May 21 marks India’s former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s death anniversary.
Read |A sense of an ending: On the release of Rajiv Gandhi case convictsA month later, A.G. Perarivalan was arrested by the officials for felicitating the probe.
Eventually, when Rajiv Gandhi made his way towards a waiting crowd, Dhanu moved close to him.
She switched on the toggle switch attached to her suicide vest, triggering a terrible blast that ripped through her, Rajiv Gandhi and 16 others.
He became India’s youngest Prime Minister at the age of 40 when he assumed office in October 1984.
May 21 marks India’s former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s death anniversary. At the helm between 1984 and 1989, Gandhi was assassinated by LTTE cadres at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu in 1991 during an election campaign.
The assassination in May 1991, ordered by the LTTE leadership and carried out by a suicide bomber, caused revulsion.
Gandhi and 15 others, including Superintendent of Police T.K.S. Mohammed Iqbal were killed on the fateful day. Following the assassination, the probe was handed over to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the CBI at the Tamil Nadu government’s request.
Read |A sense of an ending: On the release of Rajiv Gandhi case convicts
A month later, A.G. Perarivalan was arrested by the officials for felicitating the probe. Years later, in 1998, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) court sentenced 26 accused, to death. In 1999, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentences of Murugan, Santhan, Perarivalan and Nalini. Over a decade and a lot of appeals later, the execution of Santhan, Murugan and Perarivalan was fixed for September 2011. In 2014, however, the Supreme Court commuted the death sentence of the three into life sentence.
In November 2022, the Supreme Court ordered the immediate release of six convicts who were serving life sentences for more than three decades. The six convicts were Nalini, Ravichandran, Jayakumar, Santhan, Murugan and Robert Pius. This marked the end of a tragic episode that began with India’s disastrous involvement in Sri Lanka’s internal strife in the 1980s.
The task
Once the task of killing Gandhi was handed over to the LTTE intelligence operative known by his nom de guerre Sivarasan, the Tigers decided that the latter should not get mixed up with the existing LTTE network in Tamil Nadu. To ensure that everything went well, the LTTE had carried out a rehearsal at an election rally of former Prime Minister V.P. Singh in Chennai. As Singh was leaving, Dhanu, the suicide bomber walked up to him and touched his feet as a mark of respect for an elder.
At the rally, Dhanu was armed with a sandalwood garland — and a deadly suicide vest. Eventually, when Rajiv Gandhi made his way towards a waiting crowd, Dhanu moved close to him. Dhanu put the garland around him and bent down as if to touch his feet. But she never got up. She switched on the toggle switch attached to her suicide vest, triggering a terrible blast that ripped through her, Rajiv Gandhi and 16 others.
Read |Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and the downfall of LTTE
Gandhi took over the charge of the Congress in 1984 following the assassination of his mother and then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. He became India’s youngest Prime Minister at the age of 40 when he assumed office in October 1984.
He served as the Prime Minister of India till December 2, 1989.
