Why Priyanka’s Vellore visit is not personal

Rajiv’s daughter Priyanka Vadra recently visited Nalini Sriharan, now serving a life-term in Vellore Central Prison for her role in his assassination in May 1991. “Meeting with Nalini was my way of coming to peace with the violence and loss that I have experienced,” she said in a statement on Tuesday. As the daughter of India’s former prime minister who became the victim of a terrorist act, she and the other members of her family naturally had the sympathy of the nation. And if it indeed was “a purely personal visit”, as Priyanka has claimed, it can even be viewed as an admirable act of human bonding that transcends a terrible tragedy, a reminder that time is the greatest healer in all tragedies.

However, going by the way a section of the media has been busy eulogising Priyanka and her family (“It shows the large-heartedness of the Gandhis … and why they are so special and popular.” “ … (it) has pulled the heart strings of the nation and added to the halo of the Gandhi family… (it) has rekindled the nation’s nostalgia for the Nehru-Gandhi family and brought back memories of its ‘sacrifices’ for the nation.” — both quotes from the newspaper which carried the well-orchestrated ‘scoop’), it is difficult to believe that considerations of political gain had nothing to do with this episode.

Has Priyanka, her brother or mother ever publicly commiserated with the bereaved members of the families of 1,255 Indian soldiers who lost their lives in the IPKF operations in Sri Lanka and thus helped them “come to peace with violence and loss” that they too experienced as the result of a foolish and counter-productive decision taken by Rajiv Gandhi? Have they done the same with the bereaved kith and kin of those who lost their lives in the 1984 anti-Sikh carnage? Or, is it their belief that they alone have suffered “violence and loss” in this country? Or that their family is entitled to special privileges, both in life and in death?

There is another reason why Priyanka’s visit to Vellore cannot be treated as a purely personal matter. Newspapers have reported that “Priyanka wanted to know from Nalini who were the conspirators behind the assassination.” If this is true, the nation has a right to know why she, her brother and mother have so far not expressed displeasure over the failure of the official body that was specially constituted ten years ago to probe precisely that question.

A Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA), working under the CBI, was constituted in 1998 by the NDA government to further investigate the wider conspiracy behind the assassination and bring those accused in the case, including the absconders, to trial. The decision to set up the MDMA followed the Congress party’s vociferous rejection of the Action Taken Report tabled in Parliament by Advani, the then home minister, on the final report of Justice M.C. Jain Commission whose mandate, too, was to probe the wider conspiracy, if any, behind the LTTE’s crime. Will Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tell the nation what the MDMA has achieved in the last four years?

How the Congress party played crass politics with Rajiv’s assassination is evident — and described in significant detail in Advani’s book — from its decision to topple I.K. Gujral’s government in 1997 following certain remarks against the DMK that the Jain Commission’s interim report contained. The same DMK was later embraced by the Congress in the 2004 parliamentary polls and is now a loyal constituent in the UPA government. The Jain Commission’s final report did not indict anybody, including the DMK. Therefore, why haven’t the Gandhi family and the Congress party so far confessed to the nation that their decision to destabilise Gujral’s government, on the basis of what they knew was only an interim report, was wrong and indefensible?

Sonia Gandhi’s family and the Congress leadership have several other questions to answer. Read next week’s column.