NEW DELHI, India -- Slain Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's will was made public Thursday and showed that she left her entire estate - valued at about $175,000 -- to her three grandchildren.
Gandhi appointed her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, and his Italian wife, Sonia, as executors of the will but did not bequeath them anything. She also did not leave anything to her estranged daughter-in-law, Menaka.
The will was dated May 4, 1981, almost 3 years before she was gunned down by two of her Sikh bodyguards last Oct. 31. Her assailants said they killed her to avenge the army storming of the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion.
In her will, Gandhi wrote that her family, which has ruled India for all but a few years since independence in 1947, was once wealthy but had lost many of its assets.
The relatively small size of her estate, she wrote, was a 'commentary on our family's public life that after 30-odd years of proximity or actually in government, our assets, far from increasing, have depleted.'
A copy of the will published Thursday showed the bulk of her estate was a small farm and a farmhouse under construction -- worth $98,000 -- to be equally divided among her three grandchildren.
Rajiv has two children, Rahul and Priyanka, and Gandhi's late son, Sanjay, had one son, Varun.
Gandhi's personal jewelry, worth $2,500, was left to Priyanka, her only granddaughter.
Also left to the three grandchidren were cash, stocks and bonds amounting to about $75,000, as well as the copyrights to books written by Gandhi and her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister.
No foreign accounts or overseas properties were listed in the will, which was published after Rajiv petitioned the court to certify the document. Rajivbecame prime minister moments after his mother's death and was elected in his own right last December,
The will provided that her share of the estate left by Sanjay, who died in a 1980 aerobatic plane accident, be given to his child under a trust arrangement.
The will, apparently the only one Gandhi ever made, was written before the bitter estrangement with Sanjay's wife, Menaka, in 1982. Menaka left the Gandhi household to form her own political party in opposition to her mother-in-law.
Under a finance bill that took effect April 1, all death duties in India have been abolished and no inheritance tax will be assessed on the Gandhi estate.
