Daughter's quest

Priyanka Gandhi's journey to Vellore Jail was not an attempt to come to terms with the tragedy of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination. It was the first step to get to the truth

Sanjay Kapoor Delhi

When Priyanka Gandhi left domesticity to mysteriously show up at the high security Vellore Jail in Tamil Nadu to meet Nalini, one of the accused in the assassination of her father, Rajiv Gandhi, and to ask her about the identity of those who killed her father, she had taken the first firm step to join the rough and tumble of politics.

Her visit obviously happened after much deliberation. Surely, Priyanka was aware as to how it would have been perceived if the fact about this trip gets leaked to the media. Although it was to be a secret — till it was revealed by the lawyer of the accused — the questions that Priyanka asked her make it amply clear that she is not convinced with the official explanation about who killed her father.

Priyanka's visit to Vellore is fraught with major implications. Besides treading the same path that her mother took before she entered politics full time— Sonia criticised the PV Narasimha Rao government for not doing enough to track the conspirators behind her husband's death - the young lady made it clear that she was not willing to give up on her search for those who conspired to get her father assassinated. In a subtle, nuanced way, it also expresses a firm no-confidence in the way the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has gone about giving meaning to the unfinished work of a multi-disciplinary monitoring agency (MDMA) perfunctorily constituted to investigate the findings of the Justice MC Jain Commission, which was mandated to look into the wider conspiracy behind Rajiv Gandhi's assassination.

It must be galling to the sensitive daughter of Rajiv and Sonia that the MDMA has been relegated to a meaningless acronym after the UPA government took over in 2004. In comparison, the MDMA delivered better results when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was in power.

And there is a reason: Many of those who manned the political and security establishment at the time when Rajiv was assassinated in 1991 are still calling the shots now. “How can we expect to get to the truth in Rajiv's assassination, when we have couple of key players occupying important places in the government?” informed a source who claims proximity to the family.

Furthermore, the forces that benefited from Rajiv's death are now stronger than they were in 1991. His death contributed in some ways in changing the course of history, a fact that finds corroboration in a recent paper titled, Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassination on Institution and War, written by Benjamin F Jones and Benjamin A Olken.

Priyanka's trip, in some ways, is an act of courage. She seeks to reclaim her right to find answers to her father's gruesome assassination even when the security and political environment is not conducive to it. In doing so, she wants to expose the political and economic mafia that practises the politics of assassination and threatens those mass-based politicians who do not fall in line.

Priyanka's conduct is similar in some ways to that of Mohamed El-Fayed, who sought answers to his son Dodi's death while he was accompanying Princess Diana on her last journey. The British government inquest may still have left many people dissatisfied about its findings, but in some ways they were still quite conclusive. No one can really say that certain leads were not pursued in Diana's accident.

Conviction would be lacking in the MDMA and the government if they are questioned about how they countenanced many of Justice Jain's recommendations. Not only that, much of how the probe was conducted by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) led by DR Karkitheyan left many scandalised. Karkitheyan, who was mysteriously drafted to head the SIT, even when he had little experience of investigation, allegedly pursued only one line — Rajiv was assassinated by the LTTE. Period.

During the probe, valuable witnesses were forced to commit suicide, suitcases carrying DNA prints of the human bomb, Dhanu, were lost in transit. There is a view that Dhanu's paternity has been synthetically put together by conspirators. Perhaps the biggest mystery has been how One Eyed Jack, Sivarasan, stayed in a house that had links with a senior Congress member. Also, Sivarasan was allowed to commit suicide even when the SIT commandoes got ample opportunity to arrest him alive.

The leader of the SIT team, Ravi, claims he sought permission from higher authorities to storm and arrest the killers of Rajiv Gandhi, but quite like the Ibibo advertisement where a commando is seeking instructions from his boss to find out which wire to cut in his attempts to defuse a dynamite, without realising that his desperate queries are directed at a bucket. The ad has a punchline:  “Buckets do not answer.” The SIT boss's response was no different.

There are many unanswered questions that if reopened can present a different perspective to Rajiv Gandhi's assassination. A senior investigator in the government said that although a lot of time has elapsed, the probe should have started from the unusual chatters that was intercepted by the naval eavesdroppers around the Palk Strait. The naval intelligence unit sent intercepts indicating a threat to Rajiv Gandhi and the movement of killers towards Chennai. One specific intercept detailed where Rajiv was to be killed. The last mail before the former Congress president was killed gave graphic details about the movement of the killers and their unsuspecting quarry.

Horrifyingly, the intercepts were not deciphered and there was no response to the warnings. The belief is that intercepts were not cracked deliberately. Quite clearly, there were people in the security set-up who had been compromised and did not allow the intelligence flowing in from Palk Strait and from Yasser Arafat, who also gave similar information, to be acted upon. According to this senior investigator, an inquest would reveal why the intercepts were not analysed and why Rajiv was allowed to walk to his death. A lot of dots will connect, in his reckoning, once there was awareness about who was suborning his security.  What has gone uninvestigated pertains to the source of the explosives. For some reasons, the SIT did not follow up from where the explosive, RDX, was acquired.

If these investigations were conducted properly, the trajectory of the outcome would have been quite different. There would have been greater clarity about the alleged role of MVR Exports in supplying arms to the LTTE. In investigating this aspect more details would have come out on how the Indian Bank gave loans to this firm without engaging in due diligence and how the money was diverted to some LTTE-fronted companies.

Intriguingly, the former Chairman of the Bank, Gopalakrishnan, was given six extensions at the behest of some high profile Tamil Nadu-based Congress politician. Another dot in this long unending saga is that MVR Exports’ non-performing assets worth Rs 1,300 crore have recently been sold to an asset reconstruction company for a meager Rs 180 crore. The question is how the assets of a company tainted in the assassination case could be sold for a song.

Another aspect that has not been taken to its logical conclusion is the involvement of godman Chandraswami, whose involvement has figured in the testimonies of Ranganath, amongst many others. Ranganath had claimed that One Eyed Jack, Sivarasan, was very close to the godman.

There are many such leads that can give a new perspective to the probe. Priyanka's journey to Vellore was not an attempt to come to terms with the tragedy, but a first step to cut through the deliberate confusion created by the conspirators to hide their tracks. Reopening of the case could redefine and reorder politics in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere.