The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi Read online

  And then I saw his body. It was a sight I would never forget.

  ‘Why is he just lying there? Why doesn’t someone help him up? Someone should get him to a hospital, get him immediate emergency treatment . . . Where is the emergency medical team? Has someone called the hospital?’ I said out loud. No one was listening.

  The next, and far more selfish, jumble of thoughts that crowded in was how to get out of there. I had to find the driver of my car. I had no idea where he was.

  After we left the Meenambakam airport earlier that evening, the cavalcade accompanying Rajiv Gandhi had slowed down at the turnoff from the Grand Southern Trunk Road to the 25-kilometre drive to Sriperumbudur. A man, clearly a security guard, was moving steadily down the line of cars, peering into each car and asking something. He reached my car and asked, ‘Neena Gopal?’ When I said ‘Yes’, he gestured for me to follow him. I guessed I was finally getting the interview with the man who every pre-poll survey predicted would be the next prime minister and, in my excitement, I left my camera and my handbag—and all the cash I had—in my car, telling the driver to stay close and come looking for me when we stopped. In the aftermath of the blast, without having any way of communicating with the driver who may well have fled too, I knew I was stranded. How was I going to get back to Madras to file the story? How long would it take to get from here to the city? Where was the nearest telephone? How was I going to tell my editors at Gulf News, Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates where I was based, that I had just witnessed the gory end of one of India’s most beloved leaders?

  As the terrified crowd fled from the spot where the dead and injured lay, and bewildered, anxious survivors ran through the gathering throng in the semi-darkness, I spotted Congress leaders G.K. Moopanar and Jayanti Natarajan, and Margatham who had been in the car with me, and at whose behest the former prime minister had made a special effort to address this oddly timed, late-night election rally.

  They looked shaken, aghast, devastated at the sight of Rajiv Gandhi’s prone, seemingly lifeless body. Margatham looked shattered, as if her world had ended. Rajiv Gandhi had only come to Sriperumbudur at ‘Aunty’s’ request.

  The next day both Natarajan and Moopanar would separately tell me how they had tried to lift Rajiv Gandhi from the ground but couldn’t as his body ‘simply disintegrated in their hands’. Worse, how at that crucial moment, they couldn’t find a single policeman, barring Rajiv Gandhi’s personal bodyguard, Pradip Kumar Gupta (the man who had come looking for me), who was lying right next to Rajiv Gandhi and had died in the blast.

  There was no ambulance—now an accepted fixture at election rallies. They couldn’t find any medical personnel, or a stretcher or gurney or even a vehicle to get him to the nearest hospital. In fact, within minutes of the blast, two cars, one a white Ambassador flashing a red beacon, and another that came from somewhere in the back, had backed on to the main road and sped away.

  The mood on the ground was getting decidedly ugly. At the spot where Rajiv Gandhi’s body lay, it was getting more and more difficult to hold one’s ground as his supporters closed in, muttering unintelligibly under their breath. The undercurrent of anger and hostility was palpable, as the party workers at the ill-chosen venue began to shout ‘Vazhige Rajiv Gandhi! Vazhige! (Long live Rajiv Gandhi! Long live!),’ not knowing, perhaps, how inappropriate a slogan it was. It was apparent they were still looking for some way to vent their fury, and were only holding back from heading out and smashing everything around them because it was unclear what exactly had happened to Rajiv Gandhi—whether he was dead or grievously injured, and who exactly was behind the blast.

  It was the DMK, said one man with great certainty. ‘Kalaingar’ (the moniker for Muthuvel Karunanidhi) hated Rajiv Gandhi and had openly said that he must be stopped. His words elicited loud murmurs of support from the throng of Congress workers, until another man said it wasn’t the DMK at all and was promptly slapped and pushed around. Nobody was thinking straight. As Rajiv Gandhi lay there, and Moopanar tried to keep the throng at bay, the crowd was vocalizing what was going through all our minds.

  One man kept insisting that Rajiv Gandhi had survived the blast; that he was only injured and all that was required was for someone, anyone, to take him to the nearby hospital. Many concurred. None of them could even countenance the prospect that he had breathed his last, as the tearful crowds kept saying ‘Paapa, rosa poo maadhiriyirikidai (Poor man, he looks like a rose),’ a reference to Rajiv Gandhi’s fair skin.

  No one could say the unsayable.

  From the corner of my eye, I finally saw a vehicle that I presumed was an ambulance, lights flashing, trying to make its way from the main road that we had left only minutes earlier. Blocked by the crowd, it was inching its way forward. I had to move with it, follow the ambulance carrying Rajiv Gandhi’s body, take the story to its logical conclusion.

  By a stroke of luck, as I was pushing my way through the crowd, trying to find the car that I had hired for the evening, Rajiv Gandhi’s driver emerged from the melee. I didn’t know him personally but he called out to me and said he had been looking for me everywhere. Catching me by the arm, he said, ‘We should leave; it’s not safe here. Anything can happen. Let’s go, let’s go, I will take you back to Madras. Once the protests start, there will be riots, they will block all the roads; we won’t be able to get back.’

  Brushing aside my protests about abandoning the Congress leaders if we left, and how we should stay with Rajiv Gandhi’s body, he insisted that I go with him, assuring me we would follow the body, which we were anyway ill-equipped to transport. With no sign of my driver and realizing this was my only way back to the city, I jumped in as he quickly reversed the car. We inched our way out of the venue as I continued to scan the scene for my driver who was nowhere to be found.

  We followed the ambulance to a hospital just ahead; checked whether Rajiv Gandhi’s body would be kept there overnight and, receiving conflicting, contradictory reports from the bewildered medical personnel there, with no one ready to confirm or deny that he had indeed died, we raced to Madras before the mobs had a chance to block the roads into the city.

  At the Central Telegraph Office on Mount Road, as I typed the copy, for once the sleepy telex operators were all awake. They stood behind me, their jaws dropping, reading the story as I wrote it.

  Rajiv Gandhi was dead. Assassinated at 10.21 p.m. on 21 May 1991.

  Once I filed the story and returned to my uncle-in-law’s apartment on Harrington Road in Madras, where I was staying, I fielded telephone calls from my anxious family, particularly my husband, who said that the minute he saw the news of the assassination on television in Dubai, he was certain in his heart that I was there! I spoke to our daughter, Shwetha, who was not yet ten at the time. Blissfully unaware of how close I had come to being blown up, she happily poured out the travails of her day at school as I sounded determinedly cheerful, while making a mental note that she needed a brother or a sister and should not be alone. Our second daughter, Sharada, would be born just over nine months later, a precious pregnancy that would have me confined to the bed till she was born.

  My husband’s wonderful uncle, M.K. Ramdas, was fielding all the other calls, including the critical one from his cousin M.K. Narayanan (who was also my husband’s uncle). Narayanan headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and wanted every single detail of the night’s terrible events. He listened patiently as I described what I had seen, asking me repeatedly about the ring of fire that I insisted I had seen around Rajiv Gandhi as he lay on the ground, minutes after the bomb had exploded. Only much later would it hit me that if there was indeed a ring of flames around the blast site, it would imply the use of landmines.

  The next morning, an IB team assigned by Narayanan came to hear my account after they had reconnoitred the Sriperumbudur area. They said they saw no evidence of a ring of fire but conceded that what I had seen must have been the flames when the victims’ possessions and clothes caught fire. They listened as I de
scribed the shocking lack of security for a former prime minister who had only four years earlier survived an assassination attempt in Colombo by a Sri Lankan naval rating.

  Even at that point, as we mourned the death of a wonderfully warm human being, few had a clue about who was actually responsible for the killing. The investigators hadn’t yet gone public with the fact that a senior policeman and his team had stumbled upon a camera that had captured telling images of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins.

  I was in limbo, in some sort of a bubble. In shock. It was only when I got back to my parents’ home in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) and my normally undemonstrative parents enveloped me in a highly unusual bear hug that I began to shiver uncontrollably and allowed myself to cry and mourn the passing of Rajiv Gandhi. The full horror of what I had witnessed, and the images and emotions that I had blocked and suppressed for seventy-two hours came rushing back.

  On 24 May, the nation stayed riveted to television screens as the funeral, attended by dignitaries from over sixty countries, was telecast live. The mortal remains of Rajiv Gandhi were consigned to flames on the banks of the Yamuna; his stoic son, Rahul, and daughter, Priyanka, the cynosure of all eyes.

  Days later, I received a call from the Indian embassy in Abu Dhabi. Rajiv Gandhi’s widow had sent a message asking me to meet her at their New Delhi home at 10, Janpath. I flew to Delhi on 31 May and, as I walked from the Congress party office to the pathway that led to the house that Rajiv Gandhi had called home, alongside the Gandhi man-Friday V. George, I was accosted by several senior Congressmen, saying I must find out at any cost, whether Sonia Gandhi would lead the Congress party!

  Inside, in a room lined with books and a long table where Rajiv Gandhi had often been photographed confabulating with his cabinet, was Sonia Gandhi, her face devoid of make-up, a far cry from the beautifully coiffed creature whom I had met on her visit to Dubai a few months ago. She reached across, held both my hands in hers and said, ‘Tell me everything, tell me what he said, what mood was he in, what were his last moments like. I want to hear it from you, every tiny detail. Was he happy, was he tense, what were his last words . . .’

  Tears streaming down her cheeks—and, I realized, mine too—and still holding on to my hands, she listened as I recounted the last forty-five minutes of India’s youngest prime minister’s life; his unexpected death closing the chapter on India’s all too brief Camelot.

  2

  The Hunt for the Assassins

  IF R.K. RAGHAVAN, INSPECTOR GENERAL of police in charge of security at Sriperumbudur, hadn’t stumbled upon a camera sitting atop a dead man in the aftermath of the blast, the story of the probe into the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi would have been very different.

  The object of much scorn in the media for the two low points in his career: the probe into the 2002 Godhra riots that exonerated Narendra Modi and—just over a decade before that—the appallingly poor security at Rajiv Gandhi’s election rally at Sriperumbudur on 21 May 1991, Raghavan found a vital piece of evidence that set investigators on the path to hunting down Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins.

  No one knew if the camera had recorded Rajiv Gandhi’s last moments, least of all, the explosion that claimed the life of a promising leader and the eighteen others who died with him. Not until the film in the camera was examined within forty-eight hours of the assassination and the first prints were taken—there were ten photographs in all—were investigators able to zero in on the probable killers.

  Two people stood out in the crowd: a dark, stocky young woman in an all-enveloping salwar-kameez and a short man in a crumpled, ill-fitting, white kurta-pyjama.

  The black-and-white frames—originally in colour—would unravel the shocking conspiracy behind an assassination that only the Mahatma’s and Indira Gandhi’s could rival in this country for the tag, ‘assassination of the century’.

  The photographs gave the LTTE no room for plausible deniability; the terror outfit was responsible for unleashing their karampuli, a Black Tigress, on their unsuspecting, first foreign target.

  Without the camera, it might have been just another ‘blind case’. Unsolved. Unresolved. Never laid to rest.

  As the blast ripped through Rajiv Gandhi’s upper body and threw him face down on the stony outcrop of land near the VIP area, Raghavan was barely a few feet away. He recalls how smoke from the bomb temporarily blinded him. ‘I couldn’t see anything. I lost my vision for several minutes after the blast. It was all a blur.’

  As people began screaming and running in all directions, Raghavan pushed his way towards where the Congress leader had been standing—the spot that should have been a sanitized security zone but had been breached in spectacular fashion within minutes of his arrival.

  Despite the threat perception that the former prime minister faced, Raghavan claims he hadn’t factored in the possibility that the target could be Rajiv Gandhi. ‘But the minute it hit me that it could be him, that he could have died, then like a madcap (sic) I began shouting for him, by name, hoping he would answer and my fears would be unfounded . . . until, we, Moopanar and I, and Vazhapadi Ramamurthy who came running from the dais, finally found him.’ In fact, Raghavan became the first person to inspect the shell which was all that was left of Rajiv Gandhi’s broken body. (Moopanar was the former Tamil Nadu Congress Committee [TNCC] chief; Vazhapadi, the serving one.)

  As policemen and political workers alike ran for cover, fearing more bombs would go off, Raghavan stood his ground, determined to protect the scene of the crime.

  The top cop and his team had inspected the venue of the rally in Tamil Nadu MP Margatham’s constituency soon after they had been alerted that Rajiv Gandhi was coming. First, on 20 May, a day before the former prime minister was to arrive from Hyderabad, and again on 21 May, as early as 5 p.m. that evening.

  ‘We didn’t expect any problems that day, none at all,’ he says, although he admits that, given the kind of threat he was under, ‘security for Rajiv Gandhi wasn’t at the level that it should have been’. Curiously, neither former Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Joint Director and Inspector General D.R. Kaarthikeyan who was given charge of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) within hours, nor the Commission of Inquiry set up on 27 May under Justice J.S. Verma, would prosecute the men responsible for these lapses.

  The onus of the security lapse lay as much with the Congress party as with the local police, although with Margatham’s pointman A.J. Doss browbeating the police into submission, the former was more to blame. Kaarthikeyan, in his book The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination,1 writes of the overzealous Doss brushing aside concerns of policemen and TNCC officials, and insisting on clearing a host of people who were given access to Rajiv Gandhi—twenty-three in all—that night. The list included a Congress worker named Latha Kannan who was given top clearance because of her proximity to Margatham; Latha would prove crucial for the bomber to gain access to Rajiv Gandhi.

  At the time, it wasn’t de rigueur for women thronging election rallies to be screened, frisked or scanned with metal detectors. Even if the metal detectors had been set up at Sriperumbudur as police say they had, claiming they had two metal detectors in place, the question of how a suicide bomber, weighed down with half a kilo of RDX, got through them has never been adequately addressed.

  Doss’s crossed wires with the police—and the TNCC—had him believing that the police would screen those twenty-three people. The police, on their part, thought it was Doss who should scrutinize the invitees. In the event, their collective failure to sanitize the VIP area, keep out people who had not been thoroughly vetted and position the barricades to keep the crowds at bay, was completely overlooked by the police top brass.

  Raghavan, who had served in the SPG assigned to Rajiv Gandhi when he was prime minister, knew the drill and admits to the gaping holes in the security arrangements. ‘I did see the gaps. I’d served in the SPG for Rajiv Gandhi ten times,’ he says, but adds that there was nothing anyone could have done at that late hour.

 
Critically, in the confusion over whether or not the Congress leader would be travelling to Madras that night, his personal armed gunman stayed behind in Hyderabad, leaving the former premier with just one security guard, Pradip Kumar Gupta. Gupta, who perished in the blast, was standing right beside him when the bomb exploded.

  Police negligence on the ground, combined with the fact that Doss was calling the shots, allowed the suicide bomber to quietly attach herself to party worker Latha and get close enough to Rajiv Gandhi to self-detonate.

  But Raghavan assigns the blame elsewhere. He says that the person who should bear the primary responsibility for single-handedly removing the SPG cover that could have protected Rajiv Gandhi and thrown a security ring around him under exactly such circumstances, was former prime minister V.P. Singh. On succeeding Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister, the Raja scrapped SPG protection for former prime ministers, restricting it to serving prime ministers only.

  ‘History will never forgive him,’ says Raghavan of V.P. Singh. ‘Nobody will.’

  Neither the SIT nor subsequent commissions of inquiry held V.P. Singh to account. Nor, for that matter, were the men in charge of Rajiv Gandhi’s security while he was in the state—the Tamil Nadu police and Doss—ever brought to book. (Rajiv Gandhi himself had famously brought the Chandrashekhar government down on the grounds that the government, using the security threat as a ploy to spy on his movements, had put him, his home and his phones under the surveillance of two constables from Haryana.)

  Will history judge Raghavan more kindly? As he scoured the area looking for something, anything, to help him find out who had set off the explosion and what kind of bomb had been used, he says he espied the camera lying on a dead man.

  ‘It had not been damaged at all, just covered with earth and grass,’ he tells me, ‘and I had absolutely no idea then of the significance of that camera. I picked it up, directed one of my men to secure it and keep it safe in the hope that there would be something there. I didn’t know at the time if it did.’