Operation Ghostbuster: Major General VK Dutta on the hunt he led for Rajiv Gandhi's assassins

New Indian Express

3 days ago

Operation Ghostbuster.
This was the codename given to the hunt for a five-foot-four-inch tall bespectacled 'one-eyed jack' after Rajiv Gandhi was blown up by a suicide bomber on May 21, 1991 at a rally in Tamil Nadu's Sriperumbudur.
That 90-day manhunt to locate Sivarasan, who landed in Tamil Nadu with Rs 19 lakh worth of gold biscuits and a hit squad to take out the ex-Prime Minister, is back in the spotlight after The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case aired on OTT and began hogging attention.
What drove the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to mount such an elaborate plot where they ended up putting the lives of so many of their committed cadres at risk without any certainty of success?
What about the suicide bomber Dhanu? How did she participate in dry runs and then undertake a bus journey with plastic explosives (RDX) strapped to her body knowing she would have to embrace certain death? Didn't she flinch at all at any point?
More importantly, how did the LTTE get hold of the RDX?
And what about Sivarasan? Why did he linger on after May 21? Even make a trip to Tirupati in between. To thank gods or seek blessings for another mission?
The 'ottrai kannu aasami' (one-eyed mastermind) as he came to be infamously known went into hiding only after a photo of Dhanu at Sriperumbudur on the fateful night appeared in a newspaper on May 29. This was eight days after the suicide bombing.
A careful study of the archives reveal that it took a while for the Special Investigation Team to piece together what had happened after the bomb went off at around 10:20 pm on May 21, 1991.
India hadn't seen a suicide bombing before that night. In fact, even war-torn Sri Lanka had only seen their first suicide bombing four years ago—in July 1987.
Newspapers next day only spoke of Rajiv dying in an explosion. The fact that a suicide bomber was to blame would only be discovered thanks to Tamil Nadu's forensic chief, Professor P Chandra Sekharan.
Thalaivar enge?
Around two hours before the blast, Rajiv Gandhi had arrived—smile firmly in place—at the airport in Chennai and was greeted by a Tamil actress with a zari chawl, according to a report in our newspaper. He had proclaimed confidently that "there is no need for me to join hands with any party to form the government".
But did he have a premonition of the fate that awaited him at Sriperumbudur?
Neena Gopal, the last journalist to interview Rajiv, recently wrote in the newindianexpress.com of one of his last observations to her.
"Have you noticed how every time any South Asian leader of import rises to a position of power or is about to achieve something for himself or his country, he/she is cut down, attacked, killed…? Look at Mrs Gandhi (his mother Indira), Sheikh Mujib, look at Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at Zia-ul-Haq, (Srimavo) Bandaranaike," the ex-PM asked Neena.
Minutes later, he had himself joined that list.
The lack of security at Sriperumbudur was glaring. Our reports spoke of zero frisking and almost no metal detectors.
This despite Palestine Liberation Organisation chief Yasser Arafat having delivered a warning of there being a threat to Rajiv's life. This despite the known antipathy of the LTTE towards the ex-PM ever since he had sent the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka in 1987.
Tamil Nadu Congress Chief Vazhapadi Ramamurthy and GK Moopanar were among those running around in search for Rajiv shouting "Thalaivar enge?" (Where is our leader?) once they recovered from the shock of the blast that claimed as many as 16 lives.
A lucky break and the hunt for the assassins
The hunt that followed took off slowly.
By July 1, a National Security Guard commando unit was put in charge of capturing Sivarasan, whose identification as the key conspirator and the team leader was set off by the chance discovery of a 35 mm Chinon camera belonging to Hari Babu.
It's another matter that Hari Babu would turn out to be a man recruited by the LTTE's Nithrasanam (Reality) unit to document the assassination. But a 10-frame-sequence shot by the dead photographer in the immediate moments before the blast was pure investigation gold.
Leading the crack unit assigned the responsibility of capturing the assassination mastermind Sivarasan and his team was the now retired Major General Vijay Kumar Dutta. Then a Colonel, he had known Rajiv Gandhi from 1984 when he was the head of the unit tasked with the new Prime Minister's security immediately after Indira Gandhi's assassination.
"Rajiv was very pragmatic. Very upright. Very modern," recalls General Dutta, who was in charge of Rajiv's security during the latter's first six months as Prime Minister. He also recollected the late PM's love for driving and automobiles and of how he would stay awake till 3-4 am immersed in his work.
"I believe Rajiv would have come back to power in that election if he had not been assassinated," he stresses.
General Dutta, who lamented the withdrawal of the Special Protection Group cover for Rajiv after he stepped down as PM, went on to reveal how the team that carried out the hunt for the assassins was assembled.
Six ranking officers, eight junior commissioned officers and 40 commandos, who went around in muftis and could melt into the crowd without attracting attention, were selected by him. General Dutta had told the then Home Minister SB Chavan that his team's aim was to capture Sivarasan alive. "But if the life of any of my commandos came under threat, I told him we will take the LTTE men out."
The team had also been armed with an antidote to cyanide poisoning, "a first in the world but one that had to be administered intravenously within 30 seconds for it to take effect".
It was a mission with no margins of error.
Posters seeking information on Sivarasan were plastered everywhere, including behind buses and autorickshaws. General Dutta's team was flooded with hundreds of calls daily, even from people who wanted to settle a score with their neighbours, saying Sivarasan had been sighted at multiple addresses!
"So, we decided to base our searches on the last confirmed location of Sivarasan. From there, we started drawing a circle of 250 kilometres radius and five hours. We decided that we will only concentrate on areas that fell within that radius while launching our searches," General Dutta remembers.
"Even after this, we ended up carrying out three to four raids every day," he adds.
Broke the backbone of the LTTE
These raids saw us "slowly and gradually uprooting the entire LTTE network in Tamil Nadu", says General Dutta.
One of the most interesting discoveries he recounts stumbling upon was of a LTTE grenade factory in Coimbatore.
"This only happened because three boys on a motorcycle were intercepted by a traffic policeman. When they were caught, the boys tried to bribe that policeman with a large amount of money. This immediately aroused his suspicion. Why was he being offered so much? So, he informed the police, who found that these boys are from the LTTE.
"Soon, the cops informed the Special Investigation Team who relayed the information to us. And you will be surprised. They were actually assembling hand grenades from parts manufactured in different factories.
"Somewhere a trigger was being made. Somewhere the plastic body was being made. Somewhere the spring was being made. Somewhere the cap was being made.
"No factory had the complete picture. They were each told these were vehicle spare parts. But when the whole thing was assembled, it turned into a lethal hand grenade.
"That was the kind of ingenuity the LTTE had. They were using our infrastructure in Tamil Nadu, various small factories here and there and making stuff that served the military needs of the LTTE without any of these factories being the wiser of it," General Dutta remembers.
He admits the LTTE also had a lot of ground-level sympathy.
"There was definitely a lot of sympathy for the LTTE cadres because all said and done Sri Lanka was ill-treating Tamils there. They had a genuine cause for fighting for their rights," he observes.
On the trail of Sivarasan and the final standoff
The first major safe house that Sivarasan fled from was at 158, Muthamamil Nagar, Kodungaiyur in Chennai. After that he used many LTTE safe houses in Tamil Nadu.
"Most of these safe houses were in newly-developed colonies and so people hadn't settled down there. It helped the LTTE get these houses at cheaper rates and also let their man stay under the radar," says General Dutta.
Finally, when Sivarasan felt the hunt in Tamil Nadu was too hot to handle, he got into a tanker that was to take him to his final hideouts.
"He was hidden in a capsule slipped into the tanker" and that was how the 'one-eyed jack' reached Bengaluru after travelling hundreds of kilometres.
Finally, at the 'safe house' in Konanakunte outside Bengaluru a "milk vendor chanced upon Sivarasan" and informed the Karnataka police, who immediately reached the house and surrounded it. The commandos arrived at the house on August 19, but a 36-hour wait was to ensue.
The reason cited was Colonel Dutta's absence. He had gone to Delhi for two days to oversee operations elsewhere.
But as soon as he was informed by Captain Raveendran from his team that Sivarasan had been located, Colonel Dutta asked his director general to give them the go ahead for the storming of the safe house. Instead, he was told to get into a BSF Avro aircraft at the Palam airport from where he flew to Gwalior to pick up the cyanide antidote and reached Bengaluru at around 4:20-4:30 pm the next morning.
As soon as he was at Konanakunte, Colonel Dutta ordered his team to storm the house.
"It was a single-storey house with a roof at the top. From a neighbouring house, we placed a ladder to go over the roof. One entry from the front, one from the rear. We blew open the doors and entered. Sivarasan and the others were lying dead. Sivarasan had not only consumed cyanide, but also had a bullet in his head. He was not in disguise when we found him dead. So that is where the hunt for him came to an end," General Dutta recalls.