The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi Read online

  NEENA GOPAL

  THE ASSASSINATION OF RAJIV GANDHI

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  1. The Assassination

  2. The Hunt for the Assassins

  3. The Jaffna Conspiracy

  4. The Tamil Card—Strategy or Blunder?

  5. The RAW Truth

  6. White Vans, White Flags

  7. The Trial and the Conspiracies

  8. The Lost Legacy

  Epilogue

  Footnote

  2. The Hunt for the Assassins

  3. The Jaffna Conspiracy

  4. The Tamil Card—Strategy or Blunder?

  5. The RAW Truth

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  1

  The Assassination

  RARELY DOES ONE GET A ringside view of a cataclysmic event that changes the course of history in one’s own country, let alone a neighbouring one—an event which goes on to alter one’s life in a hundred different ways. With Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, nothing was the same again. Everything changed . . .

  He must have died instantly, falling face down as the bomb detonated, lying there in a mangled, bloodied heap, only his white-and-red scarf and his outsized running shoes intact. His clothes had been blown off his back; only the top of his head was visible.

  In a matter of seconds, a fairly standard report about a charismatic politician on the comeback trail, albeit a Gandhi scion, a former prime minister and barely forty-six at the time, was transformed—tragically—into one of the biggest stories I had ever covered.

  It catapulted me from an unknown reporter to someone who would always be known as the last journalist to have interviewed Rajiv Gandhi, minutes before he died. A macabre twist. And not the kind of exclusive I had bargained for.

  In the last twenty-five years, every time that night has come up in casual conversation, it has unfailingly recalled the image of Rajiv Gandhi lying on the ground, one outstretched arm sporting the only ostentatious thing about him, the Gucci watch he had been wearing during our hour-long interaction. And yes, his Lotto shoes. As trite as it may sound, it seemed almost as if he had been walking on air that night, exuding confidence that he was on his way back to the prime minister’s office.

  But there he now lay, cut down in his prime, less than a few feet away from where I stood rooted to the spot, in shock.

  I can still recall, in that split second before the explosion, the strange whooshing sound; a series of sputters, followed by a massive, resounding blast accompanied by a great, blinding flash of light. The heat, searing, singeing, knocked me back with its strength, raining death on everyone in front of me.

  I didn’t know what exactly had happened. I looked around peering through the smoke. There seemed to be no one else in front. Could I really be the last man standing?

  Rajiv Gandhi had landed at the Guindy airport, a stone’s throw from the more well-known facility at Meenambakam, just before sundown that day, piloting his own plane. A clutch of Congress party workers and some journalists from the local newspapers were there, as were bored policemen who didn’t bat an eyelid when I walked into the rooms at one end of the arrival lounge at the airport, which had been earmarked for VVIP guests. I checked out the dank interiors, noted paint peeling from the walls, the terrible toilets, the beds with less than clean sheets, and the complete lack of security. This was where the Congress chief was to be billeted that night.

  As Rajiv Gandhi walked into the arrival hall, a long, narrow room, he instantly spotted me and waved me to his side. I couldn’t tell whether the hundreds of messages I had bombarded every Congress office with, as Rajiv Gandhi criss-crossed the country on the first leg of the campaign, had been conveyed to him. Either way, after endless telephone calls, I had finally tracked down Rajiv Gandhi’s campaign manager and former diplomat, Mani Shankar Aiyar, who had told me on the night of 20 May to be present at Guindy the next day, and promised he would ensure an exclusive interview during the course of Rajiv Gandhi’s election halt at Madras (now Chennai). So there I was.

  We had met only months before when Rajiv Gandhi, accompanied by his wife, Sonia, had stopped over in Dubai en route to Bombay from Moscow and Tehran. At a reception hosted at the Hyatt Regency by the local Indian community, I had spent time with him discussing the hot topic of the day—his journey by train from Delhi to Lucknow, just after his Z security had been withdrawn. It was only the second time that I met him but he was chatty and approachable, and spoke at length about the drift in India under the new government and the need to rebuild ties with Moscow and Tehran.

  Sonia Gandhi, unlike the self-assured, confident leader of the party she is today, was nervous, fidgety and completely out of her comfort zone, asking me repeatedly whether I was recording the conversation with her. Which I was not.

  Rajiv Gandhi’s pressure on the Chandrashekhar government had ensured that the United States was denied permission to refuel its fighter aircraft in India at the height of the Gulf War. He had been at the receiving end of critical press in the western media for that decision, as it forced the US to continue to refuel from the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress party would subsequently pull the plug on the minority Chandrashekhar government, setting in motion the May 1991 polls that would claim his life.

  Once I got the heads-up from Aiyar, I scrapped plans to cover Jayalalitha’s campaign in her constituency. In fact, on 20 May, while I was standing outside Jayalalitha’s tony Poes Garden home in Madras along with a crowd of her die-hard supporters, she had slowed down and stopped her car when she saw me waving and, in response to a request, agreed to let me accompany her the next day when she planned to head to Bodinayakanur, the constituency from where she was standing for elections. She asked me to be there at the crack of dawn.

  This was to be the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) leader’s first and immensely successful bid to become chief minister of Tamil Nadu for the first time since the demise of her mentor, the iconic former chief minister of Tamil Nadu, M.G. Ramachandran, MGR.

  But in an odd twist of fate that evening, I went from Jayalalitha’s Poes Garden house to the headquarters of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and then to the Congress chief’s office. At the DMK headquarters, the topic of discussion was how much of a threat Jayalalitha posed to the party, and how the Congress must be cut to size as every pre-poll survey indicated that the Congress, pitted against a divided Opposition, wouldn’t do too badly nationally. At the Congress party office I met with the then Tamil Nadu Congress Committee head, Vazhapadi Ramamurthy.

  There had been stray incidents of violence throughout the day in the city. Without much prompting, Vazhapadi warned me that he had heard from the grapevine there would be violence the next day as well, while confirming, to my great excitement, that Rajiv Gandhi was indeed arriving late the next night and would most probably address a rally, not far from Madras at Sriperumbudur.

  Whether he was hinting that there would be some kind of violence at Rajiv Gandhi’s rally or not, I have never been able to fathom—and I’ve replayed that conversation in my head a zillion times over. Could he have been warning me off? What did he know? After all, Vazhapadi was the first—and only—person to talk, a full twenty-four hours before the assassination, of the dangers posed by the Sri Lankan Tamils who were based in sizeable numbers in Madras and how their very presence in the city and the state was not conducive to peace or safety.

  The warning was couched in the vaguest of terms, and it was only when I was sending off my report on the assassination that I remembered what he had said, connected the dots and wove it into the story, thereby becoming one of the first reporters t
o point fingers at the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the possible perpetrators. Moments after the assassination, on the night of 21 May, one of the senior officers of the Madras police I had accosted at Sriperumbudur had raised the involvement of the Tigers as a distinct possibility. In fact, unbeknownst to most people in authority, and without even knowing for certain if the LTTE was involved, the Madras police had begun rounding up Sri Lankan students of Tamil origin and throwing them into jail.

  Years later, Ravindran, the manager of the Tamil newspaper Virakesari in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, would tell me how he never managed to finish his engineering degree because of that one night when he was arrested and kept in a Madras jail for a few days, before he hot-footed it back home.

  A commercial pilot before he entered politics, Rajiv Gandhi had flown his own plane from Visakhapatnam where he had addressed a rally earlier that evening for Congress candidate Uma Gajapathi Raju.

  Sriperumbudur would have been called off in all likelihood had Rajiv Gandhi’s plane, which had developed technical problems in Visakhapatnam, not been fixed at the very last minute.

  Hundreds of supporters lined the streets all the way to Sriperumbudur on the bumpy, narrow road from Madras. Every time the car slowed and the crowd pushed forward, people would reach through the open window and pinch his cheek!

  En route to Sriperumbudur and then again as we turned into the rally grounds, something struck me—security for the former prime minister, virtually non-existent after prime ministers V.P. Singh and Chandrashekhar had withdrawn his Z security, could open the door to an attack of some kind.

  There was a sea of flags fluttering from the poles that ringed the rally venue and a podium at the far end. But unlike other poll rallies where there was a clear demarcation between the VIP area and the seating area for the audience, there was just open ground with a few hundred people milling about within the bamboo barricades, shouting slogans. The lighting was extremely poor. Most of the place was in darkness as the former prime minister’s car approached. Someone had clearly skimped on the arrangements when the venue of the rally was shifted from the local college to the temple grounds. And I said so.

  In my mind’s eye, I can still see Rajiv Gandhi’s gentle smile that showed not the slightest irritation at the less than conducive arrangements at the rally venue. I can still hear his voice as he turned his head and half-jokingly asked local member of Parliament Margatham Chandrashekhar who was sitting in the back seat of the car where I was, kneeling, wedged uncomfortably into the tiny space between the driver and Rajiv Gandhi, ‘Did you hear what Neena just said, Margatham? Why are there no lights? Why is it so dimly lit? There seem to be very few people. Where are your supporters? This doesn’t seem like an election rally at all . . .’ Half-joking or not, he wasn’t far off the mark.

  The government’s inexplicable scrapping of Rajiv Gandhi’s security even though the Congress leader’s life was under threat had set Lutyens’ Delhi speculating on whether there was more to the move than met the eye, and had laid him wide open and vulnerable to attack.

  Given the family’s recent history of deaths and assassinations, the removal of the Black Cats cover didn’t make sense. Rajiv Gandhi’s younger brother, Sanjay, had died under mysterious circumstances in a plane crash in 1980, with speculation rife that the two-seater aircraft had been sabotaged, while his mother, the indomitable Indira Gandhi had been gunned down in 1984 by her own Sikh bodyguards who had been reinstated against the explicit instructions of intelligence agencies.

  As the car in which we were travelling hit yet another pothole, a group of slogan-shouting supporters tried to grab him through the open window. He was even lit up like a beacon, with a light fixture above the windscreen focused directly on him. There was little doubt that at one level, Rajiv Gandhi saw the mass hysteria wherever he went as a sign of his immense popularity, as a vindication that the people still loved him and that he remained his party’s main vote-catcher. But at some level, he was concerned. While nobody could have predicted that his life would be snuffed out just like that only minutes later, he had an almost prescient premonition of his own death.

  Unsettled by the complete absence of security—no gunman would have been able to protect him, had someone lunged at him through the open window with a knife or taken a shot at him—I had asked him, pointedly, whether he felt his life was at risk, more so now that there was absolutely no security beyond the one token bodyguard, who was, incidentally, in another car.

  Rajiv Gandhi responded with a counter-question: ‘Have you noticed how every time any South Asian leader of any import rises to a position of power or is about to achieve something for himself or his country, he is cut down, attacked, killed . . . look at Mrs [Indira] Gandhi, Sheikh Mujib, look at Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at Zia-ul-Haq, Bandaranaike . . .’

  Within minutes of making that bone-chilling prophetic statement that hinted there were dark forces at work and that he knew he was a target, Rajiv Gandhi himself would be gone.

  As we turned off the main road, there was a mandatory burst of welcoming firecrackers. We had stopped on a slope on slightly higher ground and had walked down the approach, a few hundred yards or so to the open space in front of the main temple at Sriperumbudur, where a red carpet had been laid out.

  Stepping out from the front seat, Rajiv Gandhi had said, ‘Come, come, follow me,’ and I had demurred, walking to the back and around and then to the front of the car so I could have a bird’s-eye view of the venue, without having to deal with the throng.

  ‘I have one more question,’ I had said. ‘I’ll wait for you here.’

  A bomb, a suicide bomber, let alone the first female suicide bomber on Indian soil, was the last thing on anyone’s mind as Rajiv Gandhi plunged into the crowd of supporters on his way to the podium at the far side of the ground, shaking hands, smiling warmly, as was his wont, at everyone who reached out to him.

  But as the huge explosion went off a few minutes later and I, standing about ten steps away, felt what I later realized was blood and gore from the victims splatter all over my arms and my white sari, a nameless dread took hold—something terrible had happened to the man I had just been talking with.

  The last time I had followed Rajiv Gandhi into a crowd had been exactly two years earlier, in 1989, in Kalwakurthy, the constituency of the Andhra Pradesh chief minister, the larger-than-life N.T. Rama Rao, where Rajiv Gandhi was set to campaign.

  Back then, we had driven in what had seemed like an endless 100-car cavalcade, complete with Black Cat commandos and top security, all the way from Hyderabad to the venue. As I got out to follow Rajiv Gandhi, a wave of people converged around the Congress leader who was surrounded by bodyguards, even as I was knocked into a narrow little ditch. Unable to move for several minutes, and out for the count, I sensed rather than saw dozens of people jumping over me.

  This time, I was deeply reluctant to follow Rajiv Gandhi into the crowd.

  At Sriperumbudur, he had no such compunctions. Minutes after he walked unhesitatingly into the crowd, there was a deafening sound as the bomb spluttered to life and exploded in a blinding flash. Everything changed.

  A moment that, in my head, will always be frozen in time. It was exactly 10.21 p.m.

  Months earlier, in February 1991, while covering the first Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait by Allied Forces and NATO, I had walked the beaches of Kuwait with a team of French de-miners. I had a fair knowledge of what bombs looked and sounded like. Except, the French kept you at a safe distance, out of harm’s way, and insisted you use the earplugs they provided when they detonated the Claymore mines.

  Who saw Sriperumbudur coming . . .

  So when the suicide bomber did set off her bomb, the first thing I said to Suman Dubey, Rajiv Gandhi’s media adviser—I had stopped to talk to him instead of following Rajiv Gandhi into the crowd—was that this was no ordinary blast, quickly correcting my first reaction as I scanned the scene in front of me, from ‘That sounds like a very odd f
irecracker’ to ‘No, no, that’s definitely a bomb.’

  The silence once the bomb went off must have lasted less than a fraction of a second. But that moment, until all hell broke loose, the shrieks and the wailing, was the stuff of nightmares. None of the war coverage I had done in Kuwait or Iraq had prepared me for this. Every single person ahead of me had died in the blast. Bits of their clothing had been seared on to their bodies, but most of it had been burnt off. Their exposed flesh looked as if it had been roasted, blackened. It was a grisly sight. Raw, still bleeding from their wounds, many lay face up, a mangled mass of tangled bodies. Dead people. There were headless torsos, body parts, arms and legs . . . Some were barely alive; many were dying, stacked up against the grisly dead. It was macabre, a scene from hell.

  As the panicked crowd around me and on the other side of the scene took to their heels, the people screaming as they came running up, some coming straight at me as I tried to move towards the site of the blast, I was shoved this way and that. As they ran past, and in all directions, a part of me noted that many were police and security personnel. In the ensuing melee, few cared that as they pushed aside the flimsy bamboo barricades and broke through the rows of chairs, they were stepping over a clutch of the freshly dead.

  Gone was the excited crowd that had been shouting and cheering only seconds before. In its place were the wails, the screams, as I ran forward; and then, someone behind me pulled me back just in time and said in Tamil, ‘Watch out, you’re about to step on somebody’s arm.’ The revulsion, the horror was complete.

  As I fought my way through to the blast site that was only a few feet away, stepping over the debris of the dead and the broken barricades, the one thought running through my head was the fate of Rajiv Gandhi. He was in there somewhere in that mass of bodies. How serious was it? Could he have survived it? Could he be dead?