The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi

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The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi Page 9

by Neena Gopal


  Instead, critics say, he cut the most virulent—and potentially the most deadly—of the insurgent groups, the LTTE, out completely, seeing them as no different from the clutch of other Tamil separatists that India had propped up. Open to the highly manipulative suggestion of a far more adept politician in the Sri Lankan President, Rajiv Gandhi failed to examine the implications and the fallout of sending soldiers into unfamiliar terrain. They were, in the final analysis, being sent to do a job that should have rightfully been that of the Sri Lankan army.

  Rajiv Gandhi’s statement in Parliament, a day after the accord was signed, sought to justify the deployment to his domestic audience as well as to the international community. Someone should have told him that it would win him no plaudits either in the Sinhala or the Tamil camp.

  In his own mind, it seems likely he had come to understand that the troops were going in as part of an agreement with the Sri Lankan government, and that it was aimed at disarming the Tamil militants, with the final goal being the devolution of powers to a Tamil-empowered council in the north and the east.

  In his announcement in Parliament on 30 July 1987, he said:

  President Jayewardene explained that because of the deteriorating situation as a result of [these] disturbances and the increasing demands that this puts on the Sri Lankan security forces, his government would need assistance to implement the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement for ending the ethnic crisis. For this purpose the Government of Sri Lanka made a formal request for appropriate Indian military assistance to ensure the cessation of hostilities and surrender of arms in the Jaffna Peninsula, and if required, the Eastern Province . . .

  He also requested for air transport to move some of the Sri Lankan troops from Jaffna to points in the south. In response to this formal request from Government of Sri Lanka, and in terms of our obligations under the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement, units of the Armed Forces of India have landed in the Jaffna Peninsula today [30 July 1987].

  Let me repeat that our troops have landed in Sri Lanka in response to a specific and formal request of the Government of Sri Lanka who have invoked our obligations and commitments under the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement . . .

  As Dixit, then Indian high commissioner to Sri Lanka, said in an interview to Rediff’s Josy Joseph in 2000, ten years after the IPKF withdrew from the island, the idea of Indian boots on the ground was Jayewardene’s idea. Whether he was trying to shift the blame from Rajiv Gandhi, one will never know. But he said the idea of flying in Indian troops was ‘a separate matter’ from the accord itself, repeatedly stressing that it was not Rajiv Gandhi’s idea. The Sri Lankan President, he said, had pushed Rajiv Gandhi to bring in troops to disarm the LTTE, as he wanted to free the Sri Lanka Army to quell a bloody Sinhala insurgency led by the Janata Vimukta Perumana (JVP) in the south.

  ‘President Jayewardene wanted to withdraw his troops from Jaffna to control the riots in the south. And it was he who said, “I want some Indian troops to come in to ensure security in Jaffna and Trincomalee, because I am withdrawing my Sinhalese troops to maintain law and order here,”’ Dixit recounted.

  ‘And Mr Rajiv Gandhi—I was present—said, “Are you sure you want our troops? Because India can be criticised, Sri Lanka can be criticised.” He [Jayewardene] said, “I am going to give you a formal written invitation.” Mr Gandhi said, “Let us first sign the agreement, and then in your letter, if you think it is necessary, you say to ensure the efficient implementation of the agreement you want the troops.” So it was a separate matter,’ Dixit says.

  Dixit’s account of what actually transpired between the two leaders at the signing of the India–Sri Lanka peace accord underlined the Indian leader’s ingenuousness and inexperience in dealing with Colombo.

  Col Taylor (Retd) who served with the IPKF writes in Rediff.com of how LTTE cadres he later met told him: ‘The cunning old fox fooled the innocent lamb.’ No prizes for guessing who the lamb was and who, the fox.

  What that meant in real terms was that India had been cleverly manoeuvred into doing the job that should have been entrusted to the Sri Lanka Army. The unpleasant task of defanging the rebels whom India had armed in the first place would now fall to Indian troops. Rajiv Gandhi was not prescient enough to foresee how unwelcome this would make Indian troops, how the terms of engagement would change for the worse and how catastrophic the consequences would be.

  The primary challenge before the Indian troops was disarmament as a prelude to the elections. Unless the LTTE voluntarily surrendered their weapons or were forcibly disarmed by Indian troops, elections to the newly announced provincial councils could not take place. In effect, with the LTTE creating a climate of violence, a voluntary surrender of their weapons was not feasible; neither was disarmament nor were provincial polls.

  One former soldier who served in the IPKF and did not want to be named, recounts the farcical disarmament. He said that when the order went out to the Tamil separatists to disarm, they were told to put all their firearms and equipment in the Jaffna Football Stadium. Pits were dug and, over several days until 21 August 1987, arms, most of them old, damaged and unusable, were brought in and buried. But in an indication of how little India understood what it was up against, the arms surrender stopped without warning, and when the IPKF went to check whether the stash was still intact, they found vast, empty pits. The story doing the rounds then, the former soldier said, was that with the LTTE suspicious of Indian intent to disarm the Tigers and arm rival Tamil groups, the outfit decided to hijack all the weapons and redistribute them among their own cadres.

  What India had done was trade in Indira Gandhi’s hard-nosed realpolitik-driven arming of Tamil insurgents that began in 1977 and went on till 1985—a year after she died—for Rajiv Gandhi’s half-baked, midstream change of plan that went from attempting to divest the LTTE and other Tamil guerrillas of their firepower—which was a challenge in itself—to waging a full-fledged war against the Tigers.

  Mrs Gandhi’s strategy towards Sri Lanka was honed through the Cold War years when the US remained inimical to Indian interests, allying itself with Pakistan. With Sri Lanka located strategically at India’s underbelly, President Jayewardene’s increasingly strong relationship with Pakistan, the US and Israel was seen as a strategic threat that had to be countered. This was driven home as the British brought in hired mercenaries of various nationalities under the Keenie Meenie group to help train the Sri Lankan Task Force to quell the rebels in the east.

  The risk posed by the secession-prone state of Tamil Nadu was also all too real. Tamil Nadu had about 60 million Tamil-speaking Indians who held Delhi to account for not speaking out or acting to alleviate the atrocities and marginalization of the Sri Lankan Tamils at the hands of the Sinhalese majority.

  Mrs Gandhi was repeatedly asked by her Tamil allies why she had gone to war on behalf of the Bengalis but would not do the same for the Tamils.

  Rajiv Gandhi’s Lankan misadventure, his apologists say, was his bid to carry forward his mother’s plans to their logical conclusion, by sending troops to the island to safeguard Lankan Tamil interests; except that in Mrs Gandhi’s case, she used the Tamil groups to her advantage—the provisional fifth column that could be used against Colombo, if needed. That wasn’t even a part of Rajiv Gandhi’s calculations. And he capitulated, even though he held all the cards, said a colonel who had served in the IPKF. The Indian Armed Forces at the time were far superior to the Sri Lanka Army, and the LTTE could have remained a useful pawn if India had kept Prabhakaran’s hopes of a separate state alive.

  Instead, India rushed in peace-keeping forces that set off an undeclared war. Coming in as they did, completely unprepared and ill-equipped for the job at hand, the IPKF deployment set the seal on post-Independence India’s biggest foreign policy disaster. In the years since, Indian policymakers have vowed never to repeat the misadventure.

  Ironically, the Indo-Lanka peace accord pleased nobody in Colombo either. Senior members of the Jayewardene-led ruling United Nat
ional Party (UNP) were not in favour of it, nor was the Opposition Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), much less the virulently anti-Tamil JVP which had set off the conflagration between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in the first place.

  The 29 July accord that cleared the deployment of Indian troops to ‘enforce the cessation of hostilities . . .’ would unravel almost as soon as it became operational. The JVP, which had been assiduously fanning Sinhala ire at Indian interference in their internal affairs, stoked the first flames.

  On the very day that the deal was signed, a failed attempt by a Sri Lankan naval rating to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi—managing to hit him with his rifle butt—in full view of a guard of honour as senior members of the government in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo watched, indicated the popular mood. It reflected the anger—which united Sinhalas and Tamils alike—and their collective antipathy to the arrival of foreign troops on their soil.

  In Jaffna, the Indian premier’s announcement in Parliament on 30 July that Indian troops were being air-dropped into Sri Lanka, even as he spoke, was particularly poorly received.

  Once known for its genteel old-world charm, its bookshops, its voluble trishaw drivers, a famed university and a library that was the repository of ancient Tamil culture, Jaffna had by the mid-1980s turned into a hotbed of divisive, bloody Tamil separatist politics, marked by the rise of a highly motivated group committed to carving out a Tamil homeland.

  Indian troops coming in with the express intent to disarm the LTTE in the north and the east, as a prelude to setting up an interim council and supervising elections to a provincial body, set off alarm bells in the terror outfit.

  The Indian Army, since it divested Pakistan in 1971 of its East Bengal wing—a textbook success story that is taught in military schools across the world—had a formidable reputation. It believed it would be no pushover. Egged on by Dixit, the Tigers had reluctantly been persuaded to be a part of the interim council that would run the newly merged Northern and Eastern provinces. But, for Prabhakaran’s cadres, compared by analysts to the fanatical and highly motivated Japanese kamikaze bombers, this was not the prize they sought.

  The Indian Army, the Indian High Commission and RAW were blind to the fact that Prabhakaran’s final frontier wasn’t an interim government, let alone a Provincial Council. Prabhakaran didn’t want a Colombo-inspired dispensation that would grant Tamil groups a voice. He wanted to be the pre-eminent voice, the only voice of the Tamil people, and he wanted it under a fully militarized force in a separate state, his state—Eelam. After years of exposure to Indian training camps in Tamil Nadu, he knew that the only thing that stood between him and Eelam was Rajiv Gandhi and his force majeure, the IPKF.

  For the JVP, the deployment of the IPKF was a huge and unexpected bonus, a boost to their agenda to curb Tamil ambitions for a separate state.

  Banned for the Black July 1983 racial pogrom against the Tamils—a retaliation for the killing of Sri Lankan soldiers and Buddhist monks—the JVP and its military arm, the Deshapremi Janatha Viyaparaya, seized the opportunity provided by Jayewardene (who had once promised to fight the Indians to the last bullet but ended up befriending them instead) to unleash a vitriolic campaign of hate against India and their own President for their so-called plans to ‘divide’ the island.

  The accord that empowered the Indian Army to ensure power devolved to the northern and eastern Tamils enraged Sinhalese supremacists as it was seen as rewarding separatists who had taken up arms against the state.

  On the morning that the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement was to be signed, an angry mob surrounded the President’s home in Colombo; they attacked it and set it ablaze. In the run-up to the accord and after, the JVP began picking out leaders in predominantly Sinhala villages, both Catholic and Buddhist. They were given a choice: they had to come over to their side or they would be assassinated.

  The huge outcry fomented by the JVP—and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party—grew into a mass movement against ‘Indian imperialism’ and ‘Eelam terrorism’, which began even before the first Indian soldier had set foot on Lankan soil. It wasn’t helped by the fact that two senior ministers in the Jayewardene-led UNP government, Lalith Athulathmudali and Premadasa (both, incidentally, later assassinated), with one eye on the conservative Sinhala vote, were dead set against allowing even a limited measure of Tamil autonomy. Both leaders actively set out to sabotage the accord, while Premadasa went on to use it to unseat Jayewardene and assume power.

  When Rajiv Gandhi stepped down from power in the face of the Bofors storm in 1989, the new prime minister V.P. Singh and his foreign minister I.K. Gujral set out to reverse what Rajiv Gandhi had tried to do in Sri Lanka. But in withdrawing Indian troops under pressure from Sri Lanka’s President Premadasa, a further complication had arisen.

  As part of the sustained campaign by the LTTE against the ‘foreign force’, it was put out by the Tigers that on RAW’s advice, Rajiv Gandhi had re-armed other insurgent groups, including the EPRLF, the ENDLF and the PLOTE. Flaunting newly acquired arms, yet inept at fighting the LTTE, they became easy targets of the LTTE’s systematic elimination of the groups’ leaders and cadres.

  But in the counter-narrative that the Indians did little to play up, the LTTE was also flaunting brand new weapons. The IPKF officers believed the arms came from the pool of new weapons acquired by the Sri Lanka Army—they all had SLA markings. The Lankan charge against India was that it had armed and trained, and pitted one group of Tamils against another, so that one of their proxies would become powerful, and the Indian Army’s charge against Premadasa was that he had done the same with the LTTE.

  As Col Hariharan who served as India’s chief of military intelligence in Sri Lanka during the IPKF’s tenure from 1987 to 1990 explains, this was part of the LTTE’s strategy to run the IPKF out of Sri Lanka. Instead of the three years that the IPKF had believed it would take them to ‘neutralize’ the LTTE, the Indian Army had within the space of two years ‘wiped out most of the six levels of junior Tiger leaders’.

  Col Hariharan told me the decimation of the LTTE mid-level cadres and the fear that he could get totally wiped out led Prabhakaran to ‘run to Premadasa to get the IPKF out of the country’, and form a bizarre alliance that united the LTTE and Premadasa against a shared enemy—the IPKF. Posters appeared in Colombo calling the IPKF ‘Innocent People Killing Force’.

  Doing business with the LTTE, however, always came with a price. In April 1993, after Premadasa had outlived his usefulness to the Tigers—and barely a week after his friend-turned-critic Athulathmudali, who had survived a terrible bomb attack on the Parliament, was shot dead by a gunman who Premadasa swore was sent by the LTTE—he himself would be blown up at a May Day rally by an LTTE suicide bomber.

  India’s Tamil card, flawed as it was, had already gone up in flames. Its newly acquired Sinhala card was doomed even before the ink had dried on the Indo-Lanka peace accord.

  5

  The RAW Truth

  ‘RAJIV GANDHI AVARUNDE MANDALAI ADDIPODALAM.’ ‘Dump pannidungo.’ Blow Rajiv Gandhi’s head off. Eliminate him. ‘Maranai vechidungo.’ Kill him.

  Of the hundreds of intercepts between the thirty-eight-odd Tamil insurgent camps in the Nilgiris in India and their cohorts in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, almost every single one centred on arms shipments and gunrunning between Vedaranyam and Point Pedro, barely 18 kilometres from coast to coast. But no intercept would be as chilling as the kill order that came through in short bursts of VHS communication on a frequency that the LTTE favoured, that April day in 1990.

  When it was intercepted, it set off alarm bells among Tamil insurgents ranged against the Tigers, their numbers already worn thin by the LTTE’s targeting of their cadres and top leadership. The intercept, in Old Tamil interspersed with English used by the Jaffna Tamils—and largely incomprehensible to Indian Tamils—only added to the confusion that hung over the all too brief radio message.

  ‘Dump’. That particular term came into use when the LTTE began t
o ruthlessly eliminate Tamil civilians who resisted their fiat and ‘dumped’ them in pits across Jaffna. It was another way of saying ‘kill’.

  But the difference this time was that the order was not to eliminate one of their own. The target was the former Indian prime minister, the leader of another country.

  When PLOTE leader Siddharthan Dharmalingam first heard it, he was so alarmed, he immediately tipped off the IPKF’s counter-intelligence head in Sri Lanka, Col Hariharan.

  A native Tamil speaker with an inside track into the Lankan Tamil narrative, Col Hariharan was greatly helped in his task, he says, by having an aunt who was married to a Jaffna native. It was Col Hariharan, the head of Counter Intelligence (COIN), and one of a handful of Indian operatives with his ear to the ground and an understanding of the Tigers’ mindset, who recognized its true import.

  But it didn’t fly. Whether it wasn’t specific enough or clear enough to warrant immediate action, or was simply not taken seriously by the intelligence mandarins to whom the information was passed on, is not known. Either way, India’s intelligence agents were clearly unequal to the task of reading the threat for what it was—a death sentence passed by the LTTE, an insurgent group nurtured by India, on India’s former premier.

  ‘Even when Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister, the R&AW had drawn attention to the likelihood of a threat to his security from the Sri Lankan Tamil extremist organizations. It repeated this warning after he became the Leader of the Opposition,’ says B. Raman, head of RAW during 1988–94, in his eye-popping memoir, The Kaoboys of R&AW.1 ‘These warnings did not receive the attention they deserved because they were based on assessments and not on specific intelligence,’ he writes.

 

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