GANDHI'S SLAYING IGNITES TURMOIL MILITARY PLACED ON 'RED ALERT'
India's military and paramilitary forces were put on "red alert" as gangs took to the streets of New Delhi and other cities, looking for scapegoats.; India's chief election commissioner, T.N. Seshan, early this morning postponed the remaining two phases of the national parliamentary elections until next month. He acted after consulting the president and the acting prime minister.; The first phase of the elections took place Monday, but voting for the remaining 60 percent of the 537 seats at stake will be June 12 and 15 instead of Thursday and Sunday.;    Eyewitnesses at the assassination scene said Gandhi's body was ripped apart and decapitated by the force of the explosion. At least 14 other people, including a senior police officer, died in the blast.;    Officials in New Delhi said the blast was caused by either a time bomb or remote-control device. A Congress Party spokesman said the bomb was hidden in a bouquet of flowers offered to Gandhi as he approached the dais for his speech.;    It is not clear whether the bomb was thrown at Gandhi or whether he was handed flowers that contained explosives. He had been receiving bouquets and garlands all evening.;    Gandhi recently had been shrugging off security guards.;    There was no immediate indication who was responsible for the bomb, but speculation centered on Tamil separatists seeking an independent state in nearby Sri Lanka.;    President Bush and other world leaders expressed horror and sadness at the slaying. "When you look at his contribution to international order and you think of his decency, it's a tragedy," Bush said in Washington.;    End of dynasty;  Gandhi's death marks the likely end of the political dynasty that has dominated Indian politics since independence in 1947. Analysts here said there is no obvious successor to him as leader of the Congress Party, which was founded by his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, and later dominated by his mother, Indira Gandhi, who was prime minister when she was assassinated in 1984.;    This morning, Gandhi's body was flown to a stunned New Delhi.; His widow, Sonia, sobbed and hugged the couple's daughter Priyanka as the women stepped down from the air force Boeing 737 that had flown them to Madras to bring Gandhi's body home.;    Even before Gandhi's death, more than 150 people had died this week in violence connected to the election.;    After the assassination, violent mobs rampaged along roads leading to Madras on Tuesday night, smashing vehicles and other property, according to Indian news agencies.;    Government officials in New Delhi ordered all government offices, schools and colleges shut amid widespread fears that the assassination would touch off a wave of violence in a country that has endured a spate of riots during the past year, mainly over religious and caste conflicts.;    Outside Gandhi's house in New Delhi on Tuesday night, hundreds of angry Congress Party workers chanted slogans against the CIA, accusing the U.S. intelligence agency of engineering the assassination. The CIA is often blamed by India's conspiracy-minded political activists for a wide variety of the country's ills.;    Home ransacked;  Some demonstrators in New Delhi set fire to the home of a political rival and attacked foreign camera operators. People broke into the house of Gandhi's neighbor, former Labor Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, and set furniture ablaze, police said.;    Police fired shots in the air to drive away the angry, shouting crowd. There were no injuries.; Paswan, a member of the Janata Dal party, which defeated Gandhi's Congress Party in the 1989 general elections, was not home at the time.;    Some shocked Indian political leaders told reporters they feared Rajiv Gandhi's assassination augured the death of India's four-decades-old democracy. But others, including leaders of the main rival to the Congress Party in this election, the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party, denounced the killing and urged the country to remain calm in its aftermath.;    "It's a tremendous loss to democracy," senior Congress leader Vasant Sathe told reporters. "The loss can never be made up." J.B. Patnaik, a powerful Congress politician in the eastern state of Orissa, said: "I don't know what is going to happen now, how democracy will survive.";    At the site of the bomb blast in Tamil Nadu, there was no immediate evidence as to who was responsible.;    Gandhi and his Congress Party have many enemies on the subcontinent, including violent separatists in Kashmir and Punjab, leftist revolutionaries and rightist Hindu militants.;    Guerrillas suspected;  Most of the early speculation, however, focused on Gandhi's most hardened opponents in Tamil Nadu, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a disciplined and violent guerrilla force that has used Tamil Nadu as a base in its campaign to win a separate state in Sri Lanka, the island nation just off India's southeastern coast. The Tamil Tigers have assassinated dozens of political enemies in Sri Lanka and southern India, often using powerful plastic explosives set off by remote control.;    Earlier this year, the state government of Tamil Nadu was dismissed and central rule imposed after allegations that local politicians were providing aid and protection to the Tamil Tigers. Gandhi, whose Congress Party provided the main backing to the New Delhi government at the time, was widely seen as being behind the dismissal, which angered the Tamil Tigers and their supporters in southern India.;    During the current election, the Congress Party faced a brisk challenge from a leftist coalition led by former Prime Minister V.P. Singh, who denounced what he called Congress's "culture of corruption" and advocated divisive job set-asides for India's lower castes and religious minorities.;    An even tougher test for the Congress -- and the centrist ideology that has held India together for four decades -- has been mounted by Hindu ultranationalists from the Bharatiya Janata Party, who denounced Gandhi for allegedly pandering to India's Muslim minority and directing too many government resources to religious and caste minorities in an effort to win votes.;  Election in India: turmoil and tragedy;    The Congress Party, which has dominated Indian politics since independence in 1947, is being challenged by a center-left coalition that wants to break down the caste system and a right-wing party that seeks a more openly Hindu, less secular India.; ...; Caste system;    Hierarchical ranking of social groups rooted in Hindu religious beliefs that people are born with different intellectual and spiritual qualities and capabilities. Caste membership is a birth-given condition that remains unchangeable during a lifetime.
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