Why did prabhakaran killed rajiv

The target was the former Indian prime minister, the leader of another country. Rajiv Gandhi seconds before he was assassinated by Dhanu inset 25 years ago. A native Tamil speaker with an inside track into the Lankan Tamil narrative, Col Hariharan was greatly helped in his task, he says, by having an aunt who was married to a Jaffna native. It was Col. He recounts how everyone misread the signals-not just his men, but also agents from the IB who were tasked with monitoring the threat posed by Lankan Tamils residing in India, who had to trawl through hundreds of messages that went back and forth.

Nobody wanted to hear what we had to say anyway. If we had read the signals right, if we understood what was going on in Prabhakaran's mind, who knows, we could have prevented this. It was our fault, we made a huge error of judgement. We misread Prabhakaran. We never believed he would turn against us in this manner. We should have seen it coming. Twenty-five years later, neither Siddharthan nor Col.

Hariharan remembers more than this particular part of the intercept. But both say that if it had been taken on board, and acted on with the seriousness that such a tipoff deserved, history would have taken a different course. But the warning-albeit tenuous and imprecise- instead of being investigated, was laughed out of court; it was simply set aside and forgotten. But it was not sufficiently probed by the IB. In , LTTE had the upper hand.

But by , the two had fallen out and almost killed each other in a public shoot-out in Madras. Even though the Indian Army was making tracks for home, Prabhakaran was relentlessly whipping up anger against the IPKF, blaming them for excesses against civilians.

This single burst of chatter should have alerted the then V. Opposition leader or not, he was on the hit list of the Khalistanis and the Sikhs, and warranted more than the negligible cover he had been provided. Rajiv Gandhi was too proud to ask for it, and his political opponents lacked the generosity of spirit to give it to him.

In fact, Col. Hariharan said he had his knuckles rapped for raising the alarm about the plot to assassinate the former prime minister even though the intercept was nothing less than Prabhakaran putting a hit on Rajiv Gandhi. Hariharan told me. In the dense jungles of north-eastern 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. 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 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 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, says it was from these nightly thrillers that the Jaffna conspiracy to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi probably took its inspiration.

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 , 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.

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 mobilized every resource at its command to have eyes on their prize target at all times. The LTTE will simply kill him. E vents later proved he had not gone unhinged. He was just desperately scared and bitter, but still brilliantly, and tragically, prescient.

Everything he predicted came true. Almost exactly two years later, April , a gunman killed Lalith. Initially, Premadasa blamed the LTTE, and produced the body of the usual suspect, a young Tamil with a cyanide capsule in his mouth. A commission later indicted Premadasa, and among others, a band of mobsters, three of whom were mysteriously but predictably killed.

You want to know some gory details? The president was soon obsessed with the boy. So much that he took him along on his travels and nobody cared to frisk him.

Even as a wreck, Lalith had been right on everything he said, beginning with his assertion that the LTTE had killed Rajiv. Of course, nobody has as yet found out if there was a Premadasa connection. Lt Gen. I n mid, I, along with photographer Shyam Tekwani, travelled through Jaffna, Trincomalee and Batticaloa, and spent time with Kalkat who generously had us flown in his Mi to all his three division headquarters, 54th, 57th and 36th and this conspiracy theory was the common ops room and mess whisper.

But soon, it became evident that an incredible new alliance between Prabhakaran and Premadasa had come into being against a common enemy, the IPKF. And with M. Prabhakaran had lived to fight and kill another day. This is a real life story. Mahattaya was executed along with his loyal soldiers by one firing squad near Chavakachcheri in Jaffna.

The other thing the film got right, but mixed up the time frame, was the betrayal by the RAW station chief in Chennai. One of his daughters was a talented shooter and, apparently, the CIA handler cultivated him by routinely gifting him boxes of sport ammunition, which were then imported and expensive. The next step was a honey trap, using a Pan Am stewardess, and blackmail.

Unlike Bala, who shoots himself, Unnikrishnan was in Tihar for a year and then, in one of those eternal mysteries of V.

Fired from the IPS, he is now said to live a quiet life in Chennai. She won several shooting medals for India and is an Arjuna awardee. B ack to Lalith now. And different sorts of conversations with him through heady cognac evenings. It had revealed, for the first time, the existence of Sri Lankan Tamil guerrilla training camps in India. South Block was furious. The charge of being anti-national was made by none other than Mrs Gandhi, and in public.

My central point was, we were feeding a monster and it would devour us. Therefore, when I first landed in Colombo in September , for what was to be my first real foreign dateline, I was received very warmly, actually lionised. He was reputed to be arrogant, dismissive, an anti-Tamil and anti-India hawk. But we became such friends in the first meeting that I got a repeat invitation the next evening at his farmhouse, where he introduced me to his wife Srimani.

Of course, he later wrote a formal letter to me, complaining that I used particularly unflattering pictures of his with my stories. The next day, 11 September, was a sad one for Indian cricket. I was in the press box as we lost our first Test match ever in Sri Lanka. It was such a big story the next morning that it blanked out on the front pages the anti-Tamil riots which had meanwhile broken out in Trincomalee.

The strategic port and resort city was barred to the foreign press. Since that was the only real story in Sri Lanka then, I still decided to hop on to the train to Trinco. It involved some elaborate lying. Lalith frightened me by saying he may be coming there too and would send for me in the press room during lunch. I proceeded to Trinco nevertheless. Since he was an NDA alumnus, we found some common acquaintances, and he gave me his number in Trinco. He was also generous enough to grant me an audience at his headquarters as I reached his burning city.

T rouble came the next morning. Taking pictures of a Tamil temple being burnt by a Sinhala mob, helped along by the armed police, I, along with a British freelancer and his girlfriend dressed in no more than a bikini with a sarong wrapped like a ridiculous fig leaf, was arrested by the same soldiers, who locked us up, threatening to shoot and throw our bodies on the street. I dropped the two names I thought might work. Lalith Athulathmudali and Commodore Jayasuriya. Any reporter with some experience would tell you that one thing that rarely fails with armed forces in the subcontinent is throwing rank at them.

But my lie was more elaborate. I said I had to have lunch with Lalith the next day so I must be on that train to Colombo this evening. And that the JOC himself was supposed to ensure I presented myself before his minister in time. After some haggling, I was allowed to call the commodore, who, though confused, figured something was wrong and asked for me to be released.

Sure enough, I was on that train to Colombo, and it turned out to be the last for many years. Hardeep Puri was the first to call me with a mouthful — though only with kindly concern. I later learnt he too had found out about my arrest and had pulled strings to get me freed. Who can ever trust you with stories you publish?

I reminded him, gently, that his government did.