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| In today's BBC online news, a news feature appears with the title:
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| '''Indira Gandhi's death remembered'''
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| Divided in three sections - Profile/Memories of a Massacre/Photos
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| Below is an intro to the Memories of a Massacre section.
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| '''Nearly 3,000 members of India's Sikh community were massacred after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984. Rahul Bedi, one of the first journalists to reach the affected areas in the capital, Delhi, recalls events.
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| '''The 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's assassination revives stark memories of some 3,000 Sikhs killed brutally in the orderly pogrom that followed her killing.'''
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| '''The wave of ethnic cleansing which raged unhindered across the country, especially in Delhi, after Mrs Gandhi was shot dead ended only with her cremation on 2 November.'''
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| '''During these three days droves of Sikhs were determinedly hunted down by Hindu mobs from their homes, corralled and slaughtered like animals.'''
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| '''The trigger for Mrs Gandhi's killing was the storming of the Golden Temple in Sikhism's holy city Amritsar four months earlier to flush out Sikh militants fighting for an independent homeland of Khalistan or Land of the Pure.'''
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| Sikh shops and establishments were targeted and burnt
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| The heavily-armed militants - many of them former soldiers - had barricaded themselves inside the temple and were dislodged only after three days of bitter fighting. Some 1,000 people, including women and children pilgrims and about 157 soldiers, died.
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| Tanks too were employed to end the siege, leaving Sikhs highly aggrieved.
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| The eventual and possibly avoidable storming of the Golden Temple generated a wave of violence leading to Mrs Gandhi's assassination, the anti-Sikh riots and a vicious insurgency across Punjab that was eventually stamped out by the military around 1993, although not without widespread human rights abuses.
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| ==Delhi riots rocked the world==
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| But the 1984 Delhi riots rocked the world, more so for the state's direct involvement and public justification of the blood-letting.
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| ==Massacre dismissed in thoughtless - 'Earth shakes' comment==
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| Reacting to the continuing Sikh killings in Delhi and other places, newly appointed Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi declared at a massive rally in the capital that "once a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it shakes".
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| One of the worst massacres took place in two narrow alleys in the city's poor Trilokpuri colony where some 350 Sikhs, including women and children, were casually butchered over 72 hours.
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| Nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed in the massacres (Photo: Soutik Biswas)
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| The charred and hacked remains of the hundreds that perished in Trilokpuri's Block 32 on the smoky and dank evening of 2 November 1984 were stark testimony to the unimpeded and seemingly endless massacre.
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| More ... [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8306420.stm]
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