Why kill the Prime Minister?

In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi took over the seat of prime minister after the death of his mother Indira Gandhi. The first thing handled by him in the realm of geopolitics was this situation in Sri Lanka. He wanted both parties to maintain peace and work with unity.

The first major attack by the LTTE’s was in July 1983 when they ambushed a Sri Lanka Army patrol and killed 13 soldiers. In response to that, nearly 3000 Sri Lankan Tamil civilians were killed all over Sri Lanka and more than 90,000 were displaced. After the growing violence and requests from Tamil Nadu, the Indian government decided to support the rebel group. With the help of RAW, they managed to give the LTTE adequate training. 32 camps had been installed in India to teach those 495 LTTE insurgents such as 90 ladies who had been educated in 10 batches.

Major Abhay Sapru tells how the first batch of Tigers were trained in Establishment 22 based in Chakrata, Uttarakhand. He also tells how so many of the members didn’t even know how to tie their shoes and the Indian army taught them all.

Dhanu, who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi and Sivarasan, the conspirator were among the militants trained by RAW, in Nainital, India. So ideally, the prime minister dug his own grave.

Now, by 1987, Rajiv Gandhi and the Sri Lankan prime minister were on good terms and so considering the Tamils, Rajiv Gandhi agreed to sign the Indian-SriLankan Peace Accord. The peace accord assigned a certain degree of regional autonomy in the Tamil areas, with Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) controlling the regional council and calling for the Tamil militant groups to surrender. Most of the groups had agreed except for LTTE who did not like the EPRLF’s leader. On the Sri Lankan PM’s request, India also agreed to deploy a peacekeeping force in the areas surrounding the militants.

Now this may have sounded nice from our perspective but the LTTE wasn’t quite happy. That was also visible during Rajiv Gandhi’s 2 days state visit, by the end, during the closing guard of honour. Rajiv Gandhi was hit by a Sri Lankan naval soldier. Now, when the Indian peacekeeping forces came to Sri Lanka, there was a small ceremony where Tamil guerrillas formally handed over their arms marking the end of the four yearlong rebellions for independence.

Soon after, The LTTE began to resent the presence of Indian troops and the government’s strong-arm tactics. We lost so many of our soldiers because of this. The terrain was best known to the Tamilians, and hence it was difficult for our soldiers to adapt. After Rajiv Gandhi’s defeat in the next election, the IPKF returned. They hated Rajiv Gandhi but his killing was when he wasn’t in power. The sole reason for his death was a statement he made. In 1990 he said in an interview with Sunday magazine that he would send the IPKF back to disarm LTTE if he came to power again.

This is why Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. There are mixed opinions about what Rajiv Gandhi did to the LTTE but the man who met the LTTE leader Prabhakaran and gave him his bulletproof jacket in support of their cause was killed and shattered into pieces by the very same person.