The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi

by Neena Gopal

  The airdrop was Rajiv Gandhi’s signal to the Jayewardene government that the ill treatment of Sri Lankan Tamils—a domestic hot potato—coupled with the bigger issue, challenging India’s writ in its own backyard, would come at a price. India, on 4 June 1987, officially charged ‘the Government of Sri Lanka with denying the people of Jaffna their basic rights’, saying that India could not remain ‘indifferent spectators as hundreds of civilians died and many more faced starvation’. Within sixty days, however, despite being the only Indian leader to ‘fight’ for the rights of the Lankan Tamils by putting Indian boots on the ground, he would earn the implacable hatred of the Colombo elite and the only Lankan Tamil he left out of the peace deal.

  In a city inured to more than thirty years of bloodletting and war, and brought up on a diet of unadulterated Tiger propaganda, it’s no surprise that nobody in the Jaffna of today can—or will—recall the events with any clarity beyond the satisfaction that Sri Lanka—and the Tamil Tigers—gave Rajiv Gandhi’s India a bloody nose when he shifted gears again, abandoning the LTTE and going back to doing business with Colombo.

  Rajiv Gandhi, Architect of Devolution

  Not many in Sri Lanka’s north care to remember that the much-touted devolution of power to the Tamils worked into the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement of July 1987, and once again central to the Tamils’ quest for equal rights, was Rajiv Gandhi’s brainchild.

  First incorporated in the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord signed by Rajiv Gandhi and Jayewardene on 29 July 1987, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of Sri Lanka was passed on 14 November 1987. The Provincial Councils Act, passed by the Parliament alongside the 13th Amendment, legalized the establishment of provincial councils, the devolution of power to them, and the merger of the Northern and Eastern councils, while declaring Sinhala and Tamil as the national languages and retaining English as the link language.

  In fact, Rajiv Gandhi, moved more by reasons of geopolitics than just sympathy for the Sri Lankan Tamils, was the first foreign leader to weigh in on the side of the Tamils after the Sri Lankan government, in 1974, passed laws that the Tamil minority perceived as discriminatory.

  The sizeable Tamil minority—roughly 11 per cent of the 20 million Sri Lankans—had begun a peaceful, democratic push for greater autonomy which was deemed unconstitutional through the 6th amendment of the Sri Lankan Constitution in 1983.

  The devolution that Rajiv Gandhi backed would become a deeply divisive and contentious issue. It was seen by both the moderates and Sinhala chauvinists as a gross interference in Lankan affairs because it sought to give the Tamil people a status equal to that of the Sinhala majority, and no government in Colombo was willing to fully implement its provisions.

  The foot-dragging by the Jayewardene government over implementing the 13th Amendment would alienate the Tamils further. LTTE chief Prabhakaran cleverly tapped into the deep disillusionment of the highly erudite, aspirational Tamil populace with Colombo’s continued discrimination to build support for his own violent, secessionist movement.

  Support for Prabhakaran was unwavering even when it came to the most dastardly LTTE criminality of all, the forcible recruitment of boys and girls as child soldiers. In the early days, and unlike the other separatists, the group led by Prabhakaran—who projected himself as the saviour, the only leader who could deliver the Tamils from Sinhala duplicity—drew the angry Tamils to them in droves. Many were relatives of Prabhakaran himself and came from in and around the villages of Velvettithurai, his home town.

  The draw of the LTTE was such that it attracted both the educated and the uneducated, the tillers as well as the teachers, and hundreds of young people barely out of their teens. At least a third of the Tigers, recruited forcibly or otherwise, comprised young girls and women, with close to 6000 of these female soldiers dying in battle.

  But as the LTTE grew into a status quo power that ran a supremely efficient, de facto police state in the north and the east of Sri Lanka, there was a concomitant drop in the numbers gravitating towards the Tiger army. Forcible recruitment became the order of the day, and heading the drive to make up for the shortfall in the Tigers’ lower ranks was a flamboyant LTTE commander called Ellilan, who allegedly struck terror in the hearts of ordinary Tamils when he came knocking on their doors, asking for their children.

  But say that to the poster girl for the LTTE remnants, and she’ll have none of it. Ananthi is Ellilan’s wife, the face and voice of many who have all but given up hope of ever finding the ‘disappeared’.

  The Tamils’ complicated love-hate relationship with the LTTE was overlaid with an undercurrent of fear and resentment that ripples through every interaction with outsiders, be it Sinhala or Indian. Lankan Tamils half relished that they finally had a fighting force to stand up to the Sinhala majority, but it was a Faustian bargain. Honour and self-pride in return for blood, guts and sacrifice.

  Free Jaffna

  In 1998, as part of a group of international journalists invited by the Sri Lankan government to take a tour of ‘free Jaffna’, I got a taste of what it was like to live under the Sri Lankan jackboot and, at the same time, the watchful eye of the Tigers. One had to take flights operated by the SLAF, from the Ratmalana airbase in Colombo, sitting cheek by jowl with Sri Lankan military personnel who were flying out to relieve those stationed in and around the Palaly airbase.

  The runway was a reminder of the most recent battle for Jaffna; it was so pitted and cratered that we skittered across on landing and take-off. An airbase and a city 16 kilometres apart, conjoined by an uneasy peace. Sri Lankan forces had evicted every single villager from homes and farms within a 16-kilometre radius of Palaly. The dirt road was flanked by home after empty home, abandoned cattle sheds, school buildings with their roofs and walls blown off, tiny tea shops, toddy outlets that must have once done thriving business. It was no man’s land—barren fields lay untended, overgrown, ringed with palmyra trees and the dense, lush greenery of a countryside that must have once sustained a bustling community; the once well-off residents herded into what were little more than slums in the heart of Jaffna.

  I got a stark sense of what it must have felt like to be in the cross hairs of the LTTE and the IPKF when the bus taking us to Jaffna city dropped us right in front of the Jaffna Teaching Hospital. The building still bore the scars of the so-called ‘Diwali day shootout’ by the Indian Army on doctors, patients and staff, all in uniform, on 21 October 1987. An attack which the Indian Army justified claiming it was retaliatory fire. The LTTE, it would later emerge, had allegedly sent some of its wounded to be treated here.

  Some eleven years later, the hospital was teeming with patients, mostly women and children. The few men were either old or wounded, many with prosthetic limbs, but with an erudition that came through even during the briefest of interactions.

  Wealthy Tamils from an era that predated an LTTE-dominated Jaffna had always prided themselves on the education provided by the missionaries who had set up schools and colleges across the country some 250 years ago. That led to a whole generation of prominent Lankan Tamils being educated here before going abroad to the UK and the US for higher studies.

  The Jaffna they left behind remained inextricably tied with the many Tamil movements, the alphabet soup of parties, that came up to challenge Colombo’s dominance. Ultimately, of course, the LTTE emerged as the pre-eminent voice for Tamil nationalism after the Prabhakaran-led group decimated and brutally silenced Tamil moderates, justifying extreme violence as the means to an end.

  As an old Lanka hand told me, ‘In India, if you disagree, they vote you out. In Lanka, they just kill you . . .’

  In this highly politicized city where everyone is an expert, the bloodletting ever since the majoritarian versus minority politics took hold turned even mild-mannered academics into gun-toting Tamil separatists.

  As anyone with links to the violent separatists was targeted, taken away at random for questioning or simply eliminated, alienated Tamils sympathetic to the cause were
drawn to those who posed as their saviours. The LTTE’s commitment to and fierce avowal of the Tamil cause—more than the other separatist groups who were accused of striking side-deals with Colombo and Delhi—ensured the Prabhakaran-led ‘nationalists’ would rise in prominence to become the bulwark of the resistance. In drawing on an empathetic populace that would become their eyes and ears, and heed their diktat, a vast intelligence-gathering network was created, which would undermine every outside force that attempted to subjugate it.

  Yet, one could never be sure if the Jaffna Tamil—then as much as now—was an enthusiastic supporter who wholeheartedly backed the violent means adopted by the LTTE in their quest for Eelam, or if he simply played along, looking all the while over his shoulder, worried that he and his family would not be able to dodge the LTTE bullet unless he did what was asked of him.

  Was the violence, the heartbreak of losing loved ones and their broken homes worth it, one had wondered then—as one does now—because the community had come to realize that the quid pro quo of such a force multiplier was that a whole generation of the young had no real future except to take up arms. Clearly, this was why families who could afford to smuggle their children out, did so at great cost, but the poorer sections had little choice but to stay and face conscription.

  This was brought home as I wandered around that morning and processed the misery that hung like a pall of gloom over the hospital. Until then I had only heard of child soldiers which, many said, was mere government propaganda. As I was the only Tamil-speaking journalist in that group, the women in the Jaffna Teaching Hospital opened up to me that day. None would share her name, but every one of them spoke of how they had quietly moved their children out, as any child, boy or girl, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen was fair game for LTTE recruiters. If the LTTE found out, retaliation would be swift and brutal, they said. If the boy had been sent abroad, the girl would be forced to take his place.

  One woman said to me, lowering her voice, ‘Can you see a single child, a single teenager on the street?’ I looked around, and realized she was right. ‘There’s no man above eighteen and no man below thirty here, and no girls, no young women. Nobody’s safe. We are a city of old people,’ she said.

  ‘The Pulikal (Tigers) want to save us—that’s why they have left Jaffna. But they haven’t really left, so we are watched by everyone—the government and the Tigers,’ said another woman, urging me to leave, worried they would attract attention.

  The Bishop of Jaffna, sheltering hundreds of families in the sprawling bishopric was equally cagey. When asked if the return to Jaffna was an indication that the people had grown weary of the LTTE and were voting with their feet, the bishop had me quickly ushered out of the premises rather than be pinned down on where he stood vis-à-vis the Tigers.

  The hold that the LTTE had over the people, a mix of admiration and fear, was best illustrated when the grim-faced owner of a hotel where I stayed on a subsequent visit to Jaffna trotted out the LTTE line that under the Tigers, women were completely safe, even as he quietly asked me to lock my door that night!

  In Kilinochchi, ahead of an interview with S.P. Thamilchelvam, the LTTE political ideologue, a decade later, I noted that the mindset hadn’t changed. My LTTE minder tried to lock me into my room at St Theresa’s Convent, a stone’s throw from the LTTE headquarters. I persuaded him to give the key back, saying I was claustrophobic, and promised him I wouldn’t venture out. Later that night, I broke that promise as I woke to a rumble on the dark main street in an otherwise deathly quiet town, and stepped out to see tanks and trucks towing two fighter planes. It was only when the newly formed Air Tigers bombed Colombo in April 2009 that I realized what he was trying to prevent me from seeing.

  My LTTE minder was the media in-charge Dhaya Master, who would be brought in by the Sri Lanka Army to identify Prabhakaran’s bullet-riddled body when he was found in Nanthikadal in May 2009. In 2015, he refused to answer any questions on where he and other LTTE remnants stood.

  A Tamil Torn

  The dichotomy that characterized the Tamil psyche when the LTTE chief’s writ ran here could be put down to a people biding their time until the Prabhakaran era ended, and with it, the guns and violence and suicide bomb squads. They may have had enough of allowing one force to dictate how they must think, act and feel. Did they ever feel trapped, unable to escape the wrath of a man who claimed to speak for them but never let them speak their mind, all the while dogged by a state that saw them as the fifth column for their embrace of the LTTE’s brand of terror?

  C.V.K. Sivagnanam, the chairman of the newly elected National Provincial Council, had no qualms at all in standing up strongly for Prabhakaran when I asked if the Tamil people are relieved now that he’s gone. ‘Without the LTTE, we would have had nobody to fight for the rights of the Tamil people.’ This was a full year after landmark elections empowered Tamil politicians who had disavowed their ties to the militant separatists.

  Indicating that the opposite sentiment prevailed, he said that the Tamil people owed the LTTE chief a huge debt of gratitude. ‘We owe him. Prabhakaran is the only one who was willing to stand up for our rights as equal citizens of this country and when that failed, fight for the cause, fight for Tamil Eelam and not compromise on that stand. That’s why Tamils will never criticize him, we could never do that.’

  The Rajiv Gandhi legacy—the constitutional route to equality—stood for nought around the dinner table that night in Jaffna as no one disagreed on the violent methods that were embraced by the radicalized Tamil. A virtual who’s who of Jaffna’s brains trust, politicians and businessmen, they had all at one time or the other interacted with the Tiger supremo as he grew from heading one of many groups that came up to counter Colombo, to helming the only group that mattered. Prabhakaran, the virtual messiah, his rush to megalomania never challenged.

  Prabhakaran Legatees Rejected by Electorate

  Was Sivagnanam’s the popular view? Post the Prabhakaran era, a clutch of moderate political parties such as the umbrella Ilankai Thamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK) has risen anew from the ashes of the LTTE, bringing together LTTE remnants and pro–LTTE-leaning politicians, like Gajan Ponnambalam of the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF).

  While many older Sri Lankan Tamils who had pandered to the LTTE’s militaristic political order continue to hold a candle for Prabhakaran, there are many who believe in a unitary Sri Lanka and want the current process to go forward. These Tamils, outside the charmed circle of Prabhakaran and his hand-picked commanders and their families, survived the war years by staying well below the radar as power shifted back and forth between the Tigers and the army, and as the city changed hands over thirty years in the often futile and bloody tug of war between the secessionists and those who believed in federal freedoms.

  Jaffna Tamils with a history of staunch anti-Sinhala activism, like Ponnambalam, for instance, have made a conscious decision to paper over the disquiet that they are back to being second-class citizens after three decades of fighting for self-rule. The weapons Ponnambalam uses today might be different, falling back on the Constitution and the right to dissent rather than Prabhakaran. But in a clear message that times were changing, Ponnambalam’s party, the TNPF, was rejected by the electorate in the 2015 elections for attempting to nail its flag to the LTTE.

  The TNPF’s main electoral plank was a call to reject the Rajapaksa government’s division of the north and the east. This was done by the Sri Lankan President when the North-Eastern Province was de-merged in 2007, following a court verdict that rejected Jayewardene’s 1988 proclamation of a merger as part of the Rajiv–Jayewardene accord. Rajapakse also watered down the powers given to the newly created Northern Provincial Council, placing the police and the courts under Colombo’s jurisdiction, instead of implementing the full-fledged devolution that had been promised under the accord. But in a sign of the times, a political party like Ponnambalam’s tagged to Prabhakaran, however well-meaning its intent, found no takers.


  Ponnambalam still hankers after the unfulfilled promise of the 13th Amendment. ‘We will fight until we get a joint north-east provincial council, not this truncated one where the north and the east have been divided, as well as full devolution. Do you know that even the devolution that was promised by the Indo-Sri Lankan agreement by Rajiv Gandhi does not go far enough? I have always argued against it in that form,’ he insists.

  In the northern swathe of towns and villages where the needs of the Tamil individual had for so long been subsumed by the Prabhakaran-run Tamil state, the anger, resentment and shock at the comprehensive defeat of their forces and the manner of the implosion, have given way to a grudging acceptance that while fate may have dealt them a low blow, all has not been lost. It was up to them to make the best of it and take another shy at the earlier yen for parliamentary debate and the rule of law.

  The biggest change in the once embattled north is the open, thrusting debate on the streets and in homes about Tamil rights and privileges, the animated discussion and vitriol by an elected council of Sri Lankans of Tamil origin where diametrically opposite views are aired—one side unapologetically accusing the current administration led by Chief Minister Wigneswaran of selling out to Colombo, the other stressing the need to work alongside the Sinhala majority to heal the wounds of nearly four decades of war.

  Sampanthan—The Man in the Middle

  This is Jaffna’s first real taste of democracy post the internecine wars that began in the 1980s. Can it let the opportunity slip away in the welter of criticism of Colombo that is threatening to drown out even those like the venerable TNA leader and member of Parliament Rajavarothiam Sampanthan who counsels patience and negotiation? The newly anointed éminence grise of Tamil politicians, Sampanthan lays out the reasoning behind the moderate stance of his party.