The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi
Author- Neena Gopal
Publisher- Penguin Random House, Rs499
If it wasn’t for a camera sitting atop a dead man after the explosion, the probe into the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi would’ve been very different, writes NEENA GOPAl. Excerpt:
If RK Raghavan, Inspector General of police in charge of security at Sriperumbudur, hadn’t stumbled upon a camera sitting atop a dead man in the aftermath of the blast, the story of the probe into the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi would have been very different.
No one knew if the camera had recorded Rajiv Gandhi’s last moments, least of all, the explosion that claimed the 18 other lives with his own Not until the film in the camera was examined within 48 hours of the assassination and the first prints were taken — there were 10 photographs in all — were investigators able to zero in on the probable killers. Two people stood out in the crowd: A dark, stocky young woman in an all-enveloping salwar-kameez and a short man in a crumpled, ill-fitting, white kurta-pyjama.
The photos gave the lTTE no room for plausible deniability; the terror outfit was responsible for unleashing their karampuli, a Black Tigress, on their unsuspecting, first foreign target.
Without the camera, it might have been just another ‘blind case’ Unsolved. Unresolved. Never laid to rest.
As the blast ripped through Rajiv Gandhi’s upper body and threw him face down on the stony outcrop of land near the VIP area, Raghavan was barely a few feet away. He recalls how smoke from the bomb temporarily blinded him. ‘I couldn’t see anything. I lost my vision for several minutes after the blast. It was all a blur.’
As people began screaming and running in all directions, Raghavan pushed his way towards where the Congress leader had been standing — the spot that should have been a sanitised security zone but had been breached in spectacular fashion within minutes of his arrival.
Despite the threat perception that the former Prime Minister faced, Raghavan claims he hadn’t factored in the possibility that the target could be Rajiv Gandhi. ‘But the minute it hit me that it could be him, that he could have died, then like a madcap (sic) I began shouting for him, by name, hoping he would answer and my fears would be unfounded ... until, we, GK Moopanar, I, and Vazhapadi Ramamurthy who came running from the dais, finally found him.’ In fact, Raghavan became the first person to inspect the shell which was all that was left of Rajiv Gandhi’s broken body.
The top cop and his team had inspected the venue of the rally in Tamil Nadu MP Margatham’s constituency soon after they had been alerted that Rajiv Gandhi was coming. First, on May 20, a day before the former Prime Minister was to arrive from Hyderabad, and again on May 21, as early as 5 pm that evening.
‘We didn’t expect any problems that day, none at all,’ he says, although he admits that, given the kind of threat he was under, security for Rajiv Gandhi wasn’t at the level that it should have been’ Curiously, neither former Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Joint Director and Inspector General DR Kaarthikeyan who was given charge of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) within hours, nor the Commission of Inquiry set up on 27 May under Justice JS Verma, would prosecute the men responsible for these lapses.
The onus of the security lapse lay as much with the Congress party as with the local police, although with Margatham’s pointman AJ Doss browbeating the police into submission, the former was more to blame. Kaarthikeyan, in his book The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination, writes of the overzealous Doss brushing aside concerns of policemen and TNCC officials, and insisting on clearing a host of people who were given access to Rajiv Gandhi — 23 in all-that night. The list included a Congress worker named latha Kannan who was given top clearance because of her proximity to Margatham; latha would prove crucial for the bomber to gain access to Rajiv Gandhi.
Doss’s crossed wires with the police — and the TNCC — had him believing that the police would screen those 23 people. The police, on their part, thought it was Doss who should scrutinise the invitees.
Critically, in the confusion over whether or not the Congress leader would be travelling to Madras that night, his personal armed gunman stayed behind in Hyderabad, leaving him with just one security guard, Pradip Kumar Gupta, who perished in the blast.
But Raghavan assigns the blame elsewhere. He says that the person who should bear the primary responsibility for single-handedly removing the SPG cover that could have protected Rajiv Gandhi and thrown a security ring around him under exactly such circumstances, was former Prime Minister VP Singh. On succeeding Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister, the Raja scrapped SPG protection for former prime ministers, restricting it to serving prime ministers only.
‘History will never forgive him,’ says Raghavan of V.P. Singh. ‘Nobody will.’
