The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi

by Neena Gopal

  In August 1997, an interim report by the Jain Commission was leaked, kicking off a huge storm and inviting even stronger criticism that it was an attempt to prolong the life of the commission with fantastical conspiracy theories.

  The seventeen-volume, 5000-page report which had the testimony of some 110 witnesses, unequivocally and baldly stated that without the DMK’s support for the LTTE, and the ‘deep nexus between the Tamils of Sri Lanka and India’, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi would not have been possible. Although, curiously, by the time the final report was released in July 1998, the findings were less sweeping and bore little relation to the interim report that had been leaked.

  The interim report had blamed prime ministers V.P. Singh and Chandrashekhar for not having provided enough security for Rajiv Gandhi. It had devoted several pages to the godman Chandraswami, who, Justice Jain believes, was involved in the high-profile assassination. It remains unexplained why Justice Jain submitted a 2000-page-long final report that watered down the charge made in the previous year’s leaked interim report against the Tamils, to say that only ‘a few Tamils supported the LTTE’ although it continued to maintain that the SIT had failed in its investigation as it had not questioned the DMK leader and Tamil Nadu chief minister, M. Karunanidhi, and a minister in his government, Subbulakshmi Jagadeesan, who allegedly provided refuge to one of the accused, Santhan, in her farmhouse in Coimbatore after the assassination.

  Buttressing its argument with reports by the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau, the Jain Commission said that during 1989–91, ‘The LTTE had fertile ground in Tamil Nadu during the DMK rule.’ It also said that the ministry of home affairs had been kept informed of the ‘material and moral support to the LTTE from DMK sympathisers’.

  The Jain Commission report, made public seven years after the assassination, said, ‘One such message, sent by the Additional Director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) to the Home Secretary on January 30, 1990 states: “The LTTE has been taking full advantage of the sympathies of the DMK in Tamil Nadu . . . local DMK leaders in the coastal region of Thanjavur have also been collaborating with the LTTE in their illegal trafficking and activities . . .”’ It is for this reason that Justice Jain he felt ‘the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, M. Karunanidhi should have been among the politicians, who were questioned by the Special Investigating Team (SIT). On many matters his interrogation was quite relevant.’

  In Justice Jain’s list of additional suspects were another twenty-one people whom, it said, the SIT should have investigated. Apart from the ten Indians on the list, he named eleven Sri Lankans, including the LTTE’s financier and arms buyer Kumaran Pathmanathan, ‘KP’; its London-based international spokesperson Col Kittu; ‘Baby’ Subramaniam; and Muthuraja.

  Jain says, contrary to the assertion (during deposition) of SIT chief Kaarthikeyan that there ‘is little scope of involvement of any other persons’, his conclusion was that the SIT should have filed supplementary charge sheets against a ‘large number’ of persons.

  (The Congress party’s agitation, incidentally, that used the Jain Commission interim report against the then DMK government, which was allied with I.K. Gujral’s United Front government at the Centre, achieved its immediate aim—toppling the Gujral government—but paved the way for the entry of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led BJP government in Delhi.)

  Noorani’s main criticism rests on the premise that Justice Jain, in pursuing ‘the conspiracy theory’, was simply grabbing at straws. ‘The charge sheet rested squarely on a conspiracy by the LTTE. Independent journalistic investigation supported the charge. International perception did not differ. President Chandrika Kumaratunga publicly blamed the LTTE,’ he said. Yet, Justice Jain believed there was more to the assassination than the LTTE.

  The premise of the two commissions of inquiry differed. As Noorani writes in Frontline in February 1998, ‘While the Jain Commission, set up on 23 August 1992, had one main remit, the conspiracy aspect, which Justice J.S. Verma had refused to accept . . . Justice Verma confined his inquiry, set up on May 27, 1991, to security failures alone, personal or systemic.’ Noorani says Jain was directed to inquire into ‘the sequence of events leading to, and all the facts and circumstances relating to the assassination of Mr Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumbudur (other than the matters covered by the terms of reference for the Commission headed by Justice Verma)’. In particular, Noorani states, the commission was enjoined to inquire ‘whether one person or persons or agencies were responsible for conceiving, preparing and planning the assassination and whether there was any conspiracy in this behalf and, if so, all its ramifications’.

  ‘For such an inquiry to declare open season on lurid conspiracy theories was to cast aspersions on the charge sheet,’ Noorani added.

  The question is—did it?

  SIT investigator Ragothaman adds a curious—and troubling—new charge. He says that for the LTTE, this was the perfect scenario as, by law, they could not be charged by two courts, in this case the Designated Trial Court and the Jain Commission of Inquiry findings when they were submitted. If the Jain Commission which was demanding access to all the letters and documents that the SIT had, found one of the LTTE accused not guilty, then the special court could not hold them or charge them.

  Ragothaman said that lawyers for the accused, and Murugan and the other LTTE accused, became supremely confident and came to believe that the SIT and the Jain Commission would cancel each other out and they would soon walk free.

  In fact, as Noorani explains, a trial and an inquiry can proceed simultaneously. ‘But a heavy onus lies on the judge holding the inquiry to ensure that the trial proceedings are neither obstructed, whether by seeking its records or otherwise, nor prejudiced.’

  Noorani said that as the head of the panel probing the conspiracy angle of the assassination, Justice M.C. Jain, in announcing that the Jain Commission had decided to form its own investigating team to evaluate the findings of the CBI’s SIT in the Rajiv Gandhi case and search for further evidence if necessary, ‘threatened the orderly course and integrity of the trial proceedings’.

  Jain asked the home ministry to provide him with a particular inspector general in the CBI, fluent in Tamil, for the assignment. ‘The IG will go after leads missed by the SIT. The Commission will examine the entire SIT material and verify its correctness,’ Justice Jain told the Indian Express in 1992. ‘Under the IG will be a team of investigating officials.’ The commission would sit in judgement on the SIT’s investigations as well as draw on its labours.

  Noorani says this ‘brazenly violated the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952, and established precedents’. Three years later, in an order made on 28 December 1995 that was in flagrant breach of the Commissions of Inquiry Act, Jain asserted that ‘the Commission is entitled to know as to how and in what manner the SIT proceeded with the investigation. It is only after looking into the record—such as the case diary before the Designated Court—that the Commission would be able to know as to what leads have not been investigated and investigation of what leads has not been completed, who are the suspects and what evidence is available against them . . .’ In other words, a parallel investigation and a parallel court.

  In Poonamallee court jail, the LTTE inmates were certain it would only be a short while before they could all go home.

  How far off the mark was Justice Jain on the conspiracy theory?

  In a curious contradiction, little known and never reported, is the fascinating story behind the exit of Gopal Subramaniam, who, acting as counsel (in 1991–92) to the judicial commission headed by Justice Verma to inquire into security lapses leading to the assassination, quit after lawyers close to Sonia Gandhi advised him to steer clear of conspiracy theories.

  The haste with which Sivaresan’s body was cremated—under tight security at Bangalore’s Wilson Garden crematorium on 3 September 1991—and the manner of his death, a bullet to his head rather than cyanide, only fuelled the cover-up theory. This was made worse when a local Congress f
unctionary close to the LTTE, Shanmugham, was found hanging from a tree, while in SIT custody. The SIT was accused of silencing him.

  When weighed in the balance, the Jain Commission and the SIT headed by Kaarthikeyan correctly deduced that the assassination was the handiwork of Prabhakaran. But they failed to squelch speculation, then, as much as now, that there could be more.

  8

  The Lost Legacy

  WHERE ONCE THERE WERE ONLY the walking wounded, empty streets, grim faces and bombed-out buildings, there is traffic! And it has been brought to a complete standstill in Jaffna this morning as schoolchildren in crisp white-and-blue uniforms march by, led by youthful teachers, yelling out lustily in a celebration of Boy Scouts Day.

  The young! In a city that once hid away any young person—man or woman—who could be forcibly recruited by the Tigers.

  Eight years of an uneasy peace without the Tiger imprimatur; almost twenty-five years since one of their own had Rajiv Gandhi killed in cold blood. This is a Jaffna, the once notional capital of Tamil Eelam—and India’s Vietnam—that is in the throes of a complete makeover.

  The cagey, shifty-eyed trishaw drivers in scruffy dhotis, the Tigers’ self-appointed secret service, who once owned the main street and openly grilled you—and every newcomer—are long gone.

  ‘You don’t look Tamil, how do you know Tamil?’ would be the first salvo as they veered off the path to show you the home of LTTE commander Pottu Amman’s girlfriend as one driver did when I was there in the late 1990s. More pointedly, once they knew you were an Indian, they would take vicarious pleasure in driving you past Prabhakaran’s hideout in Jaffna University from where the LTTE chief’s perfectly positioned machine guns had blown the Indian Army’s heli-borne troops out of a moonlit sky.

  Last but not least, you would be shown the Jaffna native’s biggest bugbear, the Buddhist viharas, the temples that mark the footprint of the Sri Lankan army—an enduring imprint of Sinhala chauvinism, an old wound that eats away at the Tamil to this day.

  The trishaw driver I hire from the surprisingly well-organized taxi rink in October 2015, who takes me to my hotel, so new that even he hasn’t heard about it—next to the spanking new railway station that India has rebuilt to reconnect the north to cities in the south—has a whole new target for his gripe. It isn’t the Sri Lankan soldiers who have escorted us into the city from the Palaly airbase. Or India. Or Rajiv Gandhi whom most Lankan Tamils, like the current member of the Provincial Council, the highly vocal Ananthi Sasitharan, blame for introducing their young to the culture of violence that wrecked their lives. He reserves his venom for Jaffna’s political class that hasn’t lived up to its promises.

  It’s at night that you get a glimpse of the dramatic dawn that is at hand. No longer the ghost city of deserted streets and long shadows that it once was, at sundown, the young, clad in hip T-shirts and jeans take over, whizzing past on motorbikes, doing wheelies on newly tarred roads, past homes that are being reconstructed.

  My taxi driver, Rajiv—a fairly common name in these parts—is barely out of his teens and already the owner of a car. He says, without batting an eyelid as he drops me off at 9 p.m., that he will come back for me by midnight, as if this is all par for the course!

  At Hotel Tilko’s open-air restaurant where I am set to have dinner with Jaffna’s large-hearted surgeon Dr Ravi Perumpillai—who moved back from London soon after the Tiger debacle to set up the city’s first surgical heart unit here—there is loud music . . . and alcohol. The puritanical ways of the Prabhakaran era were clearly at an end.

  The bouncer at Tilko overseeing the youthful exuberance of the post-LTTE era is, in fact, a hulking seven-foot-something former Tamil Tiger. Dr Pillai tells me his new cook-cum-housekeeper once served with the LTTE. ‘All my nurses at the hospital are also ex-LTTE. They don’t have formal training, which they are getting now, but they have something rarer—on-the-field training,’ said the surgeon.

  Jaffna Fort, framed in the moonlight, is no longer a Sri Lankan army fortress, but lit up—the Portuguese-built citadel is primed for a transformation into a tourist hub with a makeover on the lines of Galle Fort and Colombo’s stunning Independence Memorial hall.

  The Jaffna Football Stadium where an all-Lanka football tournament is underway is being speedily renovated under the supervision of the Indian consulate—the only foreign mission here—at a cost of Rs 7.1 crore, ahead of a video inauguration by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June 2016. It will be named after Duraiappah, the first mayor of Jaffna, who was Prabhakaran’s first ‘kill’. Until recently, it also held the grisly remains of a mass grave. Few of the Tamil teenagers playing at the stadium now will recall the blood spilled on these very same grounds—by the LTTE and by Rajiv Gandhi’s IPKF nearly thirty years ago.

  Ever since the guns finally fell silent in 2009, a clutch of doctors such as Dr Pillai, health workers, intellectuals, hoteliers and restaurateurs, even travel agents and corporates, many funded by the Tamil diaspora, have flooded back in and simply transformed the Jaffna of old.

  There are reports of the re-emergence of a religious right, a conservative backlash against the growing drug culture and promiscuity, virtually non-existent under Prabhakaran’s diktat.

  Yet, Jaffna, once so tightly wound, exudes for the first time the flavour of a freewheeling town. No longer the grim, joyless place it once was, Jaffna’s most heartening sound today is that of people laughing—out loud.

  Any regret over the Indian premier’s assassination that is trotted out when one steers the conversation in that direction, to remind them that it was Rajiv Gandhi who first came to their rescue, is at best perfunctory, embarrassed.

  The assassination was a blunder, yes. And a shock, they say. As the venerable Rajavarothiam Sampanthan, who heads the moderate Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and is the leader of the Opposition in Parliament, emotionally admits, ‘We feel an enormous sense of regret and sadness that Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a Tamil suicide bomber. I met him innumerable times, trying to find a way for our people to get their rightful place in Sri Lankan society, and he was always supportive. It was a huge shock. It simply should not have happened.’

  But for most others, it was nothing more than one of many deaths in a sea of assassinations that became part of their blood-soaked history.

  It has been almost thirty years since the young men in Ananthi’s own neighbourhood took up arms, but she reserves her most trenchant criticism for the Indian leaders who she believes were behind the upheaval—Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.

  She says that as a sixteen-year-old, long before the IPKF was even deployed in the north, she witnessed the radicalization of young Tamils by the Indians. ‘The Sri Lankan army was rounding up all Tamil youth who were critical of the government, and yes, the officers targeted all the young girls, including many like me, coming to our homes and demanding our presence in their barracks. Many of us ran away. But the people who put guns in the hands of our young men, who until then only knew a life of books and debates, were your leaders. Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. They taught them how to fight, how to use guns. Before that, we didn’t know the first thing about war. And then Rajiv sent in the Indian Army to fight our people, when they should have helped us to fight the Sri Lanka Army. This was the great betrayal. How can we forgive that?’ she asks.

  Ananthi’s is the prevailing view of Indian involvement in the Lankan Tamils’ battle for survival against the Sri Lanka Army in the cities of the north that are still living on the knife-edge of an unlikely peace.

  The unpleasant truth—Rajiv’s intervention would not earn him the gratitude of the Jaffnaite, even though he did so in their name. Today, barely anyone remembers that it was the siege of their city by the Sri Lanka Army in June 1987 that would be pivotal in the Indian prime minister’s decision to radically shift the goalposts on Sri Lanka and go from neutral interlocutor to Tamil saviour of sorts.

  After the bombing of Jaffna, a deliberate provocation by the Ja
yewardene government, the Indian prime minister initially tried to mediate between the two warring sides. The rules of the game changed when, under Delhi’s watchful eye, Colombo—which had been beefing up its armed forces through 1985–86—launched Operation Liberation, sending 4000 Sri Lankan soldiers into Jaffna city, rounding up 3500 young Tamils and bombing LTTE hideouts. As civilians flooded to safe havens across the Palk Strait, there was an outcry in Tamil Nadu. The domestic fallout forced Rajiv Gandhi to rethink his hitherto hands-off policy, as his own Intelligence Bureau warned of a Tamil backlash against the central government’s perceived inaction. As attempts at a truce floundered in the face of Jayewardene’s continuing crackdown on the LTTE, Rajiv Gandhi led India into the first direct intervention in Sri Lankan affairs.

  The Kachchativu standoff lasted for barely four hours on 2 June 1987, until the Sri Lankan navy escorted the flotilla of nineteen unarmed Indian boats loaded with food and medicines for the besieged people of Jaffna out of Sri Lankan waters. The Indian Navy was positioned ominously, barely 30 kilometres away, in international waters. Within forty-eight hours, Rajiv Gandhi would up the ante. After warning the Sri Lankan high commissioner in Delhi—a mere hour before the Indian Air Force (IAF) squadron took off from Yelahanka airbase in Bangalore—of military retaliation if they were thwarted again, he followed up Sri Lanka’s naval blockade with Operation Poomalai, a provocative airdrop of supplies over Jaffna by the IAF on 4 June that Colombo prudently chose not to challenge.

  A show of force, it was only 25 kg of supplies, airdropped a few miles from Jaffna. It was barely enough to feed a handful of families. But in strategic terms, the Jaffna siege was the closest that India and Sri Lanka came to an all-out war, until the famed standoff in 1990 between Sri Lankan President Premadasa and India’s IPKF GOC-in-C, Gen. Kalkat, when India was asked to withdraw its troops or be seen as enemy combatants.