In the dense jungles of northeastern Sri Lanka, across the Palk Strait, Prabhakaran nursed a grudge against Rajiv Gandhi which would become a full-scale obsession. It was here, deep in the forests of the Wanni, that the plot to kill the former Indian prime minister was first hatched.
As the LTTE chief, solitary and furtive, moved like a hunted animal under the cover of darkness from one hideout to another, night after night, from Jaffna and Kankesanthurai to Vadamarachchi, and Vavuniya and back, the depth of his fury at Rajiv Gandhi’s perceived perfidy was an open secret. That is, it was a secret to everyone but the Indians.
Through the IPKF deployment in the northeast, he played a game of cat and mouse with Delhi. Knowing he would be easy prey if he broke cover, he rarely slept in the same bed twice, neither took nor made any telephone calls, trusting no one, staying one step ahead of both Colombo and Delhi. It was a habit that stayed with him till his last days.
His only entertainment after he was forced to return to the island nation from India in 1987 came from a movie projector in the safe house he picked to hide out for the night. This is where he would watch the latest thriller play out as shadows on a blank wall. The Tiger chief’s obsessive paranoia fed off Kollywood, the Tamil movies that featured his idol, MGR, in the lead, and films of the same genre as the 1984 Kamal Haasan-starrer “Oru Kaidhiyin Diary” (A Convict’s Diary) that spun stories of angry men nursing a grievance, extracting retribution, driven by revenge.
A school dropout, Prabhakaran did have his Achilles’ heel. It wasn’t wine or women or song, or books — he grew up on Phantom comics — it was the movies. He was addicted to the string of videos brought to him by the one RAW agent with whom he shared a very special rapport — the legendary S. Chandrasekharan, known affectionately by the moniker “Chandran” Chandrasekharan, who retired from RAW and set up the respected Delhi-based think-tank, the South Asia Analysis Group ... it was from these nightly thrillers that the Jaffna conspiracy to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi probably took its inspiration. The Fred Zinnemann 1973 movie, “The Day of the Jackal”, based on the Frederick Forsyth bestseller, was the probable first seed.
Prabhakaran routinely settled scores by publicly eliminating his rivals to instil fear in his enemies; his first “kill” was the Jaffna mayor Alfred Duraiappah in 1975, whom he reportedly shot as he entered the Varadaraja Perumal temple. Chandran believes the plan to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi was in keeping with this “kill or get killed” philosophy. “Everyone thinks it was the CIA and Mossad that planted the idea of assassinating Rajiv Gandhi in Prabhakaran’s head. I believe it was the movies that he saw; that’s what gave him the idea,” says Chandran. Conspiracy theorists, however, demur.
It wasn’t that Delhi didn’t have him within sight. If Prabhakaran wanted to get back at India for trying to call the shots in his backyard, India had mobilised every resource at its command to have eyes on their prize target at all times.
But as a RAW operative from that era freely admits, with surveillance dependent on tip-offs from Lankan Tamils outside the inner circle, they never knew precisely where he was at any given moment. “We knew the minute he left that location,” he laughs. Close, but never close enough.
Delhi undoubtedly had ample opportunity to eliminate the LTTE chief a number of times — and chose not to. As a senior member of the Indian Air Force (IAF), who served in the IPKF and was stationed as the IAF bases in Palaly and Trincomalee, recounts, he and the helicopter squadron he commanded had been given Prabhakaran’s coordinates.
“I had my copter, all ready to go. We informed headquarters that we had been tipped off on where he was. One of our chaps had tracked him down. It was all systems go. All we needed was clearance from Delhi and we could eliminate him. Just like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. “We waited for the signal but then came the message — a firm ‘no’,” says the senior Air Force pilot. “We had him in our sights. If we had eliminated him then, who knows ...” he says with a shrug, leaving the sentence hanging.
Only once thereafter did the IPKF get close enough to Prabhakaran. They bombed his bunker in the Wanni, in his hideout Base One Four, in January 1989. The LTTE chief, though angry and upset, escaped with barely a scratch.
Complicating matters was the confusion and lack of clarity in Delhi’s intelligence and strategic circles, on whether Prabhakaran constituted a short-term threat to be eliminated or a long-term asset to be cultivated. And added to this was the question of whether this bit player who had forcefully interjected himself into the Indo-Sri Lanka narrative by taking on the Indian Army, could still be “turned”; a Tamil “card” that India could use to keep Colombo off balance in the years to come.
Prabhakaran was under no illusions about where he stood vis-à-vis Delhi. He may have made concessions on a one-on-one basis to Indians like Chandran, but Rajiv Gandhi’s Delhi was the enemy.
In fact, the RAW operative’s relationship with the LTTE chief and the man that RAW cultivated as its LTTE insider, Col Kittu, real name Sathasivan Krishnakumar, was so strong that when Indian soldiers were being held prisoner by the LTTE, it was Chandran — as he himself admits — whom the Indian Army called for help.
“They asked me to intercede with the LTTE and get our men released,” he says. “I did. I stepped in when Military Intelligence [MI] asked for help.” He knew the Lankan Tamil leaders like few others, all were on a first-name basis with him.
Chandran was low-key, nondescript. RAW recruits of that time still recall how, in the mid-1980s, he would simply throw a bag over his shoulder, get on a motorbike and zoom off from their office in Madras and not be seen or heard of for months together. Their guess was that Chandran, the only Indian who could reach out to the top rungs of the Tamil militant groups, had either headed off to Jaffna on a clandestine boat or to one of the many camps in the state where the Tamil groups were being given military training.
Thirty years later, incidentally, Chandran continues to staunchly deny that Indian operatives trained the Lankan Tamil separatists. “We didn’t need to. One group of Tamils had already travelled to Palestine and received military training from George Habash’s wing of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation]. When that first group came back, they trained the others; India had no role to play in giving them military training,” insists Chandran, as politically correct as ever, leaving out the fact that India had provided refuge and set up the camps where the Tamils trained.
Thirty years later, as difficult as it is for him to accept, Chandran also acknowledges that Prabhakaran’s black warrant for Rajiv Gandhi was unexpected.
“I didn’t see it coming. I thought I knew him, but one didn’t expect this. It makes me want to weep; it saddens me deeply that we were unable to save Rajiv Gandhi. We should have saved him, we should have known. We didn’t really get Prabhakaran,” says Chandran.
Many members of his RAW fraternity as well as senior members of India’s military who served in Sri Lanka with the IPKF have gone public over the years with their disquiet on the role played by the Colombo elite and the political families, particularly President Premadasa who is said to have fuelled Prabhakaran’s antipathy towards Rajiv Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi was a leader whom Colombo and, for that matter, Pakistan’s counter-intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which had a major presence in the Sri Lankan capital, did not want to see return to lead India.
And Prabhakaran was easy pickings for anyone wanting to settle scores with “Big Brother”. India paid him scant attention to begin with, preferring Lankan Tamil groups such as the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) and EPRLF.
As India played footsie with the other groups, the LTTE grew more powerful, tightening its hold over the Tamil people under an ever more menacing Prabhakaran who refused to be relegated to the margins of the Tamil discourse. Delhi could no longer afford to ignore him.
But in trying to contain and manage him, they erred, and erred badly.
–This article is excerpted from Neena Gopal’s The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi published by Penguin/Viking.
