20 July,2010

Rajiv’s assassin not India’s enemy?
India’s Home Minister believes that the man who ordered former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination was not India’s enemy. Amazed? But it is true. In a public meeting in Tamil Nadu on Saturday, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram said about slain Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran: “He was not our enemy. We were opposed to the path chosen by him.” This is a statement from the man responsible for India’s security! The LTTE leader had a non-bailable warrant on him for ordering Rajiv’s assassination.
Rajiv Gandhi was the seventh Prime Minister of India from 1984 to 1989. It was when he was PM that Konkani became our official language and, as a consequence, Goa got statehood. In 1989, the Congress lost the election when V P Singh, leader of the united Janata Dal (JD), became Prime Minister with the ‘outside support’ of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Congress, though it was the largest single party, was kept out of power.
The JD government did not last long, and a mid-term election was called in 1991. It was when he was campaigning for this election – just a few days after he had addressed an election meeting in Panjim – that Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu on 21 May 1991, by an LTTE woman suicide bomber named Thenmozhi Rajaratnam alias Dhanu, trained by the ‘One-eyed Jack’ Sivarasan.
Rajiv had angered Prabhakaran by pushing the LTTE supremo to sign the India-Sri Lanka Peace Agreement in 1987, after which the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) was sent in to end the Sri Lankan Civil War. Old timers will remember that the steamer service between Mumbai and Goa was stopped from that year because both ships, ‘Konkan Sevak’ and ‘Konkan Shakti’, were commandeered by the Army to supply the IPKF.
Very soon, the LTTE broke the ceasefire and declared war on the IPKF. The conflict raged till the IPKF was unilaterally withdrawn in early 1990 by the V P Singh government with significant casualties and a huge loss of face. Prabhakaran was desperate to ensure that Rajiv did not once more become India’s Prime Minister, so he ordered his killing.
The LTTE’s initially denials of responsibility for the murder were comprehensively overturned decades later in a clear confession by its international spokesman Anton Balasingham, who repeatedly told an Indian TV channel in a 2006 interview that the killing was a “great tragedy, a monumental historical tragedy which we [LTTE] deeply regret.”
Can a person who ordered the assassination of a former prime minister of the country not be an enemy of the country? Let us remember that Prabhakaran’s LTTE also went to war against the Indian Army. Mr Chidambaram is an accomplished corporate lawyer, apart from being a seasoned politician. How can he not be aware of the consequences when India’s Home Minister gives Prabhakaran a clean chit? The LTTE leader may be dead, but does that acquit him of his crimes?
One could conceivably argue that Mr Chidambaram was merely being populist in the Tamil heartland. He was speaking in Virudhunagar, the home constituency of MDMK chief Vaiko, the LTTE’s strongest supporter. But can Mr Chidambaram simply forget that he has limits and responsibilities as Union Home Minister? Besides, Vaiko was defeated in his bastion in the 2009 Lok Sabha election by a low profile Congress nominee named Manick Tagore, with a margin of 15,000 votes. This means the issue is not emotive enough to make India’s Home Minister lose his bearings.
Are we to assume that this is the official stand of the Congress and the government on the issue? If not, Mr Chidambaram owes the country an explanation.