No closure on Rajiv Gandhi assassination case even as his 70th birth anniversary celebrated
Chennai: On Rajiv Gandhi's 70th birth anniversary on Wednesday, some 23 years after his terrible murder during a poll campaign at Sriperumbudur, there is still no dearth of conspiracy theories.
The latest doing the rounds is that the assassination was an 'inside job'. The newest among the many books written on the brutal killing of the former Prime Minister by the LTTE woman suicide bomber Dhanu was released at Delhi by well-known saffron theoretician K.N. Govindacharya. Its author Faraz Ahmad, a journalist, has named his book 'Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi: An Inside Job?' and announced at the release function that he had his suspicion “from day one” about the real authors of that killing.
“There was a deliberate and conscious effort to cover up the assassination and hardly any effort to expose the real perpetrators”, said Mr Ahmad, who has done a good job in scientifically dissecting the available - and not revealed - text and fine-print in the various reports of the commissions of inquiry.
There has always been a suspicion that the sleuths in the Special Investigation Team (SIT) led by former CBI director D.R. Karthikeyan tried harder to cover up rather than uncover the conspiracy and its true perpetrators. I have been saying this from 'day-one', literally, at times even arguing with the SIT chief and his senior officers about the many holes that stared out of what clearly seemed to be a patchwork of an unprofessional probe. I have been convinced from the very beginning that it was a LTTE job, no doubt; but at the same time, the Tigers had no real reason to kill Rajiv and they only carried out a contract killing.
I was convinced that the SIT either failed to get at the faces in the deep shadows or deliberately chose not to switch the lights on. In fact, the choice of Mr Karthikeyan to lead the SIT had itself raised a few eyebrows for the man was known to be close to the Gandhi family. Was he chosen due to his competence as a cop or because of the trust he enjoyed with the family? Perhaps and perhaps not. n P6
