The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi Page 7

  Nalini was given charge of editing and producing Satanic Forces: Heinous Crimes of the Indian Peace Keeping Force. This was a 3000-page collection of anti-India articles that would turn the young woman into a fierce critic of Rajiv Gandhi and a willing accomplice to the murder.

  Sivaresan and Murugan, meanwhile, were still in Jaffna. They needed two youngsters who were adept at working transmitters and computers, and homed in on LTTE cadres Jayakumar and Payas from Udippidy, Sivaresan’s home town in Jaffna. The two were dispatched to Madras in February, to the Porur home of Jayakumar’s brother-in-law, Perarivalan, on the outskirts of the city. Perarivalan, the LTTE electronic genius, had been sent to Madras from Kilinochchi a year ago, without anyone in Indian intelligence aware of his true capabilities.

  When Murugan arrived in mid-February, loaded with cash and weapons, all that Perarivalan was told was that he had a major attack to plan for: he was to construct a belt-bomb from explosives and RDX. They soon found a third safe house where Payas and Jayakumar were then ensconced, and equipped with a scooter bought with a fake licence. By then, Murugan too was brought into the Bhagyanathan circle by Muthuraja and became an integral member of the family, growing especially close to Nalini.

  ‘Baby’ Subramaniam and Muthuraja had, in the space of eight weeks, not only co-opted an Indian Tamil family to their cause, but set up three safe houses, activated a rogue radio operator and the man who could construct the bomb that the suicide bomber would use. All they needed now was the suicide bomber.

  On 1 March, after receiving Murugan’s report on the arrangements that had been put in place, Sivaresan landed at Kodiakkarai on the east coast of Tamil Nadu, not far from Nagapattinam. He headed for the safe house in Porur where Perarivalan’s belt-bomb design was still only on paper.

  Sivaresan set the wheels in motion to acquire the explosives, falling back on the same source from whom he had acquired the bombs to fell Padmanabha—KP, the LTTE’s infamous arms procurer and chief financier, who, over the next month, would smuggle in 1 kilo of RDX as well as the deadly pellets from a factory in Singapore, which were finally used in the bomb.

  Sivaresan moved into Bhagyanathan’s home. He spun the web tighter around the five Indians and the three Lankan Tamils who were in on the conspiracy that had been forged in such secrecy in Prabhakaran’s headquarters in Jaffna, little more than six months ago.

  By the last week of March, ‘Baby’ Subramaniam and Muthuraja—their part of the mission accomplished—headed back to Jaffna, while Sivaresan would return in early April to brief Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman on the arrangements that were in place. Pleased, the LTTE chief is reported to have asked that the dry run and the actual assassination be recorded. This proved to be a fatal error.

  Meanwhile, either in an elaborate ploy to lull Rajiv Gandhi into a false sense of complacency or gauge for himself where his true intentions lay, the LTTE supremo would send out the first of three emissaries.

  The first was on 5 March 1991, when Rajiv Gandhi met a senior member of the LTTE’s central committee, Kasi Anandan, at his 10, Janpath home in New Delhi. The meeting was held at the initiative of the LTTE and was put out as the first move by the Tigers to mend fences with the Indian leader whom they had publicly vilified for ordering the Indian Army into Sri Lanka’s north and east in 1987, effectively foiling their armed struggle for a separate state.

  One of the men who helped facilitate the meeting between Kasi and Rajiv Gandhi would later tell me how the backchannels between India and Sri Lanka had been actively trying to forge a truce between the LTTE and the former prime minister.

  Kasi, who lives in a tiny rural township off the highway on the outskirts of Chennai—eerily close to Sriperumbudur—is a more than gracious host when I land at his doorstep in early 2015.

  His home is tucked away from the main road and there is no nameplate announcing his presence, but the mason working on a house just around the corner knows exactly where Kasi lives. He points us in the right direction, calling to the long-haired Sri Lankan as he waits for us at the corner: ‘Your guests have arrived.’

  Accompanying me is a man that Kasi trusts implicitly and he opens up with ease in his presence, talking of how the Tiger leader wanted him to go and meet Rajiv Gandhi, to ascertain that there would be no repeat of 1987, no sending Indian troops into Sri Lanka to destroy the Tigers again.

  As his daughter bustles around brewing tea, Kasi strongly refutes the imputation that it was his report on the meeting that set off the assassination. The message he sent to Prabhakaran was that Rajiv Gandhi, whose victory in the 1991 elections seemed certain, would not interfere in Sri Lanka during his second tenure.

  ‘Even the officers investigating Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination were given access to my report. They know what I have said,’ said the earnest Kasi, bristling at the charge, as he talks about how he shared details of that conversation with The Hindu’s owner-editors as well as the SIT team once the investigation into the killing began.

  At the time, though, none of the security agencies was privy to Kasi’s meeting with the former prime minister, and there is no record of when he was secretly brought from New Delhi’s Ashok Hotel to 10, Janpath. It may have taken place at the behest of Prabhakaran himself, no doubt, using the multiple connections he had with politicians and journalists in Madras to his advantage.

  From Kasi’s home, which even today is a virtual shrine to Prabhakaran, lined with oil lamps and a bank of photographs with the Tiger leader and his own brother, an LTTE martyr, the Tiger emigre says, ‘I told him that contrary to reports that appeared in the newspapers that had Rajiv Gandhi saying he was going to send troops back to Sri Lanka, Rajiv Gandhi himself personally assured me that he had no intention of doing so.’

  In fact, Kasi may have only speeded up plans for the assassination.

  Prabhakaran was so furious when he received Kasi’s report which said it was time to forget the past and open a new chapter with Rajiv Gandhi, that he not only tore it up in anger, but immediately gave the green signal to his deputy, Col Kittu, and the deputy leader of the women’s wing, Akila, to put plans for the assassination into motion.

  Prabhakaran was convinced that Kasi’s judgement was completely off the mark. He sent a message to the London-based Kittu to find a way to get close to his RAW source in Delhi and suss out the real thinking of the Congress leader. Little more than a week later on 14 March 1991, Prabhakaran sent another team of LTTE officials through Col Kittu to meet the former Indian premier, along with a Tiger emissary who had also been flown in by Kittu from the United Kingdom. This was London-based financier Arjuna Sittampalam, who had been brought to see the former Indian premier through the intervention of his trusted Foreign Secretary Romesh Bhandari. This is when the LTTE operatives reportedly let it be known that they posed no threat to him and would never act against India, and encouraged him to campaign in Tamil Nadu.

  Rajiv Gandhi, in turn, made solicitous inquiries about Prabhakaran’s health and sought details on how the ground situation was and where Colombo’s plans to devolve power to the north, now stood. It was, in fact, Sittampalam who correctly gauged Rajiv Gandhi’s intentions, and would signal how little the LTTE should trust Rajiv Gandhi.

  In a third meeting a fortnight later, on 28 March, of which there is no official record at all, barring an entry in the visitors book by his personal secretary, V. George, Rajiv Gandhi met Rajarattinam, the Delhi-based representative of the Eelam National Democratic Liberation Front (ENDLF). Rajiv Gandhi, who perceived Rajarattinam as being anti-LTTE, not fully realizing that the ENDLF shared the LTTE’s goal of setting up an Ilankai Eelam, let his guard down. He was much more vocal and open at that meeting, freely airing his views that Prabhakaran and the LTTE were a group that he could never fully endorse. Word of the conversation between the two men trickled back to the LTTE chief.

  Prabhakaran may have pulled the wool over Rajiv Gandhi’s eyes, but there was no fooling the LTTE supremo.

  By April 1991, t
he hunt for a suicide bomber had begun in earnest. When Akila reportedly suggested that it would be easier to smuggle a woman assassin into an election rally than a man, Prabhakaran was sold on the idea. Sivaresan soon homed in on his own kin, two of his cousins, both trained Tigresses fiercely committed to the cause—Dhanu and Subha.

  On 1 May 1991, Sivaresan returned to India with a squad of nine, including the two young women who were taken to Nalini’s home. A third, Athirai, had already been sent to Delhi as a fallback option after her arrival on 1 March. The third woman and the Delhi route was Pottu Amman’s idea. Athirai was sent in the company of an old LTTE hand, Kanakasabapathy, who stayed in a house in Delhi’s Moti Bagh, which belonged to Tamil politician Vaiko’s associate. Vaiko, incidentally, was never questioned on the help he gave Prabhakaran’s associate, and the SIT only questioned him as a ‘witness’ and not a conspirator in the plot to assassinate the former premier.

  None of them knew that the target was Rajiv Gandhi, and were under the impression that it was Varadaraja Perumal, the EPRLF leader.

  Perarivalan, meanwhile, was told the bomb would be made up of six 80-gm RDX grenades, armed with 2000 splinters, and charged with a 9-mm battery with two toggle switches. It had to be secreted into a denim vest, and a woman would be wearing it. The tailor who stitched the denim garment had no idea what it was meant for.

  All that remained were the trial runs. The first was on 21 April at Marina Beach in Madras at Rajiv Gandhi’s first campaign meeting in Tamil Nadu, which was also addressed by AIADMK leader Jayalalitha. A video and photographs record the event, where the women bombers had no role to play as they had not yet arrived in the city. The second was on 12 May, at a meeting addressed by V.P. Singh and Karunanidhi of the DMK at Thiruvallur in Arkonam, 40 kilometres from Madras. This time, Dhanu was present and the young woman, in a macabre rehearsal, practised the gesture she would repeat with Rajiv Gandhi on the fateful night of 21 May—by bending down and touching Singh’s feet.

  Ragothaman has an interesting take on the date and venue of the rally where Rajiv Gandhi’s end would come. ‘Few knew about Rajiv Gandhi’s Sriperumbudur halt as the original itinerary prepared on 13 May 1991 by Congress leader Margaret Alva, his tour manager, did not include the town. The change in Rajiv Gandhi’s poll itinerary to include Sriperumbudur was made at the last minute after Margatham Chandrashekhar, who was the party candidate there, urged him to campaign for her. Rajiv Gandhi had jotted down in his own writing the change in itinerary, “Include Aunty’s (as Margatham was called by the Gandhis) constituency also, but only for a day,” he wrote.’

  Sivaresan wouldn’t find out Rajiv Gandhi was coming to Sriperumbudur until the Tamil newspaper Dinatanthi put out the news, barely twenty-four hours before the 21 May rally.

  Sivaresan knew this was his opportunity, his best and his last chance, before polls wound up. As he arrived at Nalini’s home with a copy of the popular Tamil daily on the morning of 20 May, it was decided: Sriperumbudur it would be.

  On the night of 20 May, the co-conspirators watched a movie and seemed calm, as if the next day would be just another ordinary day. The women watched Dhanu as she tried on the vest-bomb and the outsized glasses that would help mask her face. At 4.30 p.m. on 21 May, Dhanu and Subha, along with Nalini and Sivaresan, left for Parry’s Corner where Haribabu, the photographer, was waiting. He had been sent to buy the sandalwood garland from the state handicrafts store, Poompuhar, and was waiting for them, armed with a borrowed Chinon camera and a Konica colour roll.

  No one looked twice at the group of five as they caught the bus to Sriperumbudur; they were just some election groupies going to the main event in town. They arrived at 8 p.m., an hour before Rajiv Gandhi landed in Madras, piloting his own plane from Visakhapatnam.

  At the venue, they attracted the attention of an alert lady cop who asked them to move out of the VIP enclosure and the red carpet that was being rolled out, as Rajiv Gandhi wasn’t due there for several hours.

  In fact, Anasuya, the sub-inspector, questioned a day after the assassination, would identify the five and confirm that they had come together as a group. Asked what they were doing there, Haribabu told Anasuya he was there to take pictures of the girl garlanding Rajiv Gandhi. The sub-inspector shooed them away.

  Subha and Nalini, and Sivaresan who was armed with a gun to finish the job if Dhanu didn’t succeed, moved away, leaving Dhanu and Haribabu near the red carpet in the so-called ‘sanitized area’ on which Rajiv Gandhi would walk on his way to the dais.

  Rajiv Gandhi arrived just after 10 p.m. and was immediately mobbed by Congress supporters trying to garland him and present him with silk scarves.

  Seeing Dhanu approach, Anasuya stepped in front of her, grabbed her arm in a bid to prevent her from getting close to Rajiv Gandhi, and had almost succeeded in turning her away, when Rajiv Gandhi said: ‘Let everybody get a chance.’ Anasuya stepped back. Dhanu bent down to touch Rajiv Gandhi’s feet. Rajiv Gandhi bent to lift her up. Dhanu activated the bomb.

  The message that a grim Prabhakaran received on the wireless later that night, sent by Payas, was, ‘Operation Wedding successful.’

  The Jaffna Conspiracy had been executed to the satisfaction of the LTTE chief.

  Within twenty-four hours, other Tamil militant groups housed in camps across Tamil Nadu—the Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP), the EPRLF and Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO)—laid the blame squarely at Prabhakaran’s door.

  The LTTE’s London headquarters and its spokesperson in Jaffna were uncharacteristically vigorous in their denial of any involvement in the assassination.

  Anyone and everyone who tracked the Tigers was surprised, therefore, when on 25 May, four days after Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, a report appeared in The Hindu which attempted to reinforce the LTTE denial, presenting a reasoned argument as to why the Tigers had no reason to kill him.

  The report—which was clearly an LTTE plant—claimed that there was a ‘reassessment of the role of Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE’, and a recognition on the part of the outfit that the ‘withdrawal . . . allowed Colombo to resort with impunity to a military solution, all the promises of devolution to the Tamil people . . . falling in a heap by the wayside.’

  The concluding paragraph read, ‘The LTTE had seen for itself that Rajiv Gandhi was not hostile to it and that discovery presented a positive opening in political terms. The indications that the LTTE seemed to be placing its stakes on the return of Rajiv Gandhi to power would militate against a hasty conclusion that the militant group had an interest in killing Rajiv Gandhi, just two months after the wounded relationship between the LTTE and Rajiv Gandhi had been put on a friendlier footing.’

  The LTTE, as always, at its best when it was muddying the message!

  4

  The Tamil Card—Strategy or Blunder?

  AT THE HEIGHT OF THE Sri Lankan crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, all the major players in that country accused India of attempting to destabilize its smaller neighbour by arming Tamil separatists. And they continued to hold on to this belief through all the finger-pointing and accusations that followed. So the central question that must be addressed is this: Why did India under Indira Gandhi prepare for a covert intervention, only for her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, to abandon the Tamil card and, by accident or design, turn a strategic asset into an enemy?

  Was India’s Sri Lanka policy driven by these two Indian leaders personally? Or was it their advisers who altered their thinking on this unquiet island and, once that happened, sent relations between the two countries into a downward spiral?

  Clearly, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi lived in different times and were governed by vastly differing strategic imperatives. They were also two individuals who looked at foreign policy through different prisms. Either way, history would show that neither of the paths chosen by the two leaders fully served Indian interests.

  One talked war but never waged it; the other talked peace but went to war.

  In th
e long run, arming the Tamil insurgents would prove to be counter-productive as it gave angry young Tamil men and women who had an axe to grind against the Sinhalas access to arms and weaponry they would not have had otherwise.

  India failed to factor in that even if it shut off the arms tap, the Tamils had enough middlemen—Sri Lankan Tamil, Indian and foreign—to procure weapons through alternative sources.

  Leaving the Tamil insurgents stranded, without the promised Tamil Eelam and with a province instead of a nation, alienated not just the Tamils—whose cause Delhi claimed it was espousing—but the Sri Lankan majoritarian polity as well. The overt Indian military intervention only served to reinforce the suspicions of an already wary Sinhala community that India was not there to play honest broker, but was preparing to midwife a de facto Tamil state.

  Today, India–Sri Lanka relations are picking up after nearly forty years of mutual suspicion fuelled by one self-inflicted wound after another. But even six years after the LTTE was annihilated by the Mahinda Rajapaksa government in May 2009, Colombo was unable to fully embrace Delhi, at least not until the present government’s new power trio—President Maithripala Sirisena, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga—recognized the perils of not having India fight their corner, especially when they were facing an international community more than ready to try them for war crimes.

  But in the early 1980s, insiders say, Indira Gandhi, astute tactician that she was, let the Sri Lankan government know that she opposed their antithetical stance towards the Tamils and that she was more than ready to invade ethnically divided Sri Lanka in August 1984, if the need arose. The small army of Tamil militants at home was her fallback, the weapon that she would unleash when the time was right, just as she had done with the Mukti Bahini in Bangladesh.