Death, disaster and redemption - England's tumultuous 1984-85 tour of India

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Peter Baxter had just got to much-needed sleep when he was startled awake.

It was still dark outside, but the phone next to Baxter's head in his Delhi hotel room was ringing, loudly and insistently.

Baxter had only arrived in the city a few hours earlier. As Test Match Special's producer, he was in India to cover the England men's team's tour of the country.

As he blearily lifted the receiver and listened to the voice on the other end though, it was the start of an assignment that would test him, and the team he was following, in ways they could never have foreseen.

The tour began on Halloween - 31 October 1984 - and continued until early February the following year.

In those three months, India would be convulsed by political assassinations, sectarian turmoil and an industrial disaster that rivalled Chernobyl in its loss of life and lasting ecological damage.

Yet, through the turmoil, the tour stayed on the road, taking in 16 venues, 12 first-class matches (including five Test matches) and six one-day internationals (ODIs) from Guwahati in the north-eastern Assam region of India, to Colombo in Sri Lanka, via all com points in between.

On several occasions, the tour looked certain to be cancelled only to be resurrected. By the end of it, a young, inexperienced England team under the captaincy of David Gower would do what no other England team had done before, and only one has managed since: come from behind to win a Test series in India.

England's form in advance of the tour was patchy, at best. They had been trounced 5-0 by the all-conquering West Indies in a home Test series and were sorely missing key players, such as Graham Gooch, Bob Woolmer and John Lever, who were still banned after defying a sporting ban and embarking on a rebel tour of apartheid South Africa in 1982.

While India could not match the depth of the West Indies at that time, they were a very hard side to beat in their own conditions. Three years previously, a first-choice England had suffered a 1-0 series defeat in a six-Test tour. The now-banned Gooch was their top scorer.

Ian Botham was not banned. However England's greatest all-round cricketer had opted out of the tour of India.

The previous winter in New Zealand, tabloid editors had deployed news reporters to track Botham in the very reasonable hope of uncovering salacious stories that might dominate the front, rather than back, pages. Botham was a superstar and stories about him, especially scurrilous ones, sold papers. Botham decided to take a break from cricket rather than endure similar in India.

Without him and the rebel tourists, England were forced to select a hotch-potch of young, largely untried players (Richard Ellison, Chris Cowdrey, Neil Foster, Tim Robinson, Norman Cowans and Vic Marks) alongside a pair of experienced, if eccentric spinners (Pat Pocock and Phil Edmonds), a couple of familiar faces (Graeme Fowler, Allan Lamb) and a leadership group that consisted of languid, laid-back captain Gower and his hitherto underperforming vice Mike Gatting.

It was a squad that arrived in India with a little hope, but no expectation.

The team, fresh off the plane, was soundly asleep when news began to spread that Indira Gandhi - India's Prime Minister, the daughter of the country's first post-colonial leader and the dominant figure in Indian politics for nearly twenty years - had been shot by her Sikh bodyguards.

As the players slept, Baxter awoke.

"As soon as I shut my eyes the phone was ringing," he says in Test Match Special's three-part podcast on the tour.

"It was the BBC newsroom in London, saying 'it's about this Gandhi business' and I said 'what Gandhi business">