The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi Read online

  In the charged atmosphere, the SIT was picking up one LTTE operative after another, each one a mine of information, lifting the lid off the incredible network of support that the Tigers had set up over the years. But Ranganath was a new addition to the ranks, and his movements and modus operandi were therefore that much more difficult to track, a senior police official told me.

  Vicky’s revelations would finally lead to Sivaresan. His tip-off on a safe house in Tippasandra, Indiranagar, that was used by Tiruchy Santhan, was expected to yield Sivaresan. Instead, when the police stormed this LTTE hideout on 5 August, they found two injured LTTE boys, both of whom bit into their cyanide capsules. One died instantly; the other, three days later.

  The SIT then tapped a Bangalore-based LTTE sympathizer named Jagannathan, who squealed about the handful of other hideouts in the city—each one a revelation to the police—which led them to a single-storeyed house on a quiet side street in Domlur, which abuts Indiranagar.

  When the SIT and the Black Cats raided the Domlur house—now on 14th Main, HAL second stage—after locals caught and thrashed one of the LTTE injured, mistaking him for a thief as he was coming home, they realized how close they had been to nabbing Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins. Sivaresan, Subha and Nehru, the senior police official discovered, ‘had been at the Domlur house overnight and must have been there when we stormed the other Indiranagar hideout in Tippasandra’.

  In fact, when the LTTE hit squad came to their first hideout, waiting to receive them was the burly Tiruchy Santhan himself! (In a botched attempt, the SIT was unable to nab Tiruchy Santhan alive. He was running out of places to hide when they finally cornered him several months later in November 1991 in an LTTE smuggler’s house in Tiruchy, where he consumed cyanide and died.)

  Uncomfortable and uneasy about Puttenahalli, where they stood out from the local Kannadigas, Sivaresan had moved to Domlur, even as Ranganath found a house in Muthati and another in Biroota in Mandya district for the other injured cadres under Suresh Master’s care. The new hideout for the nervous and edgy Sivaresan was a single-storeyed house in Konanakunte, some 20 kilometres away, on the outskirts of the city.

  Ranganath, who had had both the cars re-painted and their number plates changed, was given little choice but to move to Konanakunte with the group, given that he now knew they were all complicit in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. He was now a co-conspirator.

  Ranganath’s wife, Mridula, uneasy, angry and afraid after she discovered the identities of her husband’s new friends, accompanied them when they moved to the remote colony on the outskirts of Bangalore on 16 August. Suresh Master was taking no chances, even though Ranganath had grown sympathetic to the Tiger cause and was no longer doing it just for the money.

  Moving to Konanakunte was a fatal error of judgement for the Rajiv Gandhi hit squad. Cornered and hunted, moving from one safe house to another, denied a seaborne escape route, and in completely unfamiliar territory, Sivaresan probably sensed that they were running out of options.

  For the SIT and the city police, unschooled in storming hideouts, capturing Sivaresan and the other members of the hit squad alive would prove a challenge unless they were backed up by the Black Cat commandos. Before that happened, they had to find the elusive Tiger.

  Two things would lead the police to Sivaresan’s doorstep before the SIT. One, Ranganath’s contact numbers and home address were collected by police when they were checking to see who had rented the Muthati and Biroota houses. It led them to a Congress worker, Anjaneya, as the main contact in Puttenahalli, who gave Ranganath’s office address as the lathe factory in Mandya, and his home address as Puttenahalli alongside the Shanti Oliver church, where Ranganath’s brother-in-law was a pastor. It wouldn’t take long for the city police to trace him. Two, the newspapers that Ranganath brought back with him to the house when he went to buy milk that morning had front-paged the Muthati raid and the LTTE suicides, deeply upsetting both Sivaresan and Suresh Master, who reportedly muttered that they were being chased and hunted like dogs. It clearly threw them off their game.

  But the person most rattled by the news that Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins were in the state—and now in her own home and backyard—was Mridula. Claiming to be ill and suffering an asthmatic attack, Mridula simply upped and left. Strangely, not one of the hardcore and well-armed LTTE operatives, neither Suresh Master nor Sivaresan, as much as protested. She left with Ranganath, but on their way home to Puttenahalli, he got off and decided to head back to Konanakunte to his new friends. The doughty and deeply patriotic Mridula, outraged by the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, knew she had to do the right thing. She called the police and blew the whistle on the entire clandestine operation, describing in detail to the shocked, unsuspecting police, the sixteen days she had spent with Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins, and how the most wanted men in India were now holed up in a house, barely 20 kilometres outside the city, poised, armed for a counter-attack.

  Bangalore City Police took her away to be debriefed, but then made the monumental error of sending uniformed and armed men to Konanakunte. They compounded that error by surrounding the suspects’ house with police vehicles that were clearly visible from the hideout.

  Ranganath, who had spent the night holed up in a ‘lodge’, returned to Puttenahalli early on the morning of 19 August to check on his wife and was told that she had been taken away by police. Panicking, he made tracks for Konanakunte, arriving in an autorickshaw. It didn’t help matters when he was recognized by the local residents, particularly the milk vendor, who thrashed him soundly for sheltering Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins and handed him over to the police.

  By this time, hundreds of curious local residents had gathered around the Konanakunte house, as had the city police, who had been led there by whistle-blower Mridula. This is where Sivaresan, Subha and Nehru, along with Suresh Master and two others, would make their last stand.

  The SIT’s own debriefing of Mridula only happened late on Sunday, 18 August, after the police commissioner informed them of the tip-off.

  With only a few Black Cats on call and the NSG put on operational alert, the SIT knew that by the time they got to the spot, they would have lost the all-too-important element of surprise.

  The lack of camaraderie and co-operation between the local police and the SIT, unlike the close relationship enjoyed by the SIT and Tamil Nadu Police, was partly to blame for the delayed alert, and it would yield the expected consequences.

  Mridula’s information and her graphic description of the lightly armed LTTE team left the SIT with a small sense of satisfaction as they believed that their hard work was about to pay off, and they would finally get their hands on the men and the woman who had pulled off the sensational and shocking murder of a national icon. Alive or dead.

  At first toying with the idea of sending Mridula or the milk vendor into the house as a decoy, the SIT tracking team discarded the proposal as being too tricky. They knew that the only chance they had of getting Sivaresan and Subha alive was to ensure they did not access the cyanide capsules they carried on their person or turn their grenades and guns on themselves.

  For the assassins, time was running out. There was nowhere to run or hide. For both the hunters and the hunted, the next few hours would prove to be critical.

  It was 17 August 1991. If he had survived, Rajiv Gandhi would have been celebrating his forty-seventh birthday in three days. It was also three months, almost to the day, since Sivaresan had assassinated him.

  Deputy Commissioner of Police K. Seetharam, who looked after Rajiv Gandhi’s security detail when he was prime minister, had chosen to come back to Karnataka in 1990. He had been devastated by the death of his favourite politician, particularly by the manner in which he had been cut down in his prime.

  At the time, sandalwood smuggler Veerappan consumed most of his attention. So, when he was summoned late on the night of 17 August to move to Muthati village near Mandya, and from there to Biroota, where locals had reported suspicious activi
ty, the last thing he expected was to stumble upon LTTE operatives.

  By the time Seetharam and his team arrived early the next morning, at 2 a.m., and raided the hideouts, of the nine who had been hiding out in Muthati and the eight in Biroota, twelve had already died after consuming cyanide. Three would die later. Two had survived and were taken to Bowring hospital in Bangalore for treatment.

  Seetharam says that with the stepped-up hunt for Rajiv Gandhi’s killers, he could never understand why he or, for that matter, any SIT member or top cop was not given access to these survivors and allowed to interrogate them, however junior or inconsequential or near death, they may have been.

  ‘It didn’t make any sense,’ he said. ‘The entire country was fixated on Rajiv Gandhi’s killers and nobody thought it necessary to question the two survivors.’

  The next night, around 11 p.m., there was another summons from his top bosses at the police headquarters. This time, they were told that they had been tipped off about an entire team of LTTE operatives, which included Rajiv Gandhi’s killers, hiding out in Konanakunte. He and his colleague Prabhakar, and a handful of commandos from the NSG, rushed to the suburb and surrounded the house in the dead of night. Their team kept watch from the only other building in the vicinity, the house next door.

  The hideout itself was in complete darkness. It showed absolutely no activity. All the windows were shut. Nobody could see them from the house; they couldn’t see anything in the house either.

  Suresh’s man Rangan, however, while returning from the village, spotted the police vehicles that were surrounding the residence and the uniformed, armed men taking their positions, and made good his escape in the Maruti. He would be nabbed several days later when he arrived in Madras and foolishly went straight back to his place of work.

  With Rangan’s failure to return, and Ranganath and Mridula having left the hideout, the Tigers at Konanakunte quickly realized that they had no access to a car or, for that matter, a driver. Escape by road was therefore impossible. They didn’t know the local language, Kannada, and were stranded in a place they knew little or nothing about; they had no maps, no access to fresh food and water. In remote Konanakunte, they had no local support as they would have had if they had stayed on in Tamil Nadu.

  Seetharam believes the police, for the first time since Indiranagar, Muthati and Biroota, had the tiniest of advantages but, for some reason, their hand was stayed and they were told to simply stay put until reinforcements—with cyanide antidotes arrived.

  ‘The problem was, anyone looking at us from that house could see us and our people in the stairwell, and, as the sun came up, there we were, fully armed with Sten guns, barely 50 yards from the front door. We had lost the element of surprise. We should have stormed in immediately and captured Sivaresan and Subha alive. But despite repeated requests to our bosses, we were told to sit it out and wait for further orders. That the SIT, the Black Cat commandos were on their way, that the chief was coming, that Muthati had gone wrong because we had rushed in, we should wait for the cyanide antidote . . .

  ‘We were the field unit on the ground, we should have been consulted, our views taken on board. We should have stormed the house on the night of 18 August. I have no idea what we were waiting for,’ he said, showing me pictures of himself and his family with Rajiv Gandhi in happier times. He believes that the delay was because the top brass wanted to be there and corner all the glory—and the awards—when the commandos stormed the house.

  With his frustration coming through even twenty-five years after the event, Seetharam recounts how, on the morning of 19 August, members of the press arrived at their doorstep, as did the only television channels at the time, Doordarshan and Star News. If they weren’t visible before, there was no missing them now!

  ‘We just sat around and did absolutely nothing from 4 a.m. till sundown,’ he says.

  At 6.15 p.m., he says there was a flash of light from inside the house. Some fifteen minutes later, one man emerged into the portico and began shouting loudly as he fired several rounds from a machine gun before going back inside.

  ‘Bullets were ricocheting all over the place as we scrambled for cover, with one bullet missing me narrowly,’ recalls the top cop. ‘The shooter was aiming, for some strange reason, at the only other building that existed in that area, and a lorry that was parked to the left of the hideout.’

  Seetharam recalls that after the man went inside, there was a burst of fire from the back of the house—probably the shooter and another man making an attempt to see if the party could escape from there—before there was a blast from inside the house, and then it all fell eerily silent again.

  Even then, the police officers weren’t allowed to enter the hideout. Their instructions were that they should wait until the commando team and top cops Kaarthikeyan and the local police biggie Kempaiah, the additional director general of police, Crime—and currently adviser to Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah—arrived.

  At 6 a.m. the following morning, when the hideout was finally stormed by the Black Cats who had landed with the top brass only forty-five minutes earlier, they found that Sivaresan had been shot in the temple, while Subha, Nehru and Suresh Master, and three others with them, had bitten on the cyanide capsules and died, bleeding from their mouths and ears, their faces contorted in agony, their bodies twisted in pain.

  This was it, the final denouement . . . This was no blaze of glory, no roaring Tiger fighting and dying for a cause, but craven and cowardly, the Tigers and their Karampuli, the fallback Black Tigress, collapsing in a whimper.

  Either by accident or design, it was Rajiv Gandhi’s birthday.

  3

  The Jaffna Conspiracy

  IN THE DENSE JUNGLES OF north-eastern Sri Lanka, across the Palk Strait, Prabhakaran nursed a grudge against Rajiv Gandhi which would become a full-scale obsession. It was here, deep in the forests of the Wanni, that the plot to kill the former Indian prime minister was first hatched.

  As the LTTE chief, solitary and furtive, moved like a hunted animal under the cover of darkness from one hideout to another, night after night, from Jaffna and Kankesanthurai to Vadamarachchi, and Vavuniya and back, the depth of his fury at Rajiv Gandhi’s perceived perfidy was an open secret. That is, it was a secret to everyone but the Indians.

  Through the IPKF deployment in the north-east, he played a game of cat and mouse with Delhi. Knowing he would be easy prey if he broke cover, he rarely slept in the same bed twice, neither took nor made any telephone calls, trusting no one, staying one step ahead of both Colombo and Delhi. It was a habit that stayed with him till his last days.

  His only entertainment after he was forced to return to the island nation from India in 1987 came from a movie projector in the safe house he picked to hide out for the night. This is where he would watch the latest thriller play out as shadows on a blank wall. The Tiger chief’s obsessive paranoia fed off Kollywood, the Tamil movies that featured his idol, MGR, in the lead, and films of the same genre as the 1984 Kamal Haasan-starrer Oru Kaidhiyin Diary (A Convict’s Diary) that spun stories of angry men nursing a grievance, extracting retribution, driven by revenge.

  A school dropout, Prabhakaran did have his Achilles’ heel. It wasn’t wine or women or song, or books—he grew up on Phantom comics—it was the movies. He was addicted to the string of videos brought to him by the one RAW agent with whom he shared a very special rapport—the legendary S. Chandrasekharan, known affectionately by the moniker ‘Chandran’.

  Chandrasekharan, who retired from RAW and set up the respected Delhi-based think tank, the South Asia Analysis Group, says it was from these nightly thrillers that the Jaffna conspiracy to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi probably took its inspiration. The Fred Zinnemann 1973 movie, The Day of the Jackal, based on the Frederick Forsyth bestseller, was the probable first seed.

  Prabhakaran routinely settled scores by publicly eliminating his rivals to instil fear in his enemies; his first ‘kill’ was the Jaffna mayor Alfred Dur
aiappah in 1975, whom he reportedly shot as he entered the Varadaraja Perumal temple. Chandran believes the plan to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi was in keeping with this ‘kill or get killed’ philosophy. ‘Everyone thinks it was the CIA and Mossad that planted the idea of assassinating Rajiv Gandhi in Prabhakaran’s head. I believe it was the movies that he saw; that’s what gave him the idea,’ says Chandran. Conspiracy theorists, however, demur.

  It wasn’t that Delhi didn’t have him within sight. If Prabhakaran wanted to get back at India for trying to call the shots in his backyard, India had mobilized every resource at its command to have eyes on their prize target at all times.

  But as a RAW operative from that era freely admits, with surveillance dependant on tip-offs from Lankan Tamils outside the inner circle, they never knew precisely where he was at any given moment. ‘We knew the minute he left that location,’ he laughs. Close, but never close enough.

  Delhi undoubtedly had ample opportunity to eliminate the LTTE chief a number of times—and chose not to. As a senior member of the Indian Air Force (IAF), who served in the IPKF and was stationed as the IAF bases in Palaly and Trincomalee, recounts, he and the helicopter squadron he commanded had been given Prabhakaran’s co-ordinates.

  ‘I had my copter, all ready to go. We informed headquarters that we had been tipped off on where he was. One of our chaps had tracked him down. It was all systems go. All we needed was clearance from Delhi and we could eliminate him. Just like that,’ he says, snapping his fingers. ‘We waited for the signal but then came the message—a firm “no”,’ says the senior Air Force pilot. ‘We had him in our sights. If we had eliminated him then, who knows . . .’ he says with a shrug, leaving the sentence hanging.