NEW DELHI -- Across the street from the house where Mohandas K. Gandhi was shot and killed 60 years ago Wednesday stands India's National Defense College, an institution that certainly would have troubled the icon of nonviolence.

Wednesday's commemorations of his death were modest. In Mumbai, the country's financial and entertainment center, his great-granddaughter scattered some of his ashes in the Arabian Sea after a procession through city streets that attracted about 300 people.

And in New Delhi, President Pratibha Patil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laid wreaths at a memorial on the grounds of the house where he was shot.