21:50very articulate, which was said to be the great chemistry between him and her as a very,
22:00very popular cinema couple.
22:07Well, you know, India Today was a picture magazine.
22:09And Arunpuri brought the great Raghur Raya on board.
22:13Magazines had that vehicle to display pictures.
22:16And Raghur is a genius.
22:18Brought a lot of energy and a different point of view into India today.
22:25It's to call all the type ETs.
22:33For me, written words are like brickwork.
22:36So please open up the page and then let a large,
22:43powerful window to the events.
22:49This requires space that will share the powerful magic images that we've got going.
22:59How many pages we do on so-called soft stories, consumer stories, cultural stories,
23:04because ultimately the pages, I mean, it's a commercial decision.
23:07A magazine is basically sold on the newsstands.
23:10But people wanted their stories to be read and to be noticed.
23:14So there was a constant fight for pages.
23:17Give two pages more, Arun, please.
23:19Two pages.
23:20This is two pages.
23:21It's not going to go to 4.
23:22It's 15 pages.
23:24Arun said, 15 pages?
23:25Are you crazy?
23:26I said, Arun, you want to kill me like that.
23:31Do you remember any of those?
23:33Yes, of course.
23:33The whole fight was four pages.
23:36I remember him and Indujit Badwar did a series on musicians,
23:39about the old masters, the gurus of the day.
23:44The original idea came from Raghu.
23:46It's the first thing he told me when we met,
23:47you know, let's bring music into our pages.
23:50And I said, they are so intense.
23:52They are so expressive.
23:53They are so powerful.
23:55We must go out there.
23:57Bismillah Khan, he used to sit by one of the tombstones
24:00and play his music dressed as a beggar.
24:05And then Chorosia, the great 100% Chorosia,
24:07sitting in his bedroom.
24:09Magic coming out of his flute, you know.
24:12And Bhim St. Joshi.
24:15Oh, boy.
24:16What expression?
24:18What do you call it?
24:19There's no word for it in the English language.
24:22Do you feel the music from the pictures?
24:2516 pages, which is very rare in the magazine.
24:29The thinking of the India Today editorial philosophy was
24:32that politics alone does not feed an individual's
24:37appetite for knowledge.
24:39The reader for India Today is actually somebody
24:41who's interested in what is happening around him.
24:44Because it means sports, it means entertainment,
24:47it means society, it means trends.
24:50So it's really holding a mirror up to society, right?
24:54We did stories on the Raj Kapoor clan,
24:56the whole lot of them on the cover together,
25:00which is quite unique.
25:02They were very charming, they were very accessible,
25:05very large-hearted and warm people.
25:09The problem with the Kapoor's bars,
25:12getting them together in one place for Ragu Rai's cover photo.
25:17Because Ragu Rai was flying down,
25:19and Shashi was just so difficult to track.
25:22So ultimately, I appealed to his wife Jennifer,
25:25who I knew, who was a marvellous woman.
25:27She understood my problem and she just button-holed him
25:31at breakfast and said,
25:33Shashi, come on, behave yourself.
25:34You have to do this shoot for Ragu and Suneet.
25:37So that's how we got the cover shot.
25:40And it was called Filmdom's First Family.
25:44His launching of Zenith Amal and Satyam Sivam Sundaram,
25:47which was a very popular cover.
25:52And we put MF for Sand on the cover quite early.
25:58Amitabh Bachchan was a towering figure in the film industry at that time.
26:02I remember watching Diwar, Amar Akbar Anthony.
26:06And of course, Shole was just too good.
26:09It was like you could watch it a hundred times.
26:13The angry young man from a poor family,
26:15who was also fighting for the small guy.
26:18Diwar kind of endorsed and sealed the fate, so to say,
26:22of the angry young man with a very strong endorsement.
26:26That's primarily because I feel that Diwar was one of the finest and most perfect
26:31Hindi commercial mainstream Esketis cinema script that was written.
26:37The angry young man image who would fight, you know, the powerful, the corrupt,
26:46the nexus between politicians and the police, for example.
26:50These were really everyday issues that mattered to the public.
26:54So it was representative of what was happening in the country.
26:59The industry almost depended on him to get the cash registers running.
27:04So we put him on the cover as a one-man industry.
27:09And then the gas tragedy of Bhopal happened.
27:17Bhopal gas tragedy was just shocked everybody in terms of the way it happened
27:23and the number of people who died.
27:25This gas that was leaking was heavier than air.
27:29So it was not flying, it was crawling.
27:32That's why so many people were dying.
27:36They said those who inhaled a lot of gas, they were lucky because they died very quickly.
27:41Those who inhaled less gas, they were dying a slow death.
27:45And when I went there, I saw this boy.
27:51This face was so innocent and sweet and eyes wide open.
28:00I just brought home the enormity of the tragedy.
28:05We did a cover on this Nelly massacre, which was an investigative story.
28:10Arun Shorin wrote this article about the Nelly massacre, which was after the Nelly massacre.
28:15He found communications within the administration which warned them about the Nelly massacre.
28:21I was following the Assam movement quite a lot.
28:24But then we heard about these killings.
28:27People came and massacred women and children and everybody in a village.
28:32The kind of cold-blooded massacre that took place in Nelly.
28:37I think barring Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis, at least contemporary history has not seen an example.
28:45It is Shekhar Gupta's story, though I wrote it.
28:49I must have gone to Arun and asked him, could I go and see if I can find anything?
28:57And he must have said, yes, you go.
28:58But I did not have those local contacts for getting the information from Nelly.
29:04And Shekhar Gupta, he said that, no, there is such and such police officer.
29:12He knows everything.
29:13So in those days, when you went to the telegram office, you would write it down.
29:18And they will then transmit it.
29:19That gentleman who gave us, he said that, yes, I had given information earlier, a telegram.
29:25He had that written down thing.
29:28And Arun was kind enough to publish it.
29:31And that really was like a blow in the face of the government.
29:35It so happened that the cover came out when Mrs. Gandhi was having this NAM conference,
29:41where Castro was coming and all the big leaders were coming.
29:45And it kind of embarrassed her.
29:48And that became a big scandal.
29:51And there was also the time of where the rise of the Punjab militancy.
29:55Such dramatic things happened.
30:02Well, what was happening in Punjab was the Congress wanted to come back there.
30:04And Mrs. Gandhi got sucked into the vortex of Punjab politics in terms of who would run this thing.
30:10And it was much bigger than anything anyone else imagined.
30:14I am Shekhar Gupta.
30:16At the time that I joined India today, so I did go to Punjab quite a lot.
30:21The Congress government in the center got rid of its own government because of a series of
30:27killings in Punjab, including many prominent people.
30:30So things had gone really bad in Punjab.
30:35The Congress party was trying to say that Akalis have to be defeated.
30:39You must not allow some other faction of the Akalis to prop up so that the votes are divided.
30:45They created this Frankenstein called Benderwala.
30:52I used to call him Pajee, not Sanjee, because for me, he didn't have that stretcher.
31:00He will carry a kind of a steel arrow that Guru Gobind Singh used to carry.
31:08So those who saw him, they will connect him to Shri Guru Gobind Singh.
31:15I have seen that period, to the time when he became so strong and so powerful.
31:21Benderwala was encouraged by Gyanese Al Singh at that time
31:25to contest elections to the Shomniku Dwarapabandha committee against Akalis.
31:31They were pitched against Akalis.
31:34So gradually, gradually he was given more power.
31:38It was a rise in militancy, which was unbelievable.
31:44Trains were being blasted, bombs were being thrown, many people were being killed.
31:48And Benderwala became much bigger than the Congress party, could not control him.
31:55In Gurnanak Nivas, he will hold court on his open terrace.
31:59So he will sit there with hundreds of his followers.
32:01And anything he will say, there will be Jakara after that.
32:06Because he had a fan following.
32:10So there was a time when Raghu Rai and I were traveling and Raghu was sitting on the parapet.
32:14His people, they stopped the bus.
32:18They took out the Hindu men and shot him.
32:21I said, Bhaji, you tell me that this is something that you guys go and shoot the bus and shoot the bus.
32:30He said, let's see, we have shot you from here, and your father will be looking at it.
32:36In Sikhism, there is the unique concept of spiritual and political power residing in the faith,
32:47with the Akaal Takat.
32:49And then he came and sat in Akaal Takat.
32:52So symbolism wasn't lost on anybody.
32:56That was an unsustainable situation from Delhi's point of view.
33:01She miscalculated what happened.
33:03To control that, Mrs. Gandhi had to use this power.
33:08During Operation Blue Star, the army and the police came to all hotels where journalists were staying.
33:14And they asked them to leave Punjab.
33:16I stayed back of course.
33:17I think the army underestimated the kind of fight that Velarawale's people will put up.
33:25And the first night, the army suffered many casualties.
33:28That's when a very heavy military hand was used.
33:32It was in that process that he got killed.
33:37The insurgency was finally and brutally stamped out.
33:43And hundreds were killed.
33:51But you know, the after effects of that were terrible.
33:57Among the Sikh community, nobody was willing to forgive Mrs. Gandhi for what had happened.
34:02I don't think we could have done anything else.
34:06We wanted to give the maximum time to those inside to whom we were pointing out that there was
34:15that we had clear information about the accumulation of arms, about giving shelter to criminals and murderers and so on.
34:23We were hoping that they themselves would act and not allow these people to use such a sacred and holy place as a shelter.
34:33I had gone to Melbourne in Australia to see a new computer system which I wanted to buy for the magazine.
34:43I landed there in the morning.
34:44They came a flash and Mrs. Gandhi has been assassinated.
34:47It happened so suddenly and her blood-soaked body was brought to the All India Medical Institute.
35:08I think people thought that somehow they could save her because the truth was she died instantly.
35:17It was the first time I think India was coming face to face with terror of that kind,
35:30which could reach the highest, the highest in the land.
35:34That decade really is all about Indira and all about her power, her decline, her fall, her rise again.
35:42And of course it's captured in Raghu's poignant cover photograph and the headline,
35:53the passing of Inira.
35:57From this moment, India's course was forever altered.
36:01The coming decade would be one of a million mutinies.
36:10And I think the idea ofsealing and digital practice,
36:12which I would never have moved of aea,
36:13and it would be
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