‘Rajiv wanted me to meet LTTE chief’

In a dramatic disclosure in the Tamil Nadu Assembly today, CM M Karunanidhi, said the late Rajiv Gandhi had in January...

In a dramatic disclosure in the Tamil Nadu Assembly today, CM M Karunanidhi, said the late Rajiv Gandhi had in January 1989 wanted him to meet LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran in the Vavuniya jungles and clinch a negotiated settlement. “He wanted me to play a leading role in finding a solution to the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis,” Karunanidhi told the Assembly.

The DMK had won the 1989 assembly elections and Karunanidhi was CM but his government lasted barely a year. It was dismissed in January 1991 on the ground that he had allowed the LTTE a free hand in the state. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in June 1991.

Karunanidhi said he had gone to Delhi to pay a courtesy call on the former PM after the DMK came to power. “That was when Rajiv mooted the 1989 initiative,” he said. But nothing came of it as Vaiko, then a key functionary of the DMK and Karunanidhi’s close confidante, made a clandestine visit to Vavuniya jungles to meet the LTTE chief when the Indian Peace-Keeping Force was still there.

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The Chief Minister said he was forced to make the disclosure as “India’s response to the present situation in Sri Lanka has to be looked at from the perspectives that prevailed when Rajiv Gandhi was alive and after his brutal assassination on Tamil Nadu soil.”

Referring to the unanimous resolution passed in the Tamil Nadu Assembly condemning the aerial attack on an orphanage in the LTTE-controlled Mullaiteevu by the Lankan army that killed 61 teenaged girls, Karunanidhi said: “we still share an umbilical relationship with the Tamils in Sri Lanka and we cannot bear more and more Tamils being killed and plundered there”. He added: “If condemning the killing of Tamils is wrong, Tamils are ready to commit the same wrong again and again.”

The resolution had appealed to the Centre to take suitable steps to ensure lasting peace and security for Tamils in Sri Lanka. Colombo in a statement on Friday said the Tamil Nadu Assembly resolution contained “assertions based on totally fabricated reports”. The aerial reconnaissance and video footage available with its military indicated that the bombed structure was not an “orphanage” but a training facility from where the Tigers were sending out cadres to attack the security forces in the northern Jaffna peninsula, the Lankan government statement added.

While the resolution passed in the Assembly was to draw the attention of the Lankan government to “such unthinkable brutality”, it was also to urge the Indian government “not to remain a mute spectator”, Karunanidhi said, appealing to the Centre to take steps that were required to stop the killings of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

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