How Rajiv Gandhi's decision to send troops to Sri Lanka cost him his life

Indian Express

08-07-2025

When the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) arrived in Sri Lanka on July 30, 1987, New Delhi did not expect to be embroiled in a bloody conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The Indo-Sri Lankan Peace Accord of July 29, 1987 was expected to bring an end to the civil war; Indian troops were meant to simply maintain law and order in the Tamil north.
As things turned out, when the IPKF withdrew from Sri Lanka in 1990, it had suffered more than 8,000 casualties, LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran was more powerful than ever, and after breakdown of peace talks, the second phase of the Eelam War raged on, even more brutal than the first.
Then on May 21, 1991, Rajiv Gandhi, who as Prime Minister had sent in the IPKF to the Emeral Isle, was assasinated by an LTTE suicide bomber at an election rally in Sriperumbudur, tragically culminating the country's Sri Lanka misadventure that has long been described as 'India's Vietnam'.
With the latest Nagesh Kukunoor-directed show The Hunt telling the story of the CBI's investigation into the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, here's a recall of the events and decisions that led to the killing.
Seeds of the conflict
The origins of civil strife in Sri Lanka lay in the discrimination and persecution of the country's minority Tamils by the Sinhala Buddhist majority which dominated in all spheres of life in the post-colonial state.
By the late 1970s, dozens of militant Tamil groups had emerged, demanding autonomy or independence for Sri Lanka's Tamil regions — Tamils form a majority in the Northern Province and have a significant presence in the Eastern Province.
Beginning in the late 1970s, the Tamil Nadu government, and later New Delhi, began providing limited support in the form of training, supplies, and finances to Tamil separatists. This was largely borne out of deep sympathies held by India's Tamil population for their Sri Lankan brethren.
Founded in 1976, Prabhakaran's LTTE soon emerged as the most dominant Tamil separatist group in Sri Lanka by the early 1980s. It was the LTTE's deadly ambush of a Sri Lankan army patrol in 1983 that led to the 'Black July' riots which sparked the two-and-a-half decade civil war in Sri Lanka.
As Samanth Subramanian wrote in his book The Divided Island: Life, Death, and the Sri Lankan War (2014), 'The riots were brought under control, but the violence never truly ceased thereafter.'
India's decision to intervene
India's (successful) intervention in the Bangladesh Liberation War had created a template for responding to civil strife in nearby countries.
When the civil war broke out in 1983, India did not want to intervene directly; it simply wanted to resolve the crisis. While New Delhi held sympathies for Sri Lankan Tamils, it was also wary of the possibility of Tamil secession in Sri Lanka leading to demands of a greater Tamil homeland which could endanger its own sovereignty — as such, India simply wanted to be an impartial mediator. At the time, however, both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government were looking only at a military solution.
Things would change in 1987. That January, Sri Lankan forces placed an embargo on the entire Tamil North, cutting off supplies of even food and medicines. Indian relief ships headed to Jaffna were sent back, prompting Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to send in supplies via Air Force transport aircraft accompanied by Mirage-2000 fighters.
This show of force brought Sri Lanka President J R Jayewardene to the negotiating table with Rajiv Gandhi. The two inked the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord on July 29, 1987 which kept Lanka whole but forced Colombo to agree to greater provincial autonomy and withdraw troops from Tamil regions.
Rebels were to surrender arms and engage in the political process. The IPKF moved into the Tamil regions vacated by the Lankan troops in order to maintain law and order, seting up its headquarters in Palali, near Jaffna.
From keeping peace to waging war
While technically a part of the agreement, the LTTE never truly came on board, and unlike most other rebel groups, refused to surrender arms. Colombo too was not all that happy. 'There was much dissension within Jayewardene's cabinet… The masses, particularly in the Sinhala regions, vehemently opposed the Accord,' Roshani M Gunewardene wrote in 'Indo-Sri Lanka Accord: Intervention by Invitation or Forced Intervention' (1991).
At the end of the day, the underlying political reasons behind the conflict were far from resolved: the 'peace' enforced by the IPKF was tenuous at best, just waiting to come crumbling down.
And that's what happened after Sri Lankan forces detained two LTTE commanders in Jaffna early in October. The duo consumed cyanide pills while in joint custody of the IPKF and the Sri Lankan military, triggering retaliation by the rebels: the IPKF was now at war with the LTTE.
Initially, New Delhi expected a quick, decisive victory. Army Chief General K Sundarji promised Rajiv Gandhi that it would take '72 hours to seven days' to finish off the Tigers. By mid-October, however, all illusions to this end were shattered.
A disastrous heliborne mission to take out the LTTE's top leadership in Jaffna University on October 12 led to the death of 36 Indian troops, the capture of one soldier, injuries to many more, and damage to Indian helicopters. Brigade-level forces and tanks tasked to rescue the soldiers from the compound also suffered heavy losses. Between October 12 and October 13, the IPKF lost at least 70 men, many of whose bodies were never recovered.
The next 20-odd days saw brutal combat between the IPKF, tasked with taking Jaffna, and the Tigers. By the end of October, 1,100 rebels were killed, but the IPKF too lost 319 soldiers, and more than a 1,000 Indian troops were wounded. While Jaffna was captured , the LTTE's main fighting force and leadership had escaped to the jungles of Vanni in the north.
What followed was two-and-a-half years of bitter fighting against an enemy proficient in guerilla tactics and steadfast in its resolve. Casualties mounted on all sides with no end to the war in sight, even as the IPKF presence in the Emerald Isle became ever more popular in both India and Sri Lanka.
By the time the last Indian soldier had left Sri Lankan shores in 1990, after 32 months, some 1,165 Indian soldiers had died and as had more than 5,000 Sri Lankans.
The fallout of the debacle
The pullout of Indian troops finally began in 1989, after Rajiv Gandhi lost the elections to V P Singh — the Sri Lanka debacle undoubtedly played a part in the electoral result. For India, this episode left deep scars.
'Unfortunately, the Sri Lankan operation ended in disaster and, with the IPKF pulling out without achieving its objectives, it became the most powerful argument against future Indian military involvement overseas,' journalist and former Indian Army officer Sushant Singh wrote in his book Mission Overseas: Daring Operations by the Indian Military (2017).
In Sri Lanka, the Indian intervention was extremely unpopular, and the IPKF was accused of extra-judicial abductions, tortuere, rape, and killing. Even among the Sinhala population, the lengthy presence of an 80,000-strong Indian occupation force was detested: Colombo itself began arming the Tigers by 1989, in a bid to hasten IPKF's departure.
The V P Singh government that succeeded Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 was short-lived. By 1991, India was once again preparing for a general election — and Rajiv had kept a door open for re-entering the Sri Lankan civil war. In an interview with Sunday magazine in 1990, the former PM said he would send the IPKF to disarm the LTTE if he returned to power.
This would be the final straw for Prabhakaran, who held deep seated grievances against the former PM for sending Indian troops to Sri Lanka. The Tigers sent their feared suicide bombers, a 22-year-old by the name Kalaivani Rajaratnam, to take Rajiv Gandhi out. At least 15 other bystanders were killed in the bombing.