India pays tributes to country's 1st woman PM Indira Gandhi

India Monday paid rich tributes to the country's first woman prime minister Indira Gandhi on her 32nd death anniversary.

Indian President Pranab Mukherjee, Vice President Hamid Ansari, main opposition Congress party's chief Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul paid floral tributes to Indira Gandhi at the former PM's memorial in Delhi, in presence of senior party leaders and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Earlier this morning, Nehru-Gandhi scion Rahul Gandhi had led a rally from the Congress party's headquarters in Delhi to the former prime minister's house where he was assassinated by her bodyguards on October 31, 1984.

However, no minister from the central government was present during the occasion, a senior Congress leader told the media.

Indira Gandhi was the only child of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. She served as prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984, making her the second-longest-serving prime minister after her father.

She was assassinated in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards a few months after she had ordered the storming of the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs) in the northern Indian state of Punjab's city of Amritsar to counter the Punjab insurgency. Enditem