Merchandising a murder

The story that my fortnight-long travels yielded Ominous Presence in Tamil Nadu8217;, India Today, March 31, 1984 was the first account authenticated with pictures and direct quotes that our government was training and building these groups. The expose was greeted with the familiar quot;shock and indignationquot; in the government circles and the quot;sour-grapesquot; self-righteousness in the rest of the media.

One paper I think it was The Daily dismissed the magazine as Lanka Today8217; in its headline and suggested that I had taken a bottle of Scotch from Sri Lankan diplomats to write the story. Salman Haider, now high commissioner-designate to London and then the MEA8217;s spokesman, summoned me to his office and upbraided me for quot;spilling the beansquot; in such an quot;anti-nationalquot; manner. Nothing in the story, he said, quot;was a surprise to usquot; but where was the need for this stuff to get into print? Not one MP defended the story. Mrs Gandhi underlined the mood by responding to a question from one of the magazine8217;s reporters by a contemptuously dismissive quot;I do not talk to reporters from anti-national magazines.quot; It was only four years later, the corpses of hundreds of Indian soldiers weighing down our conscience, that J.N. Dixit, then High Commissioner in Colombo, acknowledged to me quot;how right you were and how horribly wrong has the government gone.quot;Since we Indians are notorious for having poor institutional memory, it was not surprising that the magazine in its initial excitement forgot to take the credit for being the first and the only one with the courage to expose this disastrous adventurism of Mrs Gandhi.

This long preamble, however, is not to remind my alma mater of this but to make the point that much before the erudite Justice Jain had put in his six-and-a-half years of labour to produce this interim report, it was widely known, documented and acknowledged that Mrs Gandhi8217;s government was as much in bed with the Sri Lankan Tamil terrorists as the Chinese had been with our Nagas in the Sixties or the Pakistanis with the Khalistanis subsequently.Both Mrs Gandhi and her ally MGR understood the electoral mileage to be gained from sugar-daddying this blood-thirsty movement. There was also, as I was told by one of Mrs Gandhi8217;s key policy planners, an element of personal vendetta. In his election campaign in Sri Lanka, shortly after Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi had been routed in India after the Emergency, Jayawardene had gone around imploring the Sri Lankan voters to quot;throw out the cow and the calf Sirimavo and Anura Bandaranaike just as the Indians had done.quot;

For those with short memories, besides the metaphorical symbolism, cow-and-calf was also Mrs Gandhi8217;s election symbol at that time. Mrs Gandhi was wild, and was going to teach Jayawardene a lesson even if it meant vivisecting his country irrespective of the consequences it was to have for her8217;s 8212; unfortunately also for her own son8217;s life.

Mrs Gandhi, consumed by yet another fire she had lit in Punjab in her adventurist phase, did not live long enough to pay for her follies. It was left to Rajiv Gandhi, lacking her guile or ruthlessness and thus putty in the hands of so seasoned a player as Jayawardene who trapped him into signing the accord and sending in the IPKF.

Jayawardene had the last laugh in more ways than one. Not only did he get the Indians to fight his battle but, though it is heartless to mention this, he became the only survivor among the key players in the build-up to the accord. The others, his ministers Gamini Dissanayeke and Lalith Athulathmuthali, his prime minister Premadasa and our Rajiv are dead. We now also have it on Justice Jain8217;s authority that perhaps the DMK and two former prime ministers were responsible for all of this. When the Gandhis lit these self-destructive fires, we were called anti-national for daring to question them. After the fires consumed them, and thousands of their countrymen, those V.P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar and Karunanidhi who held power for a mere 15-month interregnum in a whole decade of deceit and subversion are being tarred with the same brush.

If in Justice Jain8217;s scheme of things none of the blame lies at the Gandhis8217; door, it is because such commissions only serve to turn an assassination into a political football. We already have the example of the Thakkar-Natarajan Commission and the gentleman at whom the famous needle of suspicion pointed is still a worthy member of the Congress Working Committee. Even this report will play out in the internal politics of the Congress as the earlier one and may also give the other Mrs Gandhi the fig leaf she needs to enter power politics.

Perhaps some day in future, when the Congress has nothing to do with power in New Delhi, somebody will, in the national interest, look for answers to some other vital questions. Who was responsible for creating and building the LTTE? Who therefore must account for the pointless deaths of not only Rajiv but also over 2,000 innocent IPKF soldiers? Karunanidhi acted in almost a treasonous manner in refusing to welcome the returning IPKF soldiers, but can he be blamed for the deaths of so many of them?Some day a commission will be set up to find those really responsible for this Indian tragedy in Sri Lanka including Rajiv8217;s death, the terrorism in Punjab, the rise of the Bodos and the Tripuri tribal insurgents on the eve of an election. It might be a good idea then to house that commission at 10, Janpath because that is where many of these answers lie.