The Nation: Shock Sentence

Justice Navaneetham's verdict evokes strong reactions as the accused prepare for an appeal.

IJanuary 28, 10 A.m. Arun Kumar fiddles with his camera and smiles easily as he waits with a gaggle of fellow photographers outside a series of barricades in the hot, dusty Chennai suburb of Ponnamallee. This is the high-security prison-cum-court complex where the fate of 26 men and women, accused of assassinating Rajiv Gandhi, is being decided. Kumar has been on many such photographic stakeouts, but this one is different. One of those imprisoned is his father.

"It's been a struggle growing up without my father," reflects the shy, swarthy Kumar, who works at the Subha news and Photo Agency, set up by his father Subha Sundaram. "The family has undergone mental torture, but he was confident of walking out today when I met him yesterday."

6.15 p.m. Like the rest of his colleagues, Kumar scrambles for a foothold in the shabby shamiana as a weary D.R. karthikeyan, head of the CBI Special Investigation Team (SIT) walks in accompanied by a phalanx of AK-47-toting bodyguards. A silence descends on the unruly mob of journalists. The sun sinks outside and in the glare of a single halogen lamp, held up for television cameras, Karthikeyan begins to read a hastily scribbled statement. "Satyameva Jayate. The Truth will always prevail. All the 26 accused sentenced to death."

Kumar continues to fire his shutter. he does not realise the enormity of what karthikeyan -- bringing to a waiting nation the verdict of an out-of-bounds court room -- has said. As karthikeyan walks away, it sinks in. His face slowly becomes ashen, his camera drops and after fighting to stay calm, despair takes over. "We were going to take him home today," he whispers numbly. he can say no more.

The wheels of justice have no time for personal tragedies. And so it was as the judge of the special court, V. Navaneetham, showed no mercy in sentencing all the 26 tamils -- 16 of them Sri Lankans -- to the gallows for either participating or aiding in the assassination of Rajiv, blown up by the human bomb Dhanu in Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991.

It was an unprecedented sentence for an unprecedented crime. never before in India -- and rarely in the world -- have so many people been sentenced to die for a single crime. In Tamil Nadu, a state where intellectuals and politicians vied (until the assassination) with each other to support the ultra-terrorist Liberation tigers of tamil EELAM (LTTE), there were murmurs of judicial assassination. the widespread belief was that since only two of the group -- Nalini, the only survivor of the five-member assassination team, and perarivalan, who bought the pencil-size cells that detonated the bomb -- were directly charged with murder, only they might go to the gallows; the others would get lesser sentences.

Some like kumar's father sundaram were expected to walk out because six years in detention, their families hoped, would cover their sentences. friends and journalists say sundaram, a kind of godfather for many of chennai's press photographers, was definitely an LTTE sympathiser. however, they don't believe he was part of the conspiracy. even if he was, they did not expect capital punishment since he did not actually take part in the assassination.

But the judge agreed with the sit that like most others, sundaram knew exactly what he was doing. he had deputed one of his photographers, haribabu, to the meeting. It was from the dead haribabu's camera that baffled investigators recovered images of Dhanu and mastermind Sivarasan -- and got their first breakthrough in what seemed a perfect crime.

Sundaram's efforts to retrieve the camera attracted the attention of the sit and the case was cracked. After more than four years of the trial, the judge was clear about the masterminds: "Rajiv Gandhi ... was assassinated in pursuance of a diabolical plot, carefully conceived by a foreign terrorist organisation, the LTTE." Karthikeyan was jubilant after the verdict, lacing a philosophical, end-of-the road attitude with hyperbole. "The death of Rajiv Gandhi stands avenged," he said.The sit did triumph, but there's little hope that LTTE chief V. Prabhakaran and intelligence chief Pottu Amman, the main accused named in the original charge-sheet, will ever stand trial in India. "The surrounding circumstances of terrorism might have influenced the judge to hand out this severe punishment. Such shock treatment may or may not have the desired effect but it is legal and correct," says former Madras High Court judge Krishnaswamy Reddiyar.

"To keep one family (the Gandhis) happy, they are convicting 26 other families," says an angry, weeping Arputham Ammal, a schoolteacher and mother of Perarivalan. That's not far off the mark, says noted lawyer and former Union law minister Ram Jethmalani, who believes the judge went "overboard". All the 26 people, he says, "couldn't have been equally wrong or sinful". Relatives, like photographer Kumar, were hopeful because only two of the 26 were charged with murder, but the judge accepted the SIT's charge of conspiracy to lay down death sentences across the board.

The judgement, however, doesn't mean a quick hanging. All death sentences under the now defunct Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) have to be confirmed by the Supreme Court. The verdict will be referred to the apex court, to which the convicts can appeal in any case in February. "The case will get priority," says Attorney-General Ashok Desai.

Then the legal battle will begin anew. "We will appeal in the Supreme Court within a week," says defence counsel S. Doraiswamy. "I felt very bad and sad about the judgement. It is erroneous and incorrect." Anger over the judgement is simmering in parts of Tamil Nadu and groups with extremist leanings are organising themselves to raise money for a more spirited defence in the Supreme Court.

But the bad times for the gang of 26 were just beginning. In the afternoon, Navaneetham listened to their personal statements. Some pleaded that their young children and families would have no one left. Kanakasabapathy, 74, the oldest on the stand, begged for clemency, saying he was aged and plagued by high blood pressure. Everyone, except two LTTE militants, who flatly said they would accept any verdict, maintained their innocence and pleaded for mercy. Navaneetham showed none. The judge, a former magistrate and additional registrar in the Madras High Court who is always surrounded by 10 armed police guards, read out the death sentence at 5.45 p.m. He signed no document and did not, as is customary after a death sentence, break the nib of his pen after doing so.

Even though he didn't mean to do so, Navaneetham in his final judgement explained just why things turned the way they did. He noted that a man of Prabhakaran's stature, a man who the Sri Lankan army could not stop from roaming free, was confined by the Indian government for a week to a room in Delhi's Ashok Hotel, while Rajiv Gandhi was cosying up to the Sri Lankans. He developed a great hatred against Rajiv and clearly wanted him killed. The motive is clear, the judge said, death to them all. So Prabhakaran's cubs near their end. And the tiger? He roams free. .

SIT
Dogged Pursuit

A nation's leader blown apart by a suicide bomber who did not seem to have an identity. When the CBI's Special Investigation Team (SIT) was put together on May 22, 1991, a day after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, the officers drawn from all over India feared they had a mystery on their hands, like the great unsolved assassinations of this century: John F. Kennedy's in the US and Olaf Palme's in Sweden.

Then the obsessive need of the ruthless LTTE to film their deeds -- investigators found a film lying in the mess of blood and flesh -- was enough to reveal its hand. "Like the best crimes, it missed the perfection it sought to achieve," says SIT's controversial chief D.R. Karthikeyan.

The pat on the back is well deserved. But so too is the criticism about Karthikeyan's known antagonism to the Justice M.C. Jain Commission of Inquiry probing to see if there was a larger conspiracy behind the assassination. "We could have finished earlier, but I had to keep running to Delhi to appear before the commission," admits Karthikeyan.

There is little doubt the sit did a fine job of investigation. It used the best scientific techniques and exhibited fine skills to pick up thousands of loose ends, like an unravelled tapestry, and weave it back together. It picked up bits of flesh from the remains of the belt bomb to match them with the assassin Dhanu and compare the DNA found on her severed limbs. Similarly, it drew blood from mastermind Sivarasan's father in Colombo and flew it back to India to check DNA compatibility. It called in a voice expert during the trials to match a voice from a wireless intercept with a prisoner. Matching skulls with faces, lifting months-old fingerprints from letters -- the list goes on.

The logistics were staggering. The sit had to translate questions into Tamil and provide to the accused more than one lakh pages of documents. It had to engage lawyers and prepare defences for about 450 interlocutory petitions filed in regular courts by the accused and their lawyers. In four years, 288 witnesses were called, though more than 1,000 were mentioned.

But the investigation, like the crime, too was not perfect. A key suspect, landlord and smuggler Shanmugam -- a mine of information on the LTTE to which he provided logistical support -- supposedly committed suicide after escaping from the SIT's custody in August 1991. The indications seemed to point towards a death in custody.

At the end of it all, case No. 329/91 registered at Sriperumbudur was indeed solved. In that lies the triumph of the officers -- and the Indian state.