India Wednesday paid tributes to this country's first woman Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on her 97th birth anniversary.
Indian President Pranab Mukherjee, Vice President Hamid Ansari and top leaders of the main opposition Congress party, including Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi, paid homage to Indira Gandhi at her memorial Shakti Sthal on the banks of river Yamuna in the national capital.
Though no one from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance was present on the occasion, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, currently on a visit to Fiji, tweeted that "I join my fellow countrymen and women in remembering our former PM Smt. Indira Gandhi on her birth anniversary."
Indira Gandhi was born on Nov. 19, 1917, and assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards on Oct. 31, 1984, for ordering military operation to flush out militants holed up at the community's holiest shrine, the Golden Temple, in the northern state of Punjab 's Amritsar town.