NEW DELHI, 18 April 2004 — South Indian movie star Soundarya, campaigning in upcoming elections, was among four people killed yesterday when their plane crashed after takeoff near the southern city of Bangalore, police said.

Soundarya, 32, a leading light in Telugu-language cinema who had starred in more than 85 films, was traveling to the adjoining state of Andhra Pradesh on a campaign stop when the aircraft crashed, a police spokesman said.

The four were Soundarya, her brother Amarnath, pilot Joy Philips and one Ramesh Sadan, police sources said.

The privately owned four-seater Cessna caught fire minutes after takeoff from Jakkur airstrip on the outskirts of Bangalore, the spokesman said. The bodies were charred beyond recognition. Blackened debris and twisted metal was strewn across the ground. Investigations were under way to determine what started the fire.

Soundarya, who used only one name, had acted in a Bollywood film with India’s best-known actor Amitabh Bachchan and with south Indian star Rajnikant.

She had recently joined Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is trying to obtain another term in office in national elections that start Tuesday.

“It is particularly sad for all of us in the BJP that she met an untimely death while on a campaign journey for the party,” Vajpayee said in a condolence message.

Capt. Arvind Sharma, who owns the Agni company in Bangalore which rented out the aircraft, identified it as a four-seater plane. Police had earlier said it was a helicopter.

He said the plane could have been hit by a sudden gust of wind or a bird.

“A third possibility is that the pilot suddenly tilted toward one side to avoid small highway restaurants built close to the airstrip and suddenly lost control,” Sharma told reporters.

The actress lived in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, where the BJP is believed to be in a particularly tight race which coincides with elections for the state assembly. The BJP and other parties have been roping in cinema stars in hopes that glitzy celebrities will win votes in India, which produces more films than any other country.

The daughter of Bangalore-based director Satyanarayana, Soundarya had starred in films in Telugu and three other south Indian languages: Malayalam, Tamil and her mother tongue Kannada.

Since her first film, “Gandharva,” in 1992, she earned a reputation as a puritan of the silver screen, avoiding racy roles and never revealing more than a bare minimum of skin even as she starred opposite leading male heroes. “It is shocking news for us, for the whole industry in fact. She was one of the best female actresses we have had,” Mohan Lal, a leading Malayalam film actor who had costarred with Soundarya, told the Star News channel. Senior BJP leaders including Law and Commerce Minister Arun Jaitley were heading to the site of the crash, news reports said.