Commentary / Mani Shankar Aiyar

The Jain Commission can at last focus on the 'sequence of events' which led to Rajiv's killing

On May 21, 1991, Rajiv Gandhi was blown up at Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, by a human bomb detonated by the Sri Lankan Tamil terrorist organisation, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. A mere 110 days earlier, the DMK government in the state had been dismissed by the Centre under Article 356 of the Constitution for the close ties that allegedly subsisted between the outlawed LTTE and the DMK-run state government.

One of the major tasks before the Jain Commission is to unearth the nexus, if any, between the LTTE and the DMK and the relationship, if any, between that nexus and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. After more than five years of finding its inquiry stymied at virtually every turn, the Jain Commission is at last reaching the point where it can start focusing in earnest on the 'sequence of events' which led to the killing.

Justice Milap Chand Jain will be ascertaining whether two crucial events in the year leading to the assassination had a bearing on the assassination -- first, the massacre of Padmanabhan and 15 of his EPRLF associates by the LTTE in Madras (Chennai) in June 1990; and, second, the dismissal of the Karunanidhi government on January, 31, 1991, by the Chandra Shekhar government when it still had three years to run of the mandate it had secured from the people of Tamil Nadu in the election of January 1989.

The home secretary to the Karunanidhi government has already deposed before the commission. So have the prime minister and home minister of the day, Chandra Shekhar and Subodh Kant Sahay. V P Singh is, at the moment of writing, deposing at length over a period of several days.

Within the next few weeks, between the commencement of the Puja/Navaratri celebrations and Deepavali, the Jain Commission is expected to see a galaxy of the key personalities of that period coming before the commission: Karunanidhi himself; Jayalalitha who succeeded him as chief minister; and P Chidambaram, now in alliance with Karunanidhi but in 1991 the most articulate exponent of the DMK- LTTE nexus and subsequently (24.5.95. to 1.4.96) minister in charge of the investigation.

To assist the reader in making sense of the stray bits and pieces which the press will be carrying of these depositions I offers this guide to what to look out for as the inquiry enters its most crucial phase.

First, the nexus. From July 1983 to July 1987, there was a tremendous wave of sympathy all over India, cutting across party lines, for the plight of the Tamil citizens of Sri Lanka. The proximate cause of the sympathy wave was the massacre in July 1983 of prisoners of Tamil origin in a Colombo jail which signalled the intensification of the brutal suppression of the movement promoted by a number of Sri Lankan Tamil organisations for freedom for the Tamils through regional autonomy or, preferably, a sovereign state of their own ('Eelam').

It was recognised that some of these Tamil organisations were non-violent in character and attempting to achieve their goals through a democratic political process while others were dedicated to violence, insurrection and revolution. Both sets of organisations turned to India for solace and succour; both in turn were provided by the Government of India, in association with the state government of Tamil Nadu, some of it in a clandestine manner.