Five questions about the Rajiv murder - Just to remind the story we might forget

The commission set up before I had demitted office as Union law minister, under a sitting senior judge of the Supreme Court, Justice J S Verma (later CJI), to go into the security lapses leading to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, came to the conclusion that the security arrangements were adequate but the Congress party local leaders wantonly disrupted and broke these arrangements.

The commission urged an in-depth inquiry. The successor Narasimha Rao government declined to accept the recommendation, and the report was shelved. Instead the pro-LTTE circle in India began to lobby for a new commission to go into the conspiracy angle. A commission was indeed set up under Justice M C Jain, a retired former chief justice of the Delhi High Court. The commission soon became a circus and a platform for nefarious propaganda. The attempts to frame others became ridiculous. Recently the Madras High Court had to impose a fine of Rs one lakh on a Congress worker for filing a scurrilous PIL to demand a re-investigation into the assassination, holding that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) did not carry out the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. But the motive behind the inquisition by the Jain Commission was obvious — exonerate the LTTE by throwing up bogus leads and new accusations to unsettle the SIT probe being led by Kartikeyan, which was at an advanced stage of clinching the case against the LTTE. But the Supreme Court put an end to such mischievous attempts by holding in a 400-page judgment that the LTTE was the agency that killed Rajiv Gandhi on the direction of Prabhakaran. The assassin-in-chief is dead in the most demeaning of circumstances; the question of a wider conspiracy to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi is still open. The CBI-led body Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA) is still investigating that aspect. But CBI’s reputation today is in tatters.

Indeed the matter gets very intriguing when all the pieces of circumstantial evidence are put together. These are:

(1) Why and how was Rajiv Gandhi prevailed upon and by whom, to go back to Tamil Nadu to campaign when the then TNCC president, Vazhapadi Ramamurthy, the AIADMK leader and ally Jayalalithaa, the TN Governor Bhisma Narayan Singh, and the Chandra Shekhar government were all against it?

(2) How is it that not one Congress leader was in close enough proximity to Rajiv Gandhi (Verma Commission puts it as a circle within a diameter of 12 feet) to be killed or seriously injured at the detonation spot along with him?

(3) On whose authority was the NSG restrained for 14 hours after reaching the site, from storming the hideout of the assassination mastermind Sivarasan and others in Bangalore till this murderous gang had committed suicide and could not sing for the authorities about the assassination?

(4) Why Sonia Gandhi wrote to the president of India seeking setting aside the death sentence imposed by the Supreme Court on LTTE conspirators in the assassination, when Nehru did not for Godse and Rajiv Gandhi refused the pleas for Satwant Singh?

(5) How is it defensible for the widow of Rajiv Gandhi to have an open political alliance with those who have acted at the behest of the LTTE such as the DMK, PMK, MDMK and the Dalit Panthers? The last three justify the assassination. How can the awarding of one acre of land next to the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi and a donation of one lakh rupees be justified for the Dravida Kazhagam (DK)? Does DK have any presence in the Delhi area? Of the 26 convicted by the trial court in the assassination case, nine belong to the DK.

The Rajiv Gandhi assassination is an important question of national security for Indians because the LTTE is a foreign terrorist organisation that killed our leader in our country, merely stating that because his policies were not to the LTTE’s liking, he had to be killed. Can we be safe if we allow such a terrorist organisation to strike roots in our neighbourhood and have a terror infrastructure than can vitiate the democratic politics of India with money, narcotics, and plain murder?

The LTTE from day one has been part of the problem of the Tamil-Sinhala conflict, and not a part of the solution. Part of the problem is the inability of the Sinhala majority to share power with the Tamil minority. Such a sharing can be best done in a Constitution with sufficient devolution — by replacing the present unitary Sri Lankan one with a quasi-federal Indian type or fully federal US type.

Tamils and Sinhalas are one people. They have the same DNA structure. There is no ethnic difference between them. They all had originated in the Indian mainland and today speak sister languages, Sinhala and Tamil, with a large vocabulary in common with Sanskrit and Pali, both Indian languages. Their scripts have evolved from the Brahmi script. Thus, there is no fundamental linguistic difference either. Their religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, believe in the same distinguishing and fundamental theology of darshan, reincarnation and karma. In fact, Buddhism began as a reform movement of Hinduism and Hinduism has absorbed these reforms. Hence, there is also fundamentally no religious difference between a Sinhala Buddhist and a Tamil Hindu.

The two communities grew apart during the colonial period because the Tamils had access to the British imperialist invaders, due to their earlier contacts with them on the Indian mainland. This gave the Tamils professional and educational advantages. The Sinhala majority upon getting independence used its brute majority to try and close the gap by undemocratic equalisation procedures and denying power to the Tamils by adopting a unitary constitution which had no safeguards for the Tamil minority. This of course backfired and landed Sri Lanka in a spiralling crisis.

The way out today, consistent with India’s national security aims, is for Sri Lanka to immediately adopt a resolution in its Parliament to implement a devolved Constitution, and for India to assist liberally Sri Lanka since the LTTE insurgency menace is now finished off. The US, China and Israel, nations which can contribute for the implementation of this solution, must back India in this intervention. A word of praise for the resoluteness of President Rajapaksa would also not be out of place. India must formally honour him for putting an end to the organisation that killed Rajiv Gandhi and so many democratic minded leaders. At this hour I remember also Gamini Dissanayake who was murdered by the LTTE merely for promising Indians Prabhakaran’s extradition.

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