It’s
10.20 pm on 21st May, 1991. The place is the town of Sriperumbudur,
in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. A crowd is waiting at an election
rally, which will be addressed by a prominent politician.
He’s not just any politician. The latest of
India’s most prominent political dynasty, he’s been the country’s prime
minister in the past, and now that he’s managed to pull down the government in
Delhi, elections are due again; elections which he’s virtually certain to win.
Among the people waiting to see him are a
few who do not, at the time, evoke anyone’s particular interest. One of them is
a one-eyed man in white clothes; another is a plump-looking, bucktoothed young
woman in an orange salwar-kameez, with flowers in her hair and holding a sandalwood garland in her hands. Like many others, she seems to be waiting to garland the
politician when he walks past her to the dais where he’s supposed to address
the gathering.
The politician arrives, and begins walking
through the crowd, acknowledging its greetings and being garlanded by several
people. The woman in orange pushes forward, as well, and slips the garland
she’s carrying round the politician’s neck. She then bends to touch his feet in
a gesture of respect.
It is not a gesture of respect. The woman
is not one of the devoted throng of the politician’s supporters. She’s not even
Indian; she’s a Tamil from Sri Lanka. Her name is Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, though
she goes by Dhanu, and she is a member of a fanatical terrorist organisation
fighting for an independent Tamil nation in Sri Lanka.
Mission accomplished.
*********************************
I’ve been
watching a film which has been in the news much lately in India, Madras Cafe. It’s a highly
fictionalised, as well as conspiracy-theorised., version of the assassination
of the former Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, by the Sri Lankan Tamil
terrorist outfit, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, in May of 1991.
This article isn’t meant to be a review of
the film, which I’ll mention en passant,
and about which I’ll only say for now that it’s good by Bollywood standards.
That means that it’s not necessarily anywhere in the neighbourhood of good by the standards of the average
European or Iranian film, but does better than the typical Bollywood (or
Hollywood for that matter) trash; faint praise, but better than none at all. Instead, in the
course of this article, I’ll discuss the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi: one of
the most important events in recent Indian, and Sri Lankan history.
Who was Rajiv Gandhi? Grandson to India’s
first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, he was an accidental inheritor of the
Gandhi dynasty crown. His mother, Indira Gandhi, had been grooming her younger
son Sanjay as the heir apparent; but Sanjay Gandhi, always more of a street
thug than a politician, was killed stunt-flying over Delhi. It was then the
turn of elder son Rajiv, then a commercial pilot, to enter politics to “help
mummy” as he said.
 |
| Rajiv Gandhi |
On 31st October 1984, Indira
Gandhi – who had first deliberately stoked Sikh separatism in Indian Punjab as
a tool against the then provincial government, and then belatedly tried to
fight it by sending the army to storm Sikhism’s most important shrine, the
Golden Temple – was killed by her own Sikh bodyguards. Her Congress Party, then
not as abjectly a private property of the dynasty as it is now, could’ve broken
with the past and made someone else the prime minister; instead, it chose Rajiv
Gandhi, who was sworn in the same evening.
Right from the outset, it was obvious that
Gandhi wouldn’t exactly be a strong prime minister. Even as the country
dissolved into massive anti-Sikh rioting, with Congress ministers openly
leading mobs intent on murdering any Sikh they saw, his only reaction was this
comment: “When a big tree falls, the ground will shake.” Only days later, when
the army came on the streets, was order finally restored. And then Gandhi went
on to win the next elections by a landslide on the “sympathy vote” – an
election his mother was almost certain to lose.
Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, a civil war was
brewing. This isn’t the space to go into a detailed examination of the cause of
that war, but it involved an effort by Tamil militant groups to detach the
northern and eastern provinces of the island to create a separate nation,
Eelam.
In 1983, a Sri Lankan Army patrol was
ambushed by Tamil militants belonging to the LTTE, killing thirteen out of
fifteen soldiers. Chauvinist Sinhalese outfits made this into a casus belli to
launch a pogrom against Tamils in Colombo, leaving many dead over several days
of rioting. As a result, many thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils fled abroad. The
rich and well-connected migrated to the West. The poor and helpless took to
boats and made their way across the narrow straits separating India and Sri
Lanka, to the doubtful security of refugee camps in the Tamil-majority Indian
state of Tamil Nadu. Along with the refugees came fighters of the five main
Tamil rebel groups. These weren’t new to India, having been active in Tamil
Nadu since the seventies, and had occasionally fought internecine battles. But
it was only in 1983 that the Indian government finally began training and arming the rebel groups to take on the Sri Lankan army.
Why did India do this? There are several
reasons. First, and not the least important, is the compulsive Indian desire to
meddle in what it considers its backyard. This meddling has often recoiled
spectacularly, such as when it trained and armed Khampa rebels in Tibet, only
for China to retaliate by backing the far more damaging Naga and Mizo
insurgents in North East India; but it never actually seems to have taught
anyone a lesson. By “anyone” here I mean, primarily, the external spy agency,
the extremely incompetent Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). As an author I read
recently (S Murari, The Prabhakaran Saga:
The Rise And Fall Of An Eelam Warrior) said, RAW “had its own weird logic which
was not for lesser mortals like us to fathom.”
The second reason has everything to do with
internal Indian politics. Now, the state of Tamil Nadu is one of India’s more
influential provinces. Most of its people are Tamils, and they number more than three times the entire population
of Sri Lanka. Obviously, there was a certain amount of anger over the
plight of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees and the condition of the Tamils still
living in the island. The Indian government had to be seen to be doing something. In 1971, it had trained and
armed Bengali Mukti Bahini guerrillas against Pakistan, and that little effort
had ended in the secession of the eastern part of the nation as Bangladesh.
That was still fairly fresh in public memory in 1983, and the same prime
minister, Indira Gandhi, was still in office; although India, to this day, has
never officially admitted helping the Tamil rebels, it was common knowledge in
Tamil Nadu and took some of the heat off the government.
 |
| LTTE militants (see below) in training in Sirumalai, India. Velupillai Pirabhakaran is third from left and Pottu Amman far right |
A third reason was that India fantasised
that training and arming the rebel groups to take on the Sri Lankan army would force
the government in Colombo to reach an agreement with moderate Tamil political
parties. Of course it didn’t work out like that. What actually happened was
that the armed rebel groups swiftly sidelined the moderates and turned the
“struggle for self-determination” into a wholly armed one.
At this point one thing should be clearly
understood: at no point was there the slightest chance that India would stand
by and allow Sri Lanka to be broken up. The absolute last thing India wanted
was to set up an independent Tamil state neighbouring India, a state which
would at once rouse secessionist tendencies in Tamil Nadu itself. The LTTE
understood this at a very early stage; the others did not.
Inevitably, as time passed, the Tamil
groups also began jockeying among themselves for arms, training, funding and
influence. The LTTE, by far the most ruthless of them all, swiftly destroyed
the rest, starting with the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation, which had
received the maximum Indian largesse. In the course of a week in April to May
1986, the LTTE wiped out TELO, murdering hundreds of its men including those
who surrendered. India did nothing to rein in the rogue rebel group, which then
went on to neutralise two of the three remaining other groups, the EPRLF and
PLOTE, forced the final one, EROS, into an alliance and ultimately absorbed it.
By 1987, the LTTE was effectively the only Tamil rebel outfit still in the
field.
The history of the Sri Lankan civil war,
from 1986 onwards, is inextricable from that of the LTTE; and of the LTTE, from
that of its leader, Velupillai Pirabhakaran (the name is also transcribed as
Prabhakaran or Pirapaharan). There’s not enough space in this article for a
proper discussion of this man; in fact, entire books have been written about
him. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll just say that he was the LTTE – its political and
military leader, top ideologue, and charismatic, megalomaniacal dictator all
rolled into one.
 |
| Velupillai Pirabhakaran, later self-styled Sun God and President cum Prime Minister of Tamil Eelam |
Pirabahkaran tolerated no dissent; as time went on, he also
developed a strong vengeful streak which led him to exact retribution on anyone
even thought to be in opposition to
him. As long as this hatred was directed at the Sri Lankan army, India didn’t
care. Nor did it react as it should have when Pirabhakaran began murdering
Tamils opposing him. All this only emboldened the LTTE leader, who decided that
he was the arbiter of Tamil destiny.
When 1987 came around, Rajiv Gandhi was the
Indian prime minister, and had continued his mother’s policy of arming and
training the LTTE. Not that India ever admitted it, though; I remember a press
conference where a foreign reporter (a white woman) asked Rajiv Gandhi about
the training camps. Gandhi replied in these words: “You’re welcome to visit
Tamil Nadu,” (looking around) “...any of you, and if you find any training camps
I’ll have them closed down.” Of course, he didn't deny there were camps, so technically
Gandhi wasn’t lying.
In early 1987, the Sri Lankan army struck
back hard against the LTTE, which at the time controlled the city of Jaffna at
the northern tip of Sri Lanka. It was soon besieging Jaffna, prompting fresh
demands in Tamil Nadu for Indian military intervention. In an exercise (known as Operation Poomalai, Garland) reeking
of both bullying and tokenism, Rajiv Gandhi sent four Indian Air Force Antonov
32 transports escorted by Mirage 2000 fighters to drop 25 tonnes of “relief
materials” over Jaffna. All this was right on live TV so everybody knew how
concerned Gandhi was about the Sri Lankan Tamils, of course. How much of it
ever actually reached the civilians it was allegedly meant for, and what use 25
tonnes would be to a city full of people, is a question that most people didn’t
bother asking.
At that time, as I recall, most people
imagined that India was on the verge of invading Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankans
also thought so; I remember one of their ministers saying something like this:
“If India attacks, we will fight, and perhaps lose...but with dignity.”
It was Sri Lanka’s good fortune that at the
time its president was Junius Richard Jayawardene, one of the wiliest politicians South
Asia has ever produced.
 |
| Sri Lankan President Jayawardene |
Instead of looming disaster, Jayawardene saw an
opportunity to turn the tables. He signed an agreement with India, the details
of which aren’t germane to this article; but the main points were that the Sri
Lankan military would stop operations, an Indian army contingent would take
over the Tamil areas, disarm the militias and oversee a political settlement,
which would preserve the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka. Overnight, India
went from being an observer to being in the middle of the mess.
For a mess it was. The Indian military
contingent, known as the Indian Peace Keeping Force, was welcomed by the Tamil
civilians with open arms at first; but by the rebel groups, which by that time
meant the LTTE? Not so much. They felt they’d been stabbed in the back, because
the agreement had been signed by Colombo and Delhi, and their own leaders had
been virtually shanghaied into signing on afterwards. Pirabhakaran and his LTTE
saw that the agreement meant that Eelam would be permanently abandoned, and
that they would also completely lose the power which had accrued to them over the
years of fighting.
So, of course, they decided to torpedo the
agreement. Pirabhakaran admitted as much in private conversations, as described
by MR Narayan Swamy – he’d sabotage the agreement in such a way, he said, that
it could never be brought home to him. Indian journalist Anita Pratap – who
interviewed Pirabhakaran several times – also says, in her somewhat highly-coloured account of the Sri Lankan conflict (Island of Blood) that the LTTE chief had always known that he would
have to fight the Indians some day.
Therefore, to everyone but Rajiv Gandhi’s
government, it was obvious that the agreement would never work. This was
something, of course, that Jayawardene had seen coming and counted on. It was
easy enough to remove his troops from the Eelam campaign; they were now needed
to crush a Sinhalese Marxist insurgency in the country’s south. Instead, since
the IPKF was now in charge of overseeing the settlement in the Tamil areas,
whatever the rebels did, it was now India’s business to handle.
Within a remarkably short time, then, the
IPKF was at war with the LTTE. And it was a war that the Indian troops had
absolutely no idea how to fight. The LTTE, which still had the support of the
local Tamils, fought a vicious guerrilla campaign in the towns and jungles of
northern and eastern Sri Lanka, forcing the IPKF to retaliate with artillery,
armour, and helicopter gunships. Wounded LTTE fighters sneaked back into Tamil
Nadu, where helpful Indian Tamil politicians helped them rest and recover
before returning to resume fighting the Indian army.
 |
| LTTE troops |
As losses mounted, as I recall,
the Indian media stopped reporting exactly how many IPKF soldiers had died in
Sri Lanka. At first, they’d give the daily toll and say “until now, ___ Indian
soldiers have been killed.” After the toll reached somewhere in the vicinity of
1400, they stopped giving totals; and later on they stopped mentioning
the daily toll at all. To this day there’s been no official figure of Indian
casualties; the estimates range from “almost 1200” (The Tiger Vanquished: LTTE’s Story by MR Narayan Swamy) to 5000 (Time Magazine story at the time of the
IPKF’s withdrawal in 1990). My own rough estimate, going by the media reports
at the time, would put it at something in the neighbourhood of 3000.
At around the same time, Junius Jayawardene
was replaced as President of Sri Lanka by Ranasinghe Premadasa. He wasn’t,
let’s say, knee-high to his predecessor as far as political acumen went. With
right wing Sri Lankan political parties, the Marxist rebels and racist Buddhist
monks all clamouring for Sri Lankan territory to be “freed” of the “hinsakari
bandurusenava” (invading army of monkeys, a reference to the Indian epic the Ramayana), he decided to start arming
the LTTE to take on the Indian army.
So this was the situation, circa 1988 – the
Indian Army is in Sri Lanka, fighting the LTTE, which it had once trained and
armed. The Sri Lankan army, which had been fighting the LTTE, is arming it to
fight the Indians. And Indian Tamil politicians are providing the LTTE backup
support to fight the Indian Army.
As I said, it was a mess.
Despite everything, the IPKF finally forced
the LTTE out of the cities and into the Sri Lankan jungles, and so
comprehensively destroyed its networks that it was almost paralysed as an
effective fighting force. According to S Murari (The Prabhakaran Saga; The Rise And Fall Of An Eelam Warrior), the
IPKF could have wiped out the LTTE if it had wanted; but evidently the orders
were that it should let it remain in existence, just in case it was required
again. By this time, the occupation had long since passed the point of
diminishing returns: the Sri Lankans, Tamils and Sinhalese, would have to
settle their differences politically, because India had done all it could.
By 1988, also, Rajiv Gandhi was in
political trouble. His government was beset by incompetents (he had imported
his old school chums and made them his ministers and advisors) and corruption
scandals (most especially one which involved the purchase of Bofors 155mm
artillery pieces for the army). After elections in 1989, his government was
replaced by a coalition of parties led by V P Singh, who had once been Gandhi’s
finance minister before being packed off to defence when he got too curious
about financial shenanigans. And when, in 1990, Premadasa’s government demanded
India withdraw its forces, the new government complied. The occupation had been
such an evident disaster that to this day Indian media don’t make the slightest
attempt to pretend that it was a victory.
Once the Indians withdrew, fighting soon
resumed between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan armed forces. Pirabhakaran swiftly
defeated India-aligned Tamil militias created out of the rubble of the other
rebel groups, and recaptured Jaffna, which the LTTE turned into their capital.
At the same time, they began a massive expansion of their activities abroad, buying
weapons and creating what would later turn into a merchant navy of cargo
vessels and a coastal “navy” of speedboats. This was the point at which the
LTTE changed from a guerrilla band into one capable of fighting conventional
wars and holding on to territory. In other words, it was much more powerful
than ever before, and this also meant that it had much, much more to lose.
It was around this time that the plan to
kill Rajiv Gandhi must have been laid.
At this distance in time, and with almost
all the chief participants in the affair “no longer with us”, it’s not possible
to say just why the decision was
taken. However, there are some indications which give a good idea.
By late 1990, VP Singh’s government was
crumbling. The middle classes were up in arms against an affirmative action
programme he’d implemented, his ramshackle coalition was falling apart, and it
was only a matter of time before there would be elections again – elections
which Gandhi was more than likely to win. And if he did, Pirabhakaran feared,
and as he said in an interview, he’d send the IPKF in again.
Actually, there was just about zero chance
that Gandhi would ever be able to send in the IPKF even if he’d wanted to. The
duplicity of Premadasa’s government was clear, as was the unwillingness of the
LTTE to accept any kind of political settlement. Besides, since the Sri Lankan
government would certainly not invite the IPKF back again, India would have to
fight its way in – first invade Sri Lanka, and then, after winning that war, restart the battle against the
LTTE. This is the kind of imperial quagmire the US is adept at getting itself
into, but there wasn’t any way India was going to get itself into it, thank you
very much.
Of course, this was so clear to any
rational person that he or she would’ve automatically discounted Gandhi’s
statement as grandstanding for the gallery before the election soon to come,
which it obviously was. But Pirabhakaran wasn’t a rational person. He was
driven by two passions – a relentless desire to obtain Eelam on the one hand,
and a consuming megalomania on the other. The latter had already led him to
murder anyone who crossed him in the slightest – and would be instrumental in
the final collapse and extinction of the LTTE twenty years later. Pirabhakaran
thought he, and he alone, knew what
was best for the Sri Lankan Tamils; what anyone else thought was immaterial. He
also hated Gandhi for the betrayal at the time of the signing of the 1987
agreement; and anyone who was hated by Pirabhakaran generally paid for it,
sooner or later.
Besides, there was the strategic
consideration. The LTTE had much more to lose in 1990 than it had had three
years earlier. It had risen much higher and had much further to fall. The last
thing Pirabhakaran wanted was to go back to a guerrilla war in the jungles. It
was an aversion that was to last the rest of his life; in 2008-9, when the LTTE
was crumbling before the onslaught of the Sri Lankan armed forces, he adamantly
refused to abandon a clearly lost conventional war in favour of a resumption of
guerrilla operations, thus sealing his own fate, that of his outfit, and of Tamil
Eelam in general.
So, these were, almost certainly, the driving considerations behind Pirabhakaran’s
decision: revenge for the past, and a clearly illogical fear of future actions
which were logically speaking impossible. I say almost certainly, because there are persistent conspiracy theories
that Gandhi was killed by the LTTE at someone else’s behest; these are also the
core idea of the film, Madras Cafe, I
mentioned earlier. It is, however, highly unlikely that this was so.
Pirabhakaran, for all his faults, was a proud man and kept an extremely tight
and disciplined grip on his organisation in those days. He had never allowed
criminal elements to enter the LTTE, unlike the TELO for example. He would
never have countenanced turning his militia into a mercenary murder-for-hire
Mafia outfit. Also, no evidence has ever been produced of any such
behind-the-scenes influence. The highest ranked surviving LTTE leader, Kumaran
Pathmanathan or KP, who succeeded Pirabhakaran as the outfit’s chief (and who
has been portrayed as one “Rajsekharan” in the film) has maintained that it was
Pirabhakaran’s decision, along with his much-hated intelligence chief, Pottu
Amman.
Still, one should be aware that there are
these alternative theories: that the LTTE committed the killing at the behest
of a controversial Hindu religious figure called Chandraswami, or with the help
of the CIA or Mossad, or to help Gandhi’s in-party rival and future Prime
Minister, PV Narasimha Rao. That not one of these theories has stood up to
scrutiny by two independent judicial commissions hasn’t managed to silence
them. But people still believe in the Roswell crash and the Loch Ness Monster,
so I don’t suppose they’ll stop believing just on some judge’s say-so.
There’s also the hypothesis, put forward by
LTTE apologists, that Pirabhakaran was not responsible for the assassination at
all. Either, according to this narrative, his deputies acted on their own
initiative, or else the LTTE wasn’t guilty of the killing; they were framed.
Neither of these ideas stands up to any
examination. In 1991, the LTTE was a united organisation, fiercely loyal to
Pirabhakaran and still over a decade away from the Great Split of 2004, which
was to lead to its eventual demise. No LTTE official, however powerful, could
have undertaken such a major operation without it coming to the attention of
Pirabhakaran or his intelligence chief, Pottu Amman. If they ignored such a
mission, the only reason could be that they approved of it.
As for the idea that the LTTE wasn’t
responsible: many years later, in 2002, when Pirabhakaran was “President and
Prime Minister” of the (short-lived and de
facto) state of Eelam, he addressed his only press conference ever. At this
conference, he and his spokesman, Anton Balasingham (a British Tamil of Sri
Lankan birth, married to an Australian) apologised for the killing, describing
it as a tragedy, and asked everyone to look at the future, not the past. You
don’t apologise for something you haven’t done. And, of course, there's KP's statement that Pirabhakaran and Amman organised the killing.
Yes, the LTTE did it, and Pirabhakaran was
in it up to his ears.
Once the decision was taken to murder
Gandhi, the next question was how to
do it. The LTTE had killed many of its opponents in the past. One popular
technique was to send a killer squad to the victim’s residence in the name of
“talks”, and murder him there. Another, later to be used for Sri Lankan anti-LTTE
Tamil minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, was the sniper; the man was shot from a
distance in the centre of a high-security zone in Colombo. But an LTTE murder
squad could hardly expect to be able to meet Gandhi without being frisked, and
sniping him in India was more easily said than done, especially after a Sikh
had tried and failed (with a homemade weapon, no less).
That left one other way: the suicide
bomber.
Although the LTTE did not invent the suicide bomber, it developed the concept to the
level of a potent military technique. It had had a suicide culture from the beginning; throughout its existence, members were
given cyanide capsules to kill themselves rather than be captured by the Sri
Lankan army, and most of them used the poison when they had to. However, its
first suicide bomber was a “Captain Miller”, who drove a truck bomb into a Sri
Lankan Army camp in July 1987 (just before the IPKF arrived), killing himself
and 40 soldiers. “Miller” became an icon to the LTTE, which started a suicide
attacker wing called the Black Tigers, fanatically devoted to Pirabhakaran and
which stood by him to the very last.
During and just after the IPKF period, the
Black Tigers stayed away from suicide attacks. But it was time to start them
again, and this time for good (the Black Tigers would continue both human bomb
and fidayeen style storming raids for
the rest of the LTTE’s existence).
Having decided on the method, it was left
to select the team to carry it out. Nine members were picked, of whom Dhanu was
the main bomber with another woman, Subha, as backup. I’ve read that Dhanu was
a volunteer who was raped by the Indian army and thus desired vengeance. This
may or may not be true. Either way, as a Black Tiger, she would have
unquestioningly obeyed Pirabhakaran’s orders. Her personal history would’ve
been irrelevant to her dedication to her mission. The leader of this team was an
LTTE intelligence wing operative (which meant he reported to Pottu Amman),
called Sivarasan, who’d lost an eye in an earlier bomb explosion. He was
familiar with Tamil Nadu and had helped to murder dissenting Sri Lankan Tamils
there in the past as well.
The team sneaked across the sea from Jaffna
and into Tamil Nadu, where they stayed at safehouses with Indian LTTE
sympathisers. [A detailed description of their movements can be found here, including how they recruited facilitators; I do not necessarily subscribe to the opinions expressed on the site, though.]
At this point it should be understood clearly that while a lot of people
did aid and abet the team, they would not
necessarily have known that it planned to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi. In fact,
it’s highly unlikely that they’d have known anything about it, for the simple
reason that the LTTE had a tremendous dedication to secrecy. People were only
given information on a strict need-to-know basis. This extended to somewhat
ridiculous lengths at times. MR Narayan Swamy quotes (The Tiger Vanquished: LTTE’s Story) a former LTTE woman fighter as
saying that when the outfit was to attack a position, even the actual troops
who would take part in the operation wouldn’t be told what they would be
attacking. They’d be briefed along these lines: “Suppose this building is to be
attacked, you must take up position in these spots”. Especially when such a
prominent target was to be hit, the secrecy level would of course be even
higher.
Once the team was in place, more
arrangements were necessary. Rajiv Gandhi had to be enticed to come to Tamil
Nadu, a place his security felt to be unsafe. Apparently, the LTTE let it be
known on two occasions that he wouldn’t be at risk if he came to the state to
campaign before the elections. And Subha was there as a backup, to try again in
Delhi or elsewhere in case Dhanu failed in her mission.
Yet another item needed to be arranged. One
of Pirabhakaran’s fetishes was the filming or photographing of operations,
which could be used as training films for future missions. On this occasion,
too, he had Sivarasan hire a freelance photographer called Haribabu. This
Haribabu (an Indian Tamil) had been previously suborned into believing in the
LTTE cause to the extent that he was completely indoctrinated, and
one of the kill squad members was staying with him. It was no problem for him to agree to
photograph the assassination for Pirabhakaran.
In this instance, though, as we shall see,
that was a monumental blunder.
The film Madras Cafe, incidentally, claims that the RAW had unravelled a
far-reaching foreign conspiracy to kill Gandhi, even pinning down the date and
time, and only missed saving him by the narrowest of margins. This is a piece
of fantasy. RAW did not even know that Gandhi would be in Sriperumbudur at the
time, let alone the hero, an RAW man, dashing towards him seconds before the
bomb went off. Even afterwards, it was
the domestic intelligence agency, the Intelligence Bureau, which handled the
investigation, along with the police. RAW was out of the picture completely.
In the days before the assassination, Dhanu
carried out two dry runs at other meetings, but otherwise stayed indoors at the
safe house. The reason was that she didn’t want to give her Sri Lankan origins
away – the Sri Lankan and Indian Tamils speak different versions of the
language. Then, on the 21st May, after stopping off for ice cream,
she got to the meeting with Sivarasan, who was posing as a journalist, Subha, Nalini (an
Indian Tamil facilitator), and the photographer, Haribabu.
 |
| From second left, Dhanu (holding the sandalwood garland), Nalini and Sivarasan. Photo by Haribabu. |
Exactly what time they got there is the
subject of an interesting controversy. The Indian police claimed they reached
the venue only just before Gandhi did, and managed to sneak through the
security lines in the push of the crowd. On the other hand, there are reports
that a video exists showing them waiting over two hours earlier. Some further claim this video was “edited” to remove footage of them meeting local
politicians, including those belonging to Gandhi’s Congress Party, thus
fuelling conspiracy theories that Gandhi was offed by his own people. Of
course, this begs the question of why these politicians would want to meet the
suicide squad right out in the open and just before the assassination, when
they could have done so in complete safety anytime earlier.
If the video actually exists, it might have
been suppressed by the police, but for a much more mundane reason: the presence
of the kill squad at the meeting hours before it started simply proved the
incompetence of their security procedures, and they were just covering their
collective ass. It’s highly likely that the killers actually did arrive hours in advance; Indian
politicians are notorious for unpunctuality, and since Gandhi had stopped off
at other meetings before the Sriperumbudur one, they would have no way of
knowing exactly when he’d arrive. And after all the other meticulous
arrangements, it’s unlikely that Sivarasan would’ve left anything as basic as
this to chance. Also, one of the two commissions of enquiry into the killing
concluded that local Congress politicians had interfered with the security
arrangements, so as to increase Gandhi’s interaction with the people and hence
his likelihood of attracting votes.
Not that Gandhi was known for obeying
security protocols either. As Prime Minister he’d become notorious for flouting
regulations, and after his assassination a policewoman claimed she’d tried to
stop the suicide bomber from approaching, only to be countermanded by Gandhi
himself, saying something like “Relax, baby.”
But to get back to the assassination.
As they waited for the moment to strike,
Haribabu began taking pictures. He photographed Dhanu, Nalini, and Sivarasan
standing together. Then he photographed the crowd, and Rajiv Gandhi arriving.
He photographed people handing Gandhi scarves, and then another picture of him
being mobbed by supporters. This photograph clearly shows the back of Dhanu’s
flower-bedecked head in the foreground, still a couple of women away from
Gandhi. And then it shows a red blur as Dhanu’s suicide belt explodes.[all photos at source]
 |
| Rajiv Gandhi's last moment. The back of Dhanu's head can be seen left lower corner. Photo by Haribabu. |
How do we know what he photographed? We
know, because when Dhanu blew herself up, she killed not just herself and
Gandhi (who, according to an article I read at the time, was pretty much
scooped inside out) but fourteen other people – and among these fourteen was Haribabu. His Chinese-made 35mm camera, however,
survived; and its film became the only clue the investigators had about the
killing. After all, why would a professional photographer focus on a seemingly
nondescript trio of people? It was at least interesting enough to be checked
out. And it was that checking out which blew the case, so to speak, open.
 |
| Rajiv Gandhi, dead. |
As a matter of fact – and unlike the story
peddled by
Madras Cafe – at first,
nobody knew who’d committed the killing. The first suspects were the Sikh
separatists of the Khalistan movement, with the LTTE in a distant second spot.
Though
a radio message sent by Sivarasan to Pirabhakaran’s headquarters (Base
14) in Sri Lanka was intercepted, it was decoded and understood only after
several days.
By that time, the culpability of the LTTE
in the assassination was becoming clear. The photographs had led the trail back
to the safehouses, and more than twenty LTTE facilitators were arrested,
including Nalini. Most of them were sentenced to death, though ultimately – as
I have mentioned elsewhere – only three of them are still on death row as of
this writing. The sentences of the others were commuted.
As for the remaining members of the hit
squad, they did not immediately flee across the sea back to Sri Lanka. Why, I
can’t tell you – maybe they were lying low, waiting for an opportunity to
strike at another target. After all, they still had Subha to use. Or perhaps
they wanted things to cool down before leaving. Whatever the reason, they
waited too long to get away to Sri Lanka, and escaped to the neighbouring state
of Karnataka, where many Tamils live and the LTTE had a network as well. The
police ran them to ground there, in a manhunt which involved the
neutralisation of several LTTE cells and the suicide of over twenty LTTE men.
Finally, three months after the killing of Gandhi, Sivarasan and six members of
his squad were tracked down to a house in Bangalore. Surrounded by police, they all committed suicide rather than surrender – Sivarasan by shooting himself,
Subha and the rest by biting into cyanide capsules.
The story was over. Wasn’t it?
Of course not.
********************************
At the
start of the previous section of this article, I described Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination
as one of the most significant events of modern Indian and Sri Lankan history. Why?
Let’s take India first.
Rajiv Gandhi, for all his faults, was a
reasonably good person as an individual. He was not, certainly, completely in
the pockets of capitalists and industrialists as the current lot in power; nor
was he reflexively pro-American like virtually all the political leadership
today. If he was personally corrupt, no succeeding government – including those
led by his right-wing political enemies – has ever been able to present any evidence
proving it. He had blundered extremely badly in his first stint in power, but
should have learnt his lesson. It’s highly unlikely that in a second term as
prime minister he’d have brought in school cronies as ministers and the like.
Also, like his mother, he was by conviction a secularist and at least a pinko
economically.
Under his successor, Narasimha Rao, India
abandoned any pretence at socialism and embraced a bandit capitalism which brought
along with it skyrocketing corruption, immensely increased rich-poor disparity,
and a foreign policy which is nothing more than an appease-America policy. It
also junked secularism in all but name, in favour of pro-Hindu policies (known
as “soft Hindutva”) which made the minorities feel insecure and directly
emboldened the Hindunazis.
Today, India is a hyper-corrupt, dysfunctional
oligarchy run by clueless morons taking orders from bandit capitalists at home
and American warmongers abroad. This fate might not have been avoided if Gandhi
hadn’t been killed; but it’s certain that his murder brought it about much
faster and without any vestige of internal opposition. And as I speak, the
bandit capitalist economy has finally gone into free-fall, with the currency
dropping like a stone, fuel prices shooting through the roof, and the government
all set to lose power to the Hindunazis next year; Hindunazis who promise to be
no better in any way and quite likely even worse.
As for Sri Lanka:
Having got away, as he imagined, with the
killing of Gandhi, Pirabhakaran began using the Black Tigers in a big way. The
first major victim was Sri Lankan President Premadasa – the same Premadasa who
had supplied the LTTE with arms and ammunition to fight the IPKF and had then
ordered the Indian army to quit the island. Having outlived his utility, he was
no longer anything but a target as far as Pirabhakaran was concerned. On May
Day 1993, he was murdered in Colombo by a male Black Tiger suicide bomber, who
had spent about two years setting up a cover ID as a grocer in order to be able
to find an opportunity to get close enough to Premadasa to strike.
Premadasa’s successor, the left-liberal Chandrika
Kumaratunga, tried to make peace with the LTTE, but almost suffered the same fate.
In November 1999, a Black Tiger human bomb struck at a meeting she was
addressing; Kumaratunga survived, losing an eye. Though she continued to
attempt peacemaking with the LTTE, she was never the force she had been before,
and began showing an increasingly authoritarian streak. Finally, this brought her
into open political conflict with her liberal and pro-peace Prime Minister,
Ranil Wickremasinghe, a clash which led in time to the election of the hardliner Mahinda Rajapaksa as President.
 |
| Mahinda Rajapaksa |
Even though, at this time, the early 2000s,
there was a ceasefire in place, Pirabhakaran continued using the Black Tigers
against the Sri Lankan state. Among the targets was President Rajapaksa’s
brother, Gotabaya, the Defence Minister, who survived narrowly. Another was the
army chief, Lt General Sarath Fonseka. A Black Tiger woman who was (according to whom you
believe) either pretending to be pregnant or actually pregnant, made said
pregnancy an excuse to attend maternity classes at the military headquarters in
Colombo; she then blew herself up near Fonseka’s car, badly injuring him.
Fonseka recovered after treatment in Singapore, determined to crush the LTTE at
all costs.
When open fighting finally erupted again between
the LTTE and the Sri Lankan Army in 2006, the Tigers found themselves suddenly,
and unexpectedly, outclassed. Though they had provoked what came to be called
Eelam War IV, they had completely underestimated both the army and the
political leadership, which had come to the conclusion (helped along by the
ceaseless Black Tiger suicide attacks) that the LTTE had no desire to talk peace
and had to be eliminated at all costs. As the LTTE defences crumbled, they
began hoping desperately that – as in 1987 – India would bail them out.
It did not happen.
 |
| The LTTE's last battle |
One of the most important reasons it did
not happen was the fact that after Rajiv Gandhi’s murder, it had become
politically impossible for any Indian government to come to the LTTE’s aid.
Even though some Indian Tamil politicians – who had supported the LTTE from the
pre-IPKF days – demanded Indian intervention, Delhi stayed aloof. The people of
Tamil Nadu had also turned against the LTTE and Sri Lankan Tamil separatism in
general. This made it possible for India to stand by unmoved and watch as the
Sri Lankan army annihilated the LTTE in a murderous series of battles, finally
destroying it completely, and killing Pirabhakaran, on 18th May 2009.
 |
| The end of Tamil Eelam: Pirabhakaran's corpse |
That many thousands of Tamil civilians were caught in the fighting and killed
by shelling and airstrikes made no difference. India had had enough of the LTTE
after Gandhi’s murder. Nothing would make any difference to that.
The
elimination of the LTTE brought Mahinda Rajapaksa immense political dividends.
He had come to power by an extremely narrow margin, and that because the LTTE
had (going by the cynical calculation that a Sinhala hardliner would be better
for it than the pro-peace Wickremasinghe) ordered the Tamils to boycott the
election. Now, having won the 36-year-old civil war, Rajapaksa was a national
hero, and could do anything he wanted. So he promptly turned the Sri Lankan
government into a Rajapaksa family fief, where today he, his three brothers,
their in-laws, and associated hangers-on control everything, and ordinary Sri
Lankans (Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims or Burghers, it matters not what they are)
had better shut up and knuckle down – or else.
**************************************
I’ll end
this article on a personal note. On 22nd May 1991, I was home on
vacation from college. My cousin Gayatri was visiting, and she was set to leave
early in the morning. While I was talking to her, with dawn grey in the sky, my
father came up to tell us he’d just heard on TV that Gandhi had been killed the
night before.
I regret to say I felt a flash of joy. I
regret it now, and I’ve regretted it for years.
But, in my defence, I was young and stupid
then.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2013
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