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| RAJIV GANDHI KILLINGS The Buts Remain The Supreme Court verdict may not be the last word on the case as fresh conspiracy theories are spawned. By Harinder Baweja and K M Thomas
It was a big relief for them. From the special court's order in January last year when judge V. Navaneethan had decreed death for all. "Rajiv Gandhi ... was assassinated in pursuance of a diabolic plot, carefully conceived by a foreign terrorist organisation, the LTTE ...,'' he had said, adding that death warrants were merited for all the accused for an assassination that was among the "rarest of rare". The Supreme Court shared Navaneethan's views on the killing, describing it as "an unparalleled act in the annals of crime committed in the country". While delivering the judgement on May 11, it observed, "Cruelty of the crime has known no bounds. The crime sent shock waves in the country." But it made a distinction.
It differentiated between murderers, conspirators and harbourers. In short, the active and the passive. As lawyer Ram Jethmalani had said after the special court's verdict, they could not all have been equally sinful. Taking note of this, the apex court threw out charges slapped under the draconian Terrorist's and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) and ruled that none of the accused wanted to strike fear in the governments either at the Centre or the state, nor overawe them and strike terror in the minds of the people. The four who have been singled out for the death penalty were those who had participated in a dry-run for the assassination, actually purchased material to assemble the belt-bomb and arranged accommodation and transport for the LTTE hit-squad. Eight summers ago, the country had listened in shock to the news of Rajiv's killing at an election meeting at Sriperumbudur on May 21. Soon after, the CBI constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) which set about a task that was far from easy. Over 200 of the country's best forensic and explosive experts got into action to unravel whatever they could from the small ground where the assassin had, with the press of a button, killed herself and the former prime minister. That was the first lead, though dead, that took the conspiracy beyond Indian waters into Sri Lanka. Though the Supreme Court has delivered its judgement and zeroed in on four of the 26 arrested, the ifs and buts remain. LTTE chief V. Prabhakaran, who is the prime accused, still roams free and out of range. The four sentenced to death have a month's time to file a review petition in the apex court and then beg for the President's mercy.
Defence lawyer S. Doraiswamy, who camped in Delhi for
five months with help from P. Nedumaran, the champion of Tamil causes spearheading the
"Save 26 Tamil Lives'' campaign, is now preparing a revision petition. Right from the
beginning, the case has been moving on parallel fronts. Apart from the sit, the P.V.
Narasimha Rao regime also set up the M.C. Jain Commission to inquire into the conspiracy
angle. While Jain's interim report brought down the I.K. Gujral government, the final
report is still before the Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA). Thus there are
many fronts on which the assassination probe will never die. Nor will the controversy. Not
with elections due in a few months from now. On another front, the DMK which was damned in the Jain Commission interim report is seeking to extract mileage out of the Supreme Court verdict. Says a senior DMK minister: "Obviously the sit could not find anything suspicious in the role of Karunanidhi.'' There is also a feeling that the MDMA will go slow as the BJP-led government is now under no pressure to appease AIADMK chief J. Jayalalitha under whose insistence the agency was set up in the first place. "All kinds of theories will be floated on political lines,'' says Kartikeyan. "More personalities, mostly political will be added to a list of suspects.'' That may well happen as long as the case continues to draw attention. But for the four who have been sentenced to death, only the next few months will matter. Between now and Nedumaran's review petitions and the President's decision on mercy pleas. A matter of life and death. |
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