34 years later: Last journalist to interview Rajiv Gandhi recalls night that shook the world

New Indian Express

6 days ago

Sriperumbudur. May 21, 1991. At 10.21 pm. A moment that in my mind is still frozen in time.
More than thirty-four years after Rajiv Gandhi was felled by a female suicide bomber, a new documentary series on the hunt for his killers has brought the spotlight squarely back on how the leader of a Sri Lankan separatist group pulled off the assassination, right under the nose of India's skilled diplomats and its security and intelligence network.
It was an assassination, that in a bizarre twist, would leave me as the last journalist that Mr Gandhi would speak with.
Moments after he had called, "come, come, follow me" as we both exited his white Ambassador, one of India's most personable Prime Ministers had been killed in the most shocking manner possible.
How did the little-known Vellupillai Prabhakaran, head of the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who had crafted and honed the dastardly plan in the jungles of Jaffna, lull Delhi into this false sense of security, using a girl, strapped with explosives, to end the life of one of India's most promising politicians? The tool had been employed for the first time in April 1983 in the Lebanese capital Beirut outside the US embassy when a suicide bomber blew up a truck packed with 2000 pounds of TNT.
It was a modus operandi that would be borrowed and perfected by the LTTE chief, who used suicide bombers with impunity to eliminate a slew of Sri Lankan leaders including President Ranasinghe Premadasa, presidential hopeful Gamini Dissanayake, senior ministers like Ranjan Wijeratne and ten top generals in the Sri Lankan army, whom Prabhakaran believed had "betrayed" the cause of Tamil Eelam.
This, I would learn later, had prompted the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to fly personally to Delhi and warn Rajiv Gandhi and his security team that he could well be targeted in the very same way!
The radio chatter monitored by Indian intelligence had already tracked an LTTE message to Jaffna that said 'avanne mande le pottu kodu'. In other words, 'blow him up'.
Except, nobody in Delhi was listening!
In the 1991 general elections that I was covering as the foreign correspondent for the Dubai-based Gulf News, the violent methodology of the Tamil separatists, who operated freely in Tamil Nadu, never came up in the innumerable discussions and phone calls to the Congress party's election strategists like Margaret Alva, Mani Shankar Aiyar and GK Moopanar.
The sole exception? The Tamil Nadu Congress Committee chief Vazhapadi Ramamurthy.
For the most part, though, it was the challenge posed by the DMK's powerful orator M Karunanidhi and the pull on the women's vote by the former actress-turned-politician Jayalalitha, the head of the AIADMK, that dominated pre-poll analysis. That, and given the time constraints, working out how to arrange an interview with a Rajiv Gandhi who was clearly on a roll, convinced he was headed back to power as he flew from one election campaign to another, piloting his own aircraft, his plans changing from minute to minute, hour to hour, as voting day loomed.
Setting aside Jaya's constituency to go with Rajiv, and a warning
On May 20, the crowd outside Jayalalitha's Poes Garden home in Chennai was huge. Her assistant had let out that she was scheduled to campaign in Bodinayakkanur the next day, and as she drove up and spotted me in the crowd, the ADMK leader waved for me to come into the house with her. Inside, as she distributed campaign funds to her party candidates, we arranged to meet early the next day so I could travel with her to her constituency.
My next stop was the Tamil Nadu Congress party headquarters where I walked straight into the office of the party chief Vazhapadi Ramamurthy, who still had no confirmation on Mr Gandhi's actual gameplan. Fielding a flurry of phone calls, while gesturing for me to wait, he was on tenterhooks. That is, until he received the one call he had been waiting for -- from Rajiv Gandhi, informing him that he would be flying in from Visakhapatnam to Chennai the next day, after all! Mr Gandhi told him he was keeping his promise to his mother's best friend, Maragatham Chandrasekhar, that he would be campaigning for her in Sriperumbudur.
Scrap Bodinayakkanur? It wasn't even a question, as a fraught and tense Vazhapadi Ramamurthy, handed the phone to me and set up the much-sought-after meeting that would change my life. Vazhapadi didn't stop there, setting off a frisson of alarm, when without specifically mentioning the LTTE, he warned me to be "very careful of outside elements" as he had received reports there could be violence!
In retrospect, Vazhapadi clearly knew more than he was letting on. He must have been privy to state intelligence reports that the LTTE had conducted a dummy run on a rally addressed by the former prime minister VP Singh on May 7 in Chennai. He could not but have known how the LTTE chief systematically eliminated pacifist Tamil leaders of the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation and Tamil United Liberation Front in the city.
And that Rajiv Gandhi had let it be known to a Prabhakaran mole, who had been sent to test the waters about his intentions towards the LTTE chief, that 'everything would be taken care of, soon'. And Prabhakaran's outburst to a Tamil politician who had personally met Rajiv Gandhi at his home in 10 Janpath, where the Indian leader assured that India would not interfere in Sri Lanka's internal affairs!
The exact opposite of what Prabhakaran wanted to hear! An intelligence officer present at the meeting later recounted to me how Rajiv, in a gesture of misplaced goodwill, had even sent his son Rahul to fetch a bulletproof vest to present to the Tiger chief.
Waiting for Mr Gandhi and remembering Sonia's angst
At the Chennai airport the next day, it was odd to see how fate could have played out differently but didn't - the Congress stalwart came close to cheating death when his plane developed engine trouble in Vishakapatnam on May 21 that nearly made him cancel his trip. For me and the others, waiting for him at the airport that evening, however, it was a long, tense, anxious wait.
But it was also an eye-opener on how lax the security was. During a recce of the tiny, shabby room that the former Prime Minister was set to spend the night in, I walked in and out and along the corridor, unchallenged. Not a single security guard or policeman was on duty.
An hour later than his scheduled arrival time of 8.00 pm, Mr Gandhi's aircraft would finally taxi into the tiny airstrip. As he walked through the door, he picked me out from the throng of journalists to come and say a quick hello and assure me that the interview was still on! "Don't worry, I'll send for you," he promised as he began to field a slew of questions from the press, before we left for Sriperumbudur a half hour later.
Mr Gandhi and I had met twice before. The first encounter was in 1989, when he was campaigning in Hyderabad and Kalwakurthy, which was the iconic Andhra leader NT Rama Rao's constituency. This was where I had been knocked into a ditch by the huge crowds at the open field. From then on, I developed a deep reluctance to join the throng.
The second was in February 1991 as the Gulf War came to an end and he and his wife Sonia Gandhi arrived in Dubai, on the last leg of a multi-nation tour, part of the former Prime Minister's attempt to block the United States from using Mumbai airport as a refueling base. Mr Gandhi – and India's – pro-USSR leanings had been turned on their head by the previous Chandrasekhar government, which allowed US Air Force transport planes, flying in from the US-held Clark airbase in the Philippines, to refuel in Mumbai before flying on to Saudi Arabia as part of the Gulf War.
Rajiv Gandhi was having none of it. Did he anger the United States? Invite retribution?
It was in Dubai that Sonia Gandhi first shared her angst over the manner in which Rajiv's security had been reduced to practically nothing. "He has one bodyguard," she said, putting the blame squarely on former Prime Ministers VP Singh and Chandrasekhar, adding, "It's not safe, we cannot even board a train."