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 AIADMK 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 after the LTTE chief 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."
Years after his assassination, one of Mr Gandhi's bodyguards, when he was Prime Minister, would tell me about an official visit to the Swedish capital Stockholm, and how he had personally sanitised the hotel room before they left for an event. On their return, as a precautionary measure, he decided to vet the room again, and found to his horror, that placed just outside an unlocked window was a gun that wasn't there before!
Mr Gandhi, he said, simply shrugged it off. The bodyguard said it wasn't that Mr Gandhi didn't take the threats to his life seriously, he just wasn't going to allow it to rule his life.
Our 45 minutes together and his curiosity about Nawaz Sharif
On the night of May 21, when we finally set off from the Chennai airport, there must have been at least 50 cars in the cavalcade. But unlike Hyderabad of 1989, there were no Black Cat commandos, no multiple rings of security.
Within ten minutes of the cars taking the turn off to the road to Sriperumbudur, the cavalcade came to a stop and I could see a man popping his head into every car and asking something. He came to the car I was in, and asked “Neena Gopal” and I said yes. It was the lone bodyguard Pradeep Gupta, and the summons I had been waiting for. I gathered up my notepad and pen and ran to the lead car in which Rajiv Gandhi was sitting in the front. I squeezed into the back where Maragatham Chandrasekhar and her daughter were sitting.
During the course of the next 45 minutes as I tried to turn the conversation to his electoral prospects, he asked me to describe what kind of a person Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was, and whether he would be open to a dialogue with India. Clearly, he was up to speed that I had just interviewed the new Pakistani leader as well as the ousted former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
And it was a message that he wanted me to amplify that despite the scare that General Sundarji had generated with Operation Brasstacks—the mobilisation of troops to India's western and northern border with Pakistan that could have sliced the state of Sindh in two—mending fences with Pakistan was very much on his mind.
General Sundarji's moves, whether by accident or design, brought Pakistan dictator President General Zia-ul-Haq hotfooting it to India under the guise of watching a cricket match in Jaipur in February-March 1987. Within months, the unspoken Rajiv-Zia compact had set off a backroom dialogue between Pakistan's top spook, the Inter Services Intelligence chief General Hamid Gul and India's Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) chief AK Verma in motion.
This had been driven by the strategic imperative that only arriving at a solution to Siachen and J&K would bring peace to the region. Verma, in a remarkable one-on-one interview, had told me in 2016, how a far-sighted Rajiv Gandhi—a man in a hurry—actively encouraged him to work with General Hamid Gul.
A Rajiv basking in adulation and then that prescient observation
As we drove into Sriperumbudur on that night of May 21, I watched a Rajiv Gandhi who was clearly in his element. With the windows wound down and the car literally crawling through the crowds even at that late hour, Rajiv got out only once to pay respects to a statue of his mother Indira Gandhi at the turn off to the election rally ground.
This was a Rajiv who clearly revelled in the public adulation, the crowds pulling at his scarf, showering him with flowers, some even pinching his cheeks; it was after all, the popular ballast he would need to put his plans into action. Except, he would also have been fair game to anyone armed with a gun or a knife!
And I couldn’t help but ask as we turned into the Sriperumbudur election ground, poorly lit, with a smattering of police and security at the venue, whether he didn't find the lack of security troubling, that his life could well be in danger. And this was his response. Turning to Maragatham Chandrasekhar, he adeptly deflected it: "See, Maragatham, look at what Neena is saying, there's no security at all."
But turning to me, perched precariously on the gear box, he was far more prescient, almost as if he had a premonition that his life could end at any time.
And this is what he said: “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 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."
Death
Within minutes of that conversation, Rajiv Gandhi would be dead.
As the huge explosion went off barely a few feet away, and the earth shook, and I frantically tried to wipe off the blood and gore on my white saree, a nameless dread took hold of me. I ran down the slight incline to the spot where Mr Gandhi lay.
One of his closest friends Suman Dubey was right behind me, repeating over and over 'it's a firecracker, it's a firecracker'. Having just covered the Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait first hand, there was no doubt in my mind that this was no firecracker. This was a bomb.
Rajiv Gandhi lay there crumpled on the ground, his one outstretched arm still sporting his Gucci watch, his feet, the Lotto shoes, his face, strangely, at peace. He was no more. Lying by his side was his lone bodyguard Pradeep Gupta.
With no ambulance at hand, and Congress leaders GK Moopanar and Jayanti Natarajan trying desperately to lift his body and failing as their hands went through it, a panicked populace began racing in all directions. Most of them were coming straight at us as we pushed, moving in the reverse direction, towards the many fallen bodies.
Amidst the tears and the anger of the survivors and as the chant 'Rajiv Gandhi Vazhga' grew ever louder, their voices rising to a crescendo, Rajiv Gandhi's driver came up out of nowhere and said I couldn't stay there. He guided me out of the melee, and back to the car and safety.
To Chennai and the Central Telegraph Office.
He knew this was a story that simply had to be told.
(Neena Gopal was the last journalist to interview former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi)