A FIRE of sandalwood consumed the mortal remains of Indira Gandhi beside the holy Jamuna River outside Delhi at sunset yesterday.

Mourners wept as the first trickle of smoke rose into the sky. Elsewhere the communal violence, which has claimed at least 1,000 lives across India in the past three days, continued. In Delhi police opened fire to suppress disorder.

The funeral procession started from Nehru’s house where Gandhi’s body had lain in state. Resting on a bed of flowers atop a gun carriage, the body was drawn by soldiers, sailors and airmen to the sound of Handel’s Dead March and the throb of muffled drums.

Moving down the sweep of Rajpath - Kingsway – to the towering India Gate war memorial, the procession was at first watched by sparse crowds, but as the cortege approached the cremation site, where leaders of 94 nations waited, the crowds grew into a grieving throng.

The 15ft high funeral platform had been set near the places where Indira’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and her son Sanjay, killed in a 1980 plane crash, had also been cremated.

The body, wrapped in a deep-red sari and covered with flowers, was placed on the funeral pyre by Rajiv Gandhi, her elder son and India’s prime minister. Then, in a gesture of reconciliation, Rajiv called his estranged sister-in-law, Maneka, from the crowd to join the ceremony. In keeping with India’s religious pluralism, which seeks to dispel communal animosities, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Hindus and Muslims said prayers to the crowd.

A Hindu priest sprinkled the body with water and a Sikh priest said, “May the soul of this great person rest in peace.” Rajiv walked around the body seven times with a flaming torch before igniting a fireball of oil-soaked wood in the mouth of the corpse.

As flames licked the pyre, buckets of ghee, a clarified butter, were poured on to speed the burning. Rajiv handed his son Rahul, 14, a piece of wood to put on the fire. Rajiv’s final act was to push the burning body with a long stick – a symbolic gesture of farewell. He stood, silent, staring into the flames.

Afterwards, Rajiv toured the scenes of violence in Delhi and gave orders for a crackdown. Narasimha Rao, the home affairs minister, said, “Security personnel have been told to shoot rioters on sight. If they don’t take prompt action, they will be severely punished.”

World leaders, including Margaret Thatcher, Yasuhiro Nakasone, the Japanese prime minister, George Shultz, the US secretary of state, and Nikolai Tikhonov, the Soviet prime minister, as well as Mother Teresa and Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organisation leader, watched the ritual.

Thatcher said it was hard to find words to describe how deeply impressive the funeral had been. Dressed in black, she sat between Princess Anne and her husband Denis during the hour-long ceremony.

Police, who estimated the crowd at the funeral site at 1.5m, said fear had kept many people away.

Before the funeral began tanks, armoured personnel carriers and 10,000 troops poured into Delhi. Commandos were said to be guarding Rajiv’s residence.

All railway services were stopped. An official said more than 67 bodies had been found on trains and a newspaper reported that every train entering Delhi yesterday carried dead bodies.

The horror stories seem to have no end. Three employees of the state-owned All India Radio were lynched by mobs in east Delhi. Doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences said at least 400 bodies were in their morgue.

Some hospitals said they had had to turn wounded people away because of shortages of food and space. An angry crowd of Hindus outside the Ram Monahar Lohia hospital was held back by guards. A doctor said: “The mobs are hungry for revenge, although the hospital’s floors are covered with blood.”

Most Hindu victims have been stabbed or slashed with Sikh ceremonial swords, while most of the Sikh victims have been beaten or burnt.

In a suburb of Delhi, Sikhs have formed an armed self-protection unit. When Hindus entered the area, a retired Sikh army captain opened fire with a sub-machinegun. He sprayed 60 bullets into the crowd, killing 20 people.

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