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With the director abandoning the assignment the same day and his successor looking “completely lost”, AIIMS was in a “gray area” on October 31, 1984 when a bullet pierced Indira Gandhi’s wheels, says Dr P Venugopal who went on to work on the then prime minister.
In his memoir ‘Heartfelt’, the veteran cardiologist gives a detailed account of those four hours during which doctors, surgeons and nursing staff at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi worked tirelessly to save Gandhi.
Venugopal, the then Chief Cardiac Surgeon, is also the man who performed India’s first heart transplant in August 1994.
The ‘bullets falling to the floor’ from her blood soaked sari, the futile attempt at a negative blood transfusion and the political conversations debating the swearing in of the next prime minister in the hallways of the hospital… 39 years later, it all comes to a vivid recall.
“She was shaken to see the slender figure on the bed; blood was oozing from her stomach and completely soaked in blood. The thin face was pale, as if all the blood had left the body, continuing to flow in spurts and gather around her,” the former AIIMS director wrote in his book, which was released. last week.
Gandhi was assassinated on the lawn of her home by two of her security guards. The attackers fired 33 bullets at her, 30 of which hit her. 23 passed through it while seven settled inside.
“I saw that they (doctors) were trying to transfuse the rare type O negative, which seemed to me a futile exercise because what was coming out of the shredded body,” says the 81-year-old, describing scenes that are “messy to say the least.”
“A sea of AIIMS people swarming around. I moved on to Dr. H. D. Tandon, who had relinquished his post as Director that day, and Dr. Sneh Bhargava, who was taking over. They seemed completely lost. It is clear that the gray area of who was Director that day is crippling. decision or procedure. Both of them turned to me, mutually seeking guidance,” he adds. As chief of cardiothoracic surgery, Venugopal says he was looked to by many for advice and he had to make a decision on the spot.
“…I ordered her to be taken to the OT so we could stop the torrential flow of blood… The urgency was so important that I didn’t even wait for the signed consent form and simply took the initiative.” His final plan of action: “to stop the bleeding by placing her on a bypass machine and stretching the descending aorta so that the blood no longer flows into the lead-riddled abdomen.” They operated on the patient for four hours and Venugopal recalls changing the OT scrubs three times as they kept getting wet with blood. Around 2pm, they tried to get her out of the bypass but were unable to revive her.
“A feeling of deep despair settled in my stomach, as I went out to inform her people… Rajiv Gandhi, who was touring the eastern part of the country, was on his way back, and the consensus was to await his arrival,” he recalled.
Venugopal, who is credited with over 50,000 heart surgeries, maintains to this day that if the former PM had been “covered or dragged for cover, she would have survived the first two bullets”.
“What appeared to be that she fell from the first bullet, and the people who were accompanying her fled, leaving her alone on the ground. This provoked the killer to come up and emptied several rounds from his machine gun on her at close range.”
With his in-ring view of one of the most important political developments of the time, Venugopal was a “dumb” and “unwilling” bystander to the crowds for power that began to take place soon after the death of Indira Gandhi.
Of the footage of the conversations he took while in the nurses’ room—which became the center of “debate, debate, and heated appeals” over the next few hours—”the main concern was whether the President (Gyani Zail Singh) would be ready to swear in Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister.”
Therefore, the debate, with the participation of Gandhi’s close aide Arun Nehru, was whether the Vice President (R Venkataraman), who was in charge of the President going abroad, could be afforded to do the homage.
“Another department felt that it would be inappropriate. It went back and forth that way. The general feeling was that the President might call up the most senior member of the Cabinet and throw a spanner in the works!”
Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as the seventh Prime Minister of India on the same day. At the age of 41, he was the youngest Prime Minister of India.
After the assassination of Indira Gandhi, violence broke out in Delhi and other parts of the country, leading to mob attacks on Sikhs and their property. More than 3,000 Sikhs were murdered across India, most of them in Delhi. Heart: A Pioneering Journey of a Cardiac Surgeon, published by HarperCollins India and written by the physician with his wife Priya Sarkar, is a rare account of the surgeon’s personal and professional milestones and controversies during his four-decade tenure. Publishers.
(This story was not edited by the News18 staff and was published from a syndicated news agency feed – PTI)
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