The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi Read online

  Only once thereafter did the IPKF get close enough to Prabhakaran. They bombed his bunker in the Wanni, in his hideout Base One Four, in January 1989. The LTTE chief, though angry and upset, escaped with barely a scratch.

  Complicating matters was the confusion and lack of clarity in Delhi’s intelligence and strategic circles, on whether Prabhakaran constituted a short-term threat to be eliminated or a long-term asset to be cultivated. And added to this was the question of whether this bit player who had forcefully interjected himself into the Indo-Sri Lanka narrative by taking on the Indian Army, could still be ‘turned’; a Tamil ‘card’ that India could use to keep Colombo off balance in the years to come.

  Prabhakaran was under no illusions about where he stood vis-à-vis Delhi. He may have made concessions on a one-on-one basis to Indians like Chandran, but Rajiv Gandhi’s Delhi was the enemy.

  In fact, the RAW operative’s relationship with the LTTE chief and the man that RAW cultivated as its LTTE insider, Col Kittu, real name Sathasivan Krishnakumar, was so strong that when Indian soldiers were being held prisoner by the LTTE, it was Chandran—as he himself admits—whom the Indian Army called for help.

  ‘They asked me to intercede with the LTTE and get our men released,’ he says. ‘I did. I stepped in when Military Intelligence [MI] asked for help.’ He knew the Lankan Tamil leaders like few others, all were on a first-name basis with him.

  Chandran was low-key, nondescript. RAW recruits of that time still recall how, in the mid-1980s, he would simply throw a bag over his shoulder, get on a motorbike and zoom off from their office in Madras and not be seen or heard of for months together. Their guess was that Chandran, the only Indian who could reach out to the top rungs of the Tamil militant groups, had either headed off to Jaffna on a clandestine boat or to one of the many camps in the state where the Tamil groups were being given military training.

  Thirty years later, incidentally, Chandran continues to staunchly deny that Indian operatives trained the Lankan Tamil separatists. ‘We didn’t need to. One group of Tamils had already travelled to Palestine and received military training from George Habash’s wing of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]. When that first group came back, they trained the others; India had no role to play in giving them military training,’ insists Chandran, as politically correct as ever, leaving out the fact that India had provided refuge and set up the camps where the Tamils trained.

  Thirty years later, as difficult as it is for him to accept, Chandran also acknowledges that Prabhakaran’s black warrant for Rajiv Gandhi was unexpected.

  ‘I didn’t see it coming. I thought I knew him, but one didn’t expect this. It makes me want to weep; it saddens me deeply that we were unable to save Rajiv Gandhi. We should have saved him, we should have known. We didn’t really get Prabhakaran,’ says Chandran.

  Many members of his RAW fraternity as well as senior members of India’s military who served in Sri Lanka with the IPKF have gone public over the years with their disquiet on the role played by the Colombo elite and the political families, particularly President Premadasa who is said to have fuelled Prabhakaran’s antipathy towards Rajiv Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi was a leader whom Colombo and, for that matter, Pakistan’s counter-intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which had a major presence in the Sri Lankan capital, did not want to see return to lead India.

  And Prabhakaran was easy pickings for anyone wanting to settle scores with ‘Big Brother’. India paid him scant attention to begin with, preferring Lankan Tamil groups such as the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) and EPRLF.

  As India played footsie with the other groups, the LTTE grew more powerful, tightening its hold over the Tamil people under an ever more menacing Prabhakaran who refused to be relegated to the margins of the Tamil discourse. Delhi could no longer afford to ignore him. But in trying to contain and manage him, they erred, and erred badly.

  Prabhakaran first came to Chandran’s notice after his active role in the butchery of eleven Sri Lankan soldiers, the incident that triggered the July 1983 race riots in Colombo, and the storming of the Anuradhapura temple that killed more than 140 worshippers and monks two years later. That, and the earlier shootout on PLOTE leader Uma Maheswaran in Madras in broad daylight in 1982, after the two had fallen out, when Prabhakaran was detained but jumped bail, had RAW’s instant attention.

  From then on, Prabhakaran, who had launched his own violent, separatist movement with barely fifty men to call his own, was on Chandran’s radar. Chandran was one of the few who felt they understood and empathized with the angry young man from Velvettithurai—and the others drawn to him—who took up arms against Colombo.

  A man of few words, Prabhakaran, who took refuge in India in 1983 and received arms training in a camp on the Tamil Nadu–Karnataka border, met Rajiv Gandhi for the first time at 10, Janpath in June 1985, after he was picked out from the crowd for his leadership potential.

  ‘He spoke little, but he would hear you out, let you say whatever you wanted to say, never sharing what he really thought. The only time you knew what he was thinking was when he got angry. For Prabhakaran, the one thing he could never forgive was treachery. He would fly into a rage, get completely incensed about it and pronounce a death sentence,’ says Chandran, describing the mindset of the LTTE chief.

  It was Chandran and his team who reportedly shepherded Prabhakaran to pivotal meetings with Rajiv Gandhi, particularly the last one on 29 July 1987, when the LTTE leader was forced to accept—albeit only verbally—that he supported a unitary Sri Lanka. This was hours before the Indian premier headed to Sri Lanka where he would ink the Indo-Sri Lanka peace accord with Sri Lankan President Junius Jayewardene, thereby ending Prabhakaran’s dreams for a separate nation.

  Those present at that meeting at 10, Janpath that day—including LTTE ideologue Anton Balasingham—would later remark on how sanguine Prabhakaran seemed at the time. Did he mistakenly believe that he did not have to support the accord in public and would have to do no more than make a token surrender of arms, or was he simply masking his anger, biding his time until he could take revenge?

  He was gifted a bulletproof jacket that Rajiv Gandhi owned; it was placed on Prabhakaran’s shoulders by Rajiv Gandhi’s young son, Rahul, with Rajiv Gandhi saying, ‘Take care of yourself.’ Rajiv Gandhi’s naivety? Perhaps.

  Officials at the July meeting, including the then foreign minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, told Rajiv Gandhi that Prabhakaran could not be trusted, and the Congress leader reportedly dismissed them saying, ‘Prabhakaran has given his word. I trust him.’

  The LTTE leader had shown little emotion. Where once he had bristled at being treated like a bit player, no more than a sideshow in the run-up to the July 1985 peace talks in Thimpu and to the November 1986 SAARC summit in Bangalore, now, he kept his cool. He had taken the slights in his stride in the past, believing it was worth his while as long as India supported the LTTE’s quest for Eelam, as it had the creation of Bangladesh. Had the worm turned? Or had he seen the writing on the wall and deliberately kept his counsel?

  When he was escorted back to Ashok Hotel after meeting Rajiv Gandhi in 1987, the real Prabhakaran opened up, ranting and raving in Tamil to his ‘friend’ Vaiko, the Tamil Nadu politician V. Gopalaswamy, with whom he had built a bond, saying that he had been ‘betrayed’. He repeated much the same thought when he was forcibly flown back to Jaffna in August and spoke to the press there soon after.

  Once the Tigers were forced to actually de-weaponize and the EPRLF were primed to take charge of the north and the east in elections to the council held under the purview of the IPKF, Prabhakaran fully understood his newly diminished status. That became the genesis for his grudge against his newfound nemesis, Rajiv Gandhi.

  As journalist and author M.R. Narayan Swamy correctly surmised in his book The Tiger Vanquished,1 Prabhakaran may not have played by the rules himself, jettisoning fair play when it suited him. But betray him, and vengeance
and death were certain.

  In October 1989, as the IPKF began reducing its military footprint under pressure from the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE’s guerrilla tactics, Prabhakaran was putting the finishing touches to his ‘hate’ list. Leaders of the other Lankan Tamil political groups who competed with him for the fealty of the Tamil people were on it. But topping the list was the Indian prime minister who had robbed him of his dream of heading a separate Tamil state.

  In April 1990, as the last of the IPKF forces began to withdraw from Sri Lanka after a thirty-two-month deployment, Prabhakaran emerged from his jungle hideout, where he had remained hidden for over two and a half years, and met the press. In response to a question by a Sri Lankan journalist from the Sunday Times on why he had turned against Rajiv Gandhi and the IPKF, Prabhakaran, who rarely shared his innermost thoughts, had this to say: ‘The LTTE are not against the Indian people or the Indian government but they are against the former administrator of India.’ In other words, Rajiv Gandhi. Tragically, neither the IB nor RAW picked up on that first warning shot.

  In the first week of May 1990, on a sweltering day, deep in the jungles beyond Jaffna, long before anyone had an inkling of what he intended, Prabhakaran began to move the pawns on his ‘Kill Rajiv Gandhi’ chessboard. He summoned his intelligence chief, Pottu Amman, and, for the first time, voiced the idea of eliminating Rajiv Gandhi. Both Pottu Amman and one of Prabhakaran’s trusted bodyguards who was present, strongly advised him against it, an LTTE sympathizer who was close to the developments told me.

  ‘They warned him that the consequences of eliminating the leader of another country as powerful as India would be grave,’ the sympathizer said.

  Pottu Amman knew it would rob the LTTE of its only safe haven across the Palk Strait where he sent his wounded cadres for treatment, and alienate the Indian Tamils who supported and backed their cause. The other complication was that the Indian Army now knew the lay of the land better than when they had first arrived in August 1987 and would be a much more difficult force to tackle.

  Prabhakaran is said to have agreed with them. But what he didn’t tell them was that he had not given up on the idea. Instead, he began to put his Plan B into action. To his LTTE commanders, it would be sold as a plan to get rid of Padmanabha of the EPRLF, a man whose rise would have eclipsed the Tigers. For Prabhakaran, it would be a trial run for a possible Rajiv Gandhi assassination.

  In running the IPKF out of town in 1990, Prabhakaran believed he had cleared the LTTE’s own path to power. But within a month of the IPKF’s exit, Sri Lankan President Premadasa had begun negotiations with the EPRLF to put a friendlier, more amenable Tamil government in place in the north and the east. The LTTE had come in useful to rid the island of Indian forces. But that’s where it ended. Premadasa no longer had any use for the LTTE.

  Prabhakaran would settle scores with Premadasa later, having him assassinated by a Tamil suicide bomber in May 1993, an official investigation by Colombo’s deputy inspector general of the Criminal Investigation Department, Amarasena Rajapakse, would later show. The LTTE leader’s mole, a bisexual valet he had planted in the President’s household who became his eyes and ears, tipped the Tigers off about the election meeting where Premadasa would be blown up, Rajiv Gandhi-style, by a suicide bomber. The LTTE chief was incensed by Sri Lankan officialdom’s active co-operation with Indian officers investigating Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination when they arrived in Colombo in June 1991, which helped identify all the main players involved, and would conclusively implicate Prabhakaran.

  Ragothaman, part of the SIT, says that Premadasa’s role in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination has never been fully explored; as does Lt Gen. A.S. Kalkat, the general officer commanding-in-chief of the IPKF.

  But in early June 1990, Prabhakaran had other things on his mind. He summoned Pottu Amman again. He asked him to find a man who could travel to Tamil Nadu and eliminate Padmanabha. Two weeks later, Padmanabha, along with thirteen others, was murdered in an LTTE-style elimination operation on 19 June 1990 at the EPRLF office in Madras by a crack LTTE team hand-picked by Prabhakaran. Heading the team was Sivaresan, the man named ‘One-eyed Jack’ by the Indian media, who would pull off the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi eleven months later, a stone’s throw away from the same city, using the same kind of bomb-making materials.

  The Padmanabha hit was more than a dry run for the Rajiv Gandhi assassination. Prabhakaran had found his assassin.

  In August 1990, an early copy of an interview that Rajiv Gandhi had given to the ABP publication Sunday to mark his birthday, reinforced Prabhakaran’s resolve to eliminate him. This time, neither Pottu Amman nor the other members of his inner circle, like Akila—who trained the two girls picked to be suicide bombers—could disagree.

  The Sunday interview had Rajiv Gandhi spelling out his Sri Lanka policy in no uncertain terms: ‘Today, they are saying “we will never send Indian troops anywhere” or something like that . . . If a friendly country needs help, what will we do? Maldives asked for help. Were we supposed to say no and let the United States send people to the Maldives? This government would be totally abrogating its responsibility to the region . . . creating a vacuum that others will fill.’

  In the same interview Rajiv Gandhi also said, ‘The IPKF was in Sri Lanka to fight for the unity and integrity of Sri Lanka.’

  Prabhakaran wanted a separate state. Rajiv Gandhi, who had no illusions about India’s growing status as a responsible South Asian power, stood between him and his dream.

  Despite losing the November 1989 polls and declining to head a minority government, Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress still had the largest number of MPs in the Lok Sabha, which made him powerful enough to pull down governments if he wanted to—and, to a great extent, influence policy. And now, much to the chagrin of the Tigers, a year later, he was on the comeback trail.

  By September 1990, Prabhakaran had set the Rajiv Gandhi assassination plan in motion by quietly dispatching the first set of conspirators—a man named Vijayan; his wife, Selvi; and her father, Bhaskaran—all posing as refugees, to India. Their house in Kodungaiyur, Madras, would be the first of many safe houses that the assassination squads would use, as the SIT investigation into the 21 May murderous attack would find.

  As V.P. Singh’s National Front government looked ever more shaky, Prabhakaran, in early October 1990, summoned his key advisers for a crucial meeting to assess the chances of the Congress president returning to power. The consensus was that a Rajiv Gandhi comeback was all but certain, which meant two things to the LTTE leader—Indian forces would be re-deployed in north-east Sri Lanka to enforce Rajiv Gandhi’s pet project, and the deep-rooted LTTE network set up in Tamil Nadu with the active co-operation of the DK and the DMK would be dismantled.

  This time, the canny Prabhakaran was able to bring his military commanders round to his view that assassinating Rajiv Gandhi was the only option to safeguard the LTTE’s interests. But only his inner circle would be privy to this.

  By November 1990, the V.P. Singh government did fall and the former fiery ‘Young Turk’ Chandrashekhar became caretaker prime minister, his government supported from the outside by Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress party. To Prabhakaran, this wasn’t the best news. A mid-term poll seemed like a very real possibility and in the event of Rajiv Gandhi becoming prime minister, his SPG-provided security would be virtually impenetrable.

  The only way he could be eliminated was if they struck when he was still in the Opposition, or when he was on the campaign trail where security would be noticeably lax. The irony is that the plot unfolded right under the nose of the IB. Although it had established the nexus between the DK, the DMK and the LTTE, and based on that, had the DMK government in Tamil Nadu led by the pro-LTTE Karunanidhi dismissed, they failed to connect the dots or prevent the LTTE from continuing to operate as freely as it did before President’s rule was imposed in the state.

  By the end of November, Prabhakaran’s plan was all but ready. He summoned his Madras-
based LTTE propaganda chief ‘Baby’ Subramaniam to Jaffna, who arrived in the LTTE headquarters in the first week of December and was the first man outside the inner circle to be briefed on the Tiger chief’s high-profile target.

  Prabhakaran was confident of Pottu Amman’s protégé Sivaresan’s ability to pull off the hit. Sivaresan was to be assisted by two people—Muthuraja and Murugan; the first, the LTTE’s ‘go-to’ man in Madras, and the second, a Jaffna-based explosives expert.

  By the beginning of 1991, Prabhakaran’s chosen quartet was at work. ‘Baby’ Subramaniam and Muthuraja began to widen the circle of their LTTE network in Madras, looking for families that could provide a cover for the gang of assassins that was being readied to cross the Palk Strait.

  They homed in on Subha Sundaram’s Shubha News and Photo Agency, a hotbed of pro-LTTE DK sympathizers in Madras. Prabhakaran reached out directly to Subha and asked him to help Muthuraja. Muthuraja, in turn, scouted among the photographers that Subha had on call, and picked Haribabu and another photographer, who were entrusted with housing and training a ‘guest’ who was coming in from Jaffna.

  Haribabu became an enthusiastic member of the Muthuraja circle after he was paid handsomely; he even befriended the ‘guest’, Balan, who would convert him to their cause.

  Next, ‘Baby’ Subramaniam recruited a young DK supporter, the penniless Bhagyanathan, along with his sister, Nalini, and his mother, Padma, a nurse employed at a local nursing home, who were soon to be evicted from their quarters, and were desperate for financial assistance. ‘Baby’ Subramaniam ‘sold’ his printing press to Bhagyanathan for a paltry Rs 5000 and the entire family moved into their new home at the press. Subramaniam had his captive audience—both for the virulently anti-Rajiv Gandhi propaganda that had to be printed and which the family would be subjected to and brainwashed into believing, and as the perfect hideout when ‘friends’ came visiting from Jaffna.