New Delhi — “‘I did not bother to know whether he was alive or dead,” Mrs. Bimla Kaur Khalsa, widow of Beant Singh, the slain assassin of Indira Gandhi, had said when she came to know that her husband was involved in the assassination on October 31.
She said in a statement to the police on January 16 that her husband never told her that he wanted to kill Indira Gandhi. But she said, in the last week of July, 1984 Beant had told her that he wanted to be a “martyr.”
“When I asked him what will happen to the children, he replied you will bring them up or wahe guru palega,’’ she said. Mrs. Bimla said Beant had also told her that during operation Blue Star in the Golden Temple many innocent people including women and children had been killed. Mrs. Bimla, a nurse in a hospital, said that on the fateful day when she was on duty around 12:10 p.m., she came to know that Indira Gandhi had been shot at, ‘‘When the police came to take me, I got suspicious that my husband had also been injured.”
She said in a statement in Hindi that Beant went through “Amrit Chakhna”’ ceremony on October 14 at a Gurdwara in R.K. Puram here at the instance of Keher Singh, his relative and an accused in the case. A day earlier for the first time Beant told her that he was undergoing the ceremony.
She said that ‘‘When I asked about the reason, he said he was giving up drinking.”
Mrs. Bimla said that she also went through the same ceremony at Gurdwara Sis Ganj on October 17.
Article extracted from this publication >> March 15, 1985
