The Assassination Of Rajiv Gandhi by Neena Gopal : Published by Penguin -Viking; Pages 273 ; Price  Rs.499 /-

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 Neena Gopal  was Foreign Editor of Gulf Times and   currently edits the Bangalore edition of Deccan Chronicle. She was the last person to interview Rajiv Gandhi on 21 May 1991  before he was killed by a suicide bomber She reveals the complicity at various levels  from intelligence officers to Congress party officials to the country’s foreign policy makers and finally the dead man  himself. Rajiv  did the absolutely wrong thing in  putting boots on the ground in a neighbouring country where he was not welcome, and paid for it with his own life and that of thousands of others.

Writes Gopal, “ Minutes after Rajiv Gandhi  walked unhesitatingly into the crowd, there was a deafening sound as the bomb spluttered to life and exploded in a blinding flash. Everything changed. A moment that, in my head, will always be frozen in time. It was exactly 10.21 pm.” The  place Sriperumbudur—the birthplace of Ramanujacharya.

She  points out that a year before the assassination, Colonel Hariharan, India’s chief of military intelligence in Sri Lanka, had told the Intelligence Bureau in Chennai about the “Rajiv Gandhine marana podungo (bump off Rajiv Gandhi)”---- chatter within the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). They pooh—poohed  him. It was common knowledge  that LTTE leader Prabhakaran’s style was to kill his assailants brutally. Neither the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), which considered several people up and down the LTTE ladder as its protégés, nor Vazhapadi K. Ramamurthy, the Congress chief in Tamil Nadu who had warned Gopal to “be very careful” while she was headed for the fateful rally, foresaw this disaster.

 Rajiv was taken for a rally in an obscure panchayat 50 kms from Chennai. Security arrangements were so lax that they couldn’t detect and stop a tiny girl with half a kilo of RDX round her waist despite there being two metal detectors. Rajiv who was facing several threats was protected by two gunmen—one was in distant Hyderabad. Both D.R.Karthikeyan who was in-charge of the S I T as also Justice J.S.Verma Chairman of the Inquiry Committee would prosecute the men responsible for the lapses.

 R.K.Raghavan , Inspector General in Sriperumbudur ,said the persons who should bear the responsibility for single-handedly removing the SPG  cover that could have protected Rajiv Gandhi were the former  Prime Ministers V.P.Singh and Chandra Sekhar ,who had stripped him of SPG Security.

Rajiv is quoted as saying, “Have you noticed how every time a South Asian leader of any import rises to a position of power or is about to achieve something for himself or his country, he is cut down, attacked, killed.” .This was less than an hour before he died.

The first half of the book is full of tension which is  resolved in the second part  by delineating developments behind the scenes and investigating  the factors leading to the gory aftermath.

 Gopal packs original reporting and revealing anecdotes and has done thorough research of the background. Rajiv’s death is a “Chronicle Foretold”.  None had gauged the total abhorrence  Prabhakaran had for Rajiv Gandhi. A considerable portion of the book is devoted to the intricacies of India’s understanding of Sri Lanka and how we got it all wrong. According to the author : “The message is that not enough is known about the Indian involvement in Sri Lanka and how Rajiv’s assassination was a direct fallout of the Sri Lankan blunder.” No mention is made of the involvement of political parties in Tamil Nadu .Vazhapadi Ramamurthy had expressed to the author 24 hours earlier that danger loomed. Immediately after the blast, one white Ambassador with a red beacon and another car sped away.No investigation was made of who were in those cars. Shri.A.J.Doss cleared the list of invitees without informing the police but the SIT did not ask him or the police. A crucial video tape disappeared and evidence did not include that video.

  “Even when Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister, the RAW had drawn attention to the likelihood of a threat to his security from the Sri Lankan Tamil extremist organisations. It repeated this warning after he became the Leader of the Opposition,” says B. Raman, head of R&AW during 1988-94, in his book , “The Kaoboys of R&AW.”  “These warnings did not receive the attention they deserved because they were based on assessments and not on specific intelligence,”

 “The IB and RAW didn’t agree on much. If we had read the signals right, if we understood what was going on in Prabhakaran's mind, who knows, we could have prevented this. It was our fault, we made a huge error of judgement. We misread Prabhakaran. We never believed he would turn against us in this manner. We should have seen it coming. We didn’t. We failed Rajiv Gandhi, we failed to save his life,”

Prabhakaran’s  order—an intercepted message-- was not to eliminate one of their own. The target was the former Indian prime minister, the leader of another country. When PLOTE leader Siddharthan Dharmalingam first heard it, he was so alarmed, he immediately tipped off the head of IPKF’s Counter-Intelligence (COIN) in Sri Lanka, Col Hariharan. A native Tamil speaker with an inside track into the Lankan Tamil narrative, Col Hariharan was assisted  by his  aunt who was married to a Jaffna native. It was Col Hariharan—one of a handful of Indian operatives with his ear to the ground and an understanding of the Tigers’ mindset—who recognised its true import.

“Whether the intercepts were not clear enough, or were not taken seriously by intelligence mandarins who received them, is not known.” “It was the first time we heard any mention of Prabhakaran taking vengeance against Rajiv Gandhi,” Siddharthan said, But the warning—albeit tenuous and imprecise—instead of being investigated, was laughed out of court; it was simply set aside and forgotten.

The author’s description of the death of Prabhakaran deserves special mention. The process of cornering him, trapping and killing him, and the state of his body after he was killed is brought out in graphic detail covering several pages. It seems to be a kind of highly understandable personal vindication.

The book is tautly written and has the pace of a Frederick Forsyth novel. Prabhakaran was very fond of the Fred Zinneman film  of the Forsyth novel “ The Day of the Jackal”.

P.P.Ramachandran.

02 / 10 / 2016