The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi

by Neena Gopal

  RAW sources say that until the very last minute, Prabhakaran was tricked into believing that a surrender was a viable option, and that he would be handed over to a neutral international group and not the Sri Lankan government as Colombo wanted.

  As the LTTE began to lay down weapons, and the UN negotiators and journalists embedded with the Sri Lankan forces tried to intervene to get safe passage for the LTTE commanders and their families—and failed—Prabhakaran’s own surrender plan was being worked out by his supposed trusted confidant KP who has admitted that he had reassured his old friend he would do his best for him.

  Unknown to KP, his conversation with Prabhakaran’s aide Velu—Prabhakaran never spoke to anyone on the phone—was being monitored by Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Alongside the ‘take no prisoners’ diktat that was issued from the very highest levels of the military, the plan to ensure that Prabhakaran did not make a run for it was, clearly, also in place.

  KP would later tell a senior journalist of the Colombo Telegraph of his shock when he was brought before Rajapaksa after he landed in Colombo following his arrest in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, in August 2009. He also spoke of how the secretary of defence would admit to him that he had been listening in on his conversations with Prabhakaran’s aide as they discussed the ‘surrender.’

  While the conflicting accounts of the LTTE supremo’s last moments make many Tamils continue to hold to this day that Prabhakaran surrendered and was then executed, and his body placed in the marshes at Nanthikadal, few believe that their ‘Annai’ could have given up the fight so easily. He showed no signs of having put up a fight. Tamil websites show he did not have a stitch of clothing on him when his body was found and only a part of his head had been blown off, as if he had been shot at close range, perhaps from a few feet away. Most intriguingly, giving the story some credence is the fact that the official photograph distributed by the armed forces shows him fully clothed.

  Prabhakaran’s final hours—as much of a mystery as his misdirected life.

  The central question remains, however: Why would Prabhakaran believe that India, the US, the UK, the EU and Norway would facilitate a surrender—even an unconditional one—and offer him safe passage?

  Perhaps, unschooled in the ways of the world and no longer advised by the sophisticated LTTE ideologue Balasingham, who had died in 2006, he was unaware that the leadership in these countries had lost their trust in him after he had repeatedly thrown peace deals and, finally, the Ceasefire Agreement brokered by the international community in 2002, back in their faces. The world had changed since 9/11 and tolerance for his brand of terror was at an all-time low. The US had gone from sympathetic supporter of the Tamil cause to critic as the Tamil diaspora failed to win over the Obama administration. A formal India-brokered safe passage was mere fantasy, given that the government that came back to power in India that very week was led by Sonia Gandhi, widow of the first and only foreign leader he had assassinated in 1991.

  KP, who had been estranged from the LTTE leader since 2003, but who had, some say suspiciously, reconciled with his boss as the LTTE’s military fortunes nosedived, was strangely his main interlocutor.

  Banking on AIADMK leader Jayalalitha as the one who would find a way out showed equally poor judgement. Whether it was an electoral ploy or a gesture to honour her mentor M.G. Ramachandran’s friendship with Prabhakaran, she had openly professed her support for Eelam—and then spectacularly lost the Tamil Nadu parliamentary polls.

  The question will always be this: Was Prabhakaran under the mistaken impression that India—in tandem with Norway—would step in and give him a safe haven, overlook his past? Or did LTTE sympathizers and the RAW operatives they dealt with grossly miscalculate how far they could go with such a deal? Was Delhi ever on board?

  Fonseka Provocation

  The actual move to go on the offensive and finish off the Tigers was set rolling after Prabhakaran’s ill-considered assassination attempt on the life of Sri Lanka Army Chief Lt Gen. Fonseka on 25 April 2006.

  It was Prabhakaran’s signal that he formally rejected the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement that had been forged between him and Sri Lankan Prime Minister Wickremesinghe on the active advice of the LTTE leader’s own political adviser Balasingham, whom he subsequently relegated to the sidelines.

  While the Sri Lankan intelligentsia roundly criticized the move at the time as Ranil’s biggest blunder because it gave de facto legitimacy to a terrorist organization that was one step away from declaring a separate state, many have, in retrospect, come to acknowledge that it could have proven to be Ranil’s masterstroke. In fact, it may have been the first nail that was driven into the Tigers’ collective coffin.

  And this is why. As they travelled freely for the first time to the freewheeling, fun-loving Sinhala-dominated south—and foreign countries such as Indonesia—to take part in the peace negotiations, Tigers like Col Karuna Amman, the LTTE eastern commander in charge of Batticaloa and Amparai, got a taste of the good life. In dropping restrictions on travel within the island, the messianic hold of the militaristic Prabhakaran on Tamils weakened as the LTTE leaders moved from their hitherto harsh, grim existence in the jungles to the cities in the south.

  The peace talks in Phuket, Thailand, in 2002 to which Prabhakaran had sent Karuna, were an eye-opener for the LTTE commander, sowing the seeds for his final defection from the ranks of the Tigers in 2004. It is in Thailand that Karuna claims he had his epiphany that ‘the conflict can only end through political means.’

  He is said to have discovered what every peace interlocutor had found—Prabhakaran was never serious about negotiating a genuine peace. This was true when he made a verbal promise to Rajiv Gandhi back in 1987, to President Premadasa in 1989 whom he would assassinate four years later and to President Chandrika Kumaratunga whom he failed to assassinate in 1999, and finally, to Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, with whom peace talks led to a cessation of hostilities and a formal Ceasefire Agreement in 2002 that Prabhakaran, with his continued provocations, showed he had no intention of honouring.

  Karuna’s defection—whether because he lost faith in a military solution or discovered the good life—however, would prove costly for the Tigers. It meant the loss of its crucial eastern wing. It was from the ranks of the east that the LTTE chief recruited the human cannon fodder he used against the Sri Lanka Army.

  Karuna’s role as he spilled Tiger secrets and helped unravel the LTTE fighting machine would be key to the destruction of the militants. As he himself admitted in an interview to the Washington Post in February 2009, soon after he was rewarded with a ministry in the Rajapaksa government, ‘All the world knows that without me, they couldn’t have won the war.’ He said he knew all the hideouts, all the tactics. ‘And without my manpower’, the Tigers were left without an army. ‘They lost their grip,’ he said.

  Karuna’s publicly articulated grouse stemmed from the fact that it was his soldiers from the east who were used when the LTTE went to war. The top rung of the LTTE leadership comprised northern Tamils, who protected their own while sacrificing his fellow easterners. The breaking point came when, in 2004, he was supposedly ordered to provide another 1000 fighters after he had already forcibly recruited a battalion of child soldiers. Instead, he announced he was quitting the LTTE.

  In another ill-judged move, Karuna—unlike Mahattaya, the key Prabhakaran aide who was preparing to remove him, purportedly at the behest of Indian intelligence, and was executed by an unforgiving chief—was never targeted. Colombo, which kept him secure in a safe house, ensured he couldn’t be touched.

  In keeping with the LTTE leader’s classic doublespeak, proffering peace while making war, Prabhakaran compounded that error of judgement on Karuna by attempting to eliminate hardliner Gen. Fonseka. The army chief was badly injured in the April 2006 attack when the LTTE suicide bomber—a pregnant woman—detonated herself at the army headquarters in Colombo just as he was leaving the building.

  When Ge
n. Fonseka resumed active duty several months later, armed with the backing of the international community which worked towards proscribing the terror outfit in thirty-three countries—India had already banned the LTTE in 1992, a year after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination—he was determined to get even. The end of the LTTE was almost a given.

  The failed assassination attempt against Gotabaya Rajapaksa on 1 December 2006 sealed their fate.

  The Sri Lanka Army, trained and equipped by Israel, India and the United States, first took Mavil Aru in the critical east in July 2006, followed by Sampur in September.

  With the full backing of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother Gotabaya, a former military man himself, the Sri Lanka Army under Gen. Fonseka took complete control of the Eastern Province from the LTTE for the first time in fourteen years.

  In January 2007, a key town in Batticaloa district was captured. Six months later, Maj. Gen. Gallage wrested the LTTE-held stronghold of Thoppigala from the Tigers. Both in Sampur and Mavil Aru, the LTTE was sucked into fighting a conventional battle. Prabhakaran erred. He had been drawn into a war where he had moved from the hit-and-run strategy of old to the conventional tactics adopted by traditional armies in the battlefield, over which he had no mastery.

  He made one more error. In going to war with the Sri Lankan state, which had been prepared to make concessions to his people, Prabhakaran lost the sympathy of the international community which had helped broker the peace.

  From 2007 to 2009, as the Sri Lanka Army steadily closed in on the LTTE, with President Rajapaksa determined to take on the LTTE in the east, the Tigers were hit by Karuna’s defection. This closed off the supply chain of ammunition, weaponry and military cadres. The LTTE was unprepared for a full-scale offensive, robbed as it was of its eyes and ears, and its access to intelligence and men, money and arms, as Col Karuna went from being Prabhakaran’s man to Gotabaya’s.

  The Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) had, in the interim, been honed into a battle-ready squad, trained by the Indians and the Israelis. In November 2007, the SLAF bombed a bunker, barely a few kilometres from the LTTE capital, Kilinochchi, and killed off S.P. Thamilchelvam, the leader of the LTTE’s political wing. Thamilchelvam had been talking on a satellite phone to members of his family and the diaspora for several hours at the so-called Peace Secretariat in Kilinochchi, and had just retired to a bunker, when the SLAF’s newly acquired Israeli Kfir fighter aircraft let loose a US bomb. Gotabaya is reported to have said: ‘We want to give them the message that we know where they are.’

  Curiously, the man who had handed Gotabaya the east was on that very same day arrested in London for travelling on a forged passport. If any reinforcement of the theory that it was Karuna who had in fact gifted the east on a platter to the Sri Lanka Army was necessary, it came with his claim that he was travelling on a diplomatic passport arranged for him by Gotabaya. After a nine-month incarceration, he was deported back to Sri Lanka. No charge.

  Towards the end of 2008, the Sri Lanka Army finally took control of the LTTE’s entire eastern wing, including Batticaloa and Trincomalee, that it had battled to conquer for years.

  With that, the separatists lost a vital and strategic artery that connected the eastern waterbody to the northern Wanni hinterland. As India stepped up its vigil in international waters in the north and its navy hindered the once rampant smuggling of weapons and drugs, the LTTE found itself hemmed in from the east as well as the north. The LTTE’s fleet of speedboats could no longer bring in arms and equipment or even cash from Malaysia, once arranged through KP, the outfit’s arms, cash and drugs procurer.

  On 1 January 2009, the LTTE suffered the first of several fatal blows. As the Sri Lanka Army advanced on three fronts, the LTTE lost control of the A9 arterial road from Jaffna. It lost Pooneryn; it lost the strategic Elephant Pass and, within hours, the SLA had overrun the Tigers’ administrative capital, Kilinochchi.

  Journalists flown in to see the fallen capital recount how every single office in the Peace Secretariat where the LTTE grandees had held court was empty—the offices left wide open with the locks on filing cabinets and storerooms still intact. It was a mine of information on LTTE contacts and their sources of funding overseas. The only thing the LTTE destroyed as they exited was the huge water tank in Kilinochchi, which the Sri Lanka Army has left untouched. Six years later, it’s the only remaining symbol of the LTTE’s scorched earth policy.

  The LTTE abandoned Kilinochchi in great haste. Some 3,00,000 people—cadres and their families, and the farmhands and fisherfolk who worked the land and the sea—were forced to go with them as they retreated deeper and deeper into the Wanni until they were squeezed by government forces into Mullaithivu, the north-east corner of the isle on a strip of land that measured 42 square kilometres.

  Trapped or Surrender

  The ruthless separatist war waged by the LTTE against the Sinhalese-majority Sri Lankan government came to a bloody end on a desolate beach at Mullaithivu after more than a quarter of a century, in May 2009, when the man who had held out the dream of a separate Tamil state, Ilankai Eelam, was finally snared.

  His military might was exposed as nothing more than a myth. Trapped between his own lies and those peddled by the Tamil diaspora, he believed that he was still of some value to the international community. But with no army, territory or a capital, and with a group within his own organization led, many say, by KP, ready to trade him in, in return for their own freedom, Prabhakaran had no cards left to play.

  Why he waited for six months from the fall of Kilinochchi in January 2009 to make his strangely addled moves to escape from Mullaithivu makes little sense.

  Did he hope to hide among his cadres and take advantage of the assurances of a safe surrender given by President Rajapaksa and his brother, Defence Secretary Gotabaya, to make good his own escape? Was he led to believe that in the last moments of the war, he would be flown out of Mullivayikal to safety by the Indian Navy, only to be betrayed by Delhi working in cahoots with Colombo and Washington?

  Did India have the last laugh?

  Or does the real story lie somewhere in between—that behind the scenes, Indian spooks with ties to the Tigers had tried to get Prabhakaran and his family to safety, and to help provide safe passage for non-combatants, but failed in the face of Colombo’s determination to end the Tamil insurgency once and for all. As a top intel operative told me: ‘We stopped trying once we heard of the killing of Balachandran, VP’s fourteen-year-old son.’ There was no way back after that.

  7

  The Trial and the Conspiracies

  THERE WAS DEATHLY SILENCE IN the Poonamallee courtroom in Chennai as Justice V. Navaneetham walked into the Designated Trial Court on 28 January 1998 and, without further ado, pronounced the death sentence on all twenty-six accused in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.

  Justice Navaneetham had just made judicial history.

  In symbolically breaking the nib of his pen after signing the landmark judgment, he brought to a close one of the longest running trials in Indian history. The trial had passed the death sentence on the largest number of people in any court case in the country and was dubbed a ‘judicial massacre’ by members of the legal fraternity. The trial had begun on 19 January 1994, two years after Kaarthikeyan, who led the SIT, submitted a formal charge sheet on 22 May 1992 against forty-one people. The specially constituted Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) court-concluded hearings on 5 November 1997, had finally come to an end.

  This was closure for the Gandhi family; for the entire nation.

  But did it go far enough? Did it lay out clearly how the LTTE managed to catch India’s security establishment so completely off guard?

  Despite the indictment of governments, politicians and the police by not one but two commissions of inquiry—one headed by Justice J.S. Verma was constituted a week after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in May 1991 to probe the security lapses; the second, led by Justice Milap Chand Jain and set u
p on 23 August 1992, was to look into the circumstances of the assassination and the conspiracy angle—the indictments remained on paper.

  The Justice Verma Commission described the withdrawal of SPG cover for Rajiv Gandhi as ‘unjustified’. It blamed the IB for not keeping Tamil Nadu Police informed of the high threat perception, and the Tamil Nadu police for being unable to prevent the suicide bomber from getting access to the former premier.

  The Jain Commission of Inquiry set off a furore in August 1997 when its interim report was leaked, three months before the Designated Trial Court’s Judge Navaneetham pronounced his judgment based on the SIT’s findings. The Jain report asked why the SIT had not sufficiently probed the nexus between the DMK and the LTTE; it brought up the role played by the godman Chandraswami, and implied that Israeli and US intelligence—Mossad and the CIA—had a hand in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.

  Two of the main accused, LTTE leader Prabhakaran and intelligence chief Pottu Amman, were never extradited. Insiders told me that President Premadasa had communicated to Indian officials it would be difficult to deliver the extradition papers to the LTTE lair in the north as no one dared to enter Tiger territory!

  No government in Delhi has pushed for extradition. The LTTE supremo died in a hail of bullets when he was hunted down to the marshy lagoons of Nanthikadal in May 2009. His arms procurer-in-chief—the man who delivered the parts of the belt-bomb to Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins in Madras—KP, continues to be at large.

  Delhi has not once asked for KP’s extradition, with Colombo—and the Narendra Modi government, as strangely silent as the preceding one under Manmohan Singh—being protective of the man who, many believe, was the key to luring the Tiger out of his lair.

  While the Sri Lankan government threw up its hands and said there was no way it could bring ‘Pirabaharan’, nothing was done to bring the other two main accused, his intelligence chief, Pottu Amman, and Akila, the deputy chief of the female wing ‘Black Tigresses’, to trial either.