So why did her family topple a govt?

This begets an important question. Who exactly did Priyanka forgive? It cannot be Nalini, since she continues to maintain her innocence in the assassination conspiracy. If Nalini indeed privately confessed to the contrary before Priyanka, the latter has a duty to immediately convey it to the Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA), working fruitlessly under the CBI for the past 10 years to probe the wider conspiracy behind Rajiv’s murder. Nalini, however, is only one among the many LTTE persons linked to the assassination plot. Therefore, the next important question arises: Has Priyanka also forgiven Prabhakaran, the LTTE supremo who heads the list of persons charged by the Special Investigation Team (SIT), and others involved in the plot? If so, why? If not, why not? These questions cannot be escaped if the real purpose of Priyanka’s visit to Vellore was, as the fawning sections of the media have claimed, to bring a closure to the tragedy that befell her family.

All in all, there does seem to be something more to Priyanka’s widely praised meeting with Nalini than has yet come to light.

My last week’s column had questioned Priyanka’s claim that her meeting with Nalini was ‘purely personal’. I did so by recalling how the Congress party had crassly politicised the probe into Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and even used it to pull down the government of I.K. Gujral in 1997. If the Congress leadership — and this means primarily Sonia Gandhi and her family — believes in the principle of accountability, it has not so far demonstrated it by explaining to the nation why it destabilised Gujral’s government by demanding the ouster of DMK ministers from it. It cannot take shelter behind the argument that it was responding then to the Jain Commission’s interim report (which contained some damning remarks against the DMK), whereas once the Commission’s final report gave a clean chit to the DMK, it had no problem allying with Karunanidhi’s party in 2004 and making it a partner in the UPA government. Indeed, Sonia Gandhi made this argument while justifying the Congress-DMK alliance prior to the 2004 parliamentary elections.

Sadly for the Congress, facts drill holes in this self-serving argument. On August 19 1998 — that is, five months after the Jain Commission had submitted its final report exonerating the DMK — a delegation of senior Congress leaders, including Dr Manmohan Singh, Arjun Singh and Pranab Mukherjee met the then Home Minister L.K. Advani and submitted a seven-page letter with the following demand: “The Congress insists that the agency (MDMA) be directed by the government to investigate all matters relating to Mr M. Karunanidhi as adverted by the Commission and proceed against him in a court of law, if warranted by the evidence which will be uncovered.” This demand could not have been made without the concurrence of Sonia Gandhi.

This raises two important questions: If the Congress leadership had continued to suspect the DMK’s hand even after the submission of the Jain panel’s final report, what reasons, other than pure political opportunism, prompted it to ally with Karunanidhi’s party in 2004? Secondly, has Manmohan Singh, in his four years of premiership, acted on the demand that he had himself placed before Advani — namely, directing the MDMA “to investigate all matters relating to Mr. Karunanidhi”?

Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination was indeed a national tragedy. Sadly, his family has not so far allayed suspicions that the Congress played politics with it. Rahul and Priyanka still have an opportunity to make a clean break from this amoral past.