IT’S NOW two decades since it happened but the horror haunts me still. It seems like last night, though it happened on the night of May 21, 1991. Congress senior leader G.K. Moopanar and his political pupil Jayanthi Natarajan were bending over the crumpled body lying face down. Moopanar hesitantly tried turning the body to see the face,
to check if it was Rajiv Gandhi. There was no face, not much of the chest either. The blast had blown off most of the handsome man, and all of India’s hopes of seeing him return as Prime Minister and complete his dream of modernising India.
I had gone to Sriperumbudur along with three other journalist-friends to cover Rajiv’s campaign for the Congress-AIADMK alliance contesting the state and Lok Sabha polls. Among those three was a business reporter who wanted to come along “just to see how a political rally looks like”. And what a nightmare it turned out to be!
When it was announced that Rajiv was going to be late, the four of us crossed the road to while away time in a tea shop. Returning to the rally venue, we were crossing the large maidan when a young photographer stopped me with a loud, “Sir, do you remember me?” greeting. It was Haribabu, whom I had known as a darkroom boy at friend Subha Sundaram’s photo studio in Royapettah in central Chennai. The kid has now grown to be a young man, proud to wield the camera himself. While my three friends moved on towards the press enclosure, I stayed back with Hari to chat. He said he was sent on assignment to cover Rajiv’s rally by Ravishankar, another student of Sundaram who branched out to be on his own. Hari then introduced a short dark man in a white kurta and said he was Ravi’s partner in the new studio. I said “hello” and the stranger just smiled and nodded. I told Hari I would first like to see the contact print of his pictures and then decide. I joined my friends at the media enclosure and we waited for Rajiv’s arrival.
Soon there was a burst of crackers at a distance and we were told that Rajiv had arrived and was garlanding his mother’s statue at the end of the road. Minutes later, his convoy arrived at the maidan and he stepped on to the red carpet laid to the dais. And then there was another blast, louder and so close.
“How can these Congressmen be so foolish to light crackers so close to the thatched dais put up on casuarinas? Don’t they realise it could catch fire?” I remember wondering. And then there was chaos, screaming people running helter-skelter, many of them with black burn injuries. We ran towards the red carpet and found several people on the ground, some dead and the others moaning in pain. There was a tall, fair man lying on the right side, face down. It took a few minutes for Moopanar and Jayanthi to gather the courage to turn his face and confirm their fears.
We made a quick count of the bodies around us and ran towards our car parked at the maidan edge. We wanted to return to Chennai before the roads got blocked by angry mobs. There were no mobile phones and no email, so we must send the news only through landline or fax. My house in K.K. Nagar (west Chennai) became the media centre for us four since it was the closest. The rest of the night was spent on filing copies for our newspapers and for the many international wire services that somehow got on to us.
Sundaram phoned around midnight to ask if I had seen Haribabu. He sounded worried as Babu had taken his camera and there was this blast. He called again to say Babu was dead and he was even more worried about the camera. I recalled the meeting with Babu and wondered if that kurta man was really a studio owner. Something told me he was not.
Next morning, an English daily had a page-one story saying it could not have been the LTTE because the Tigers had become friends with Rajiv and were, in fact, negotiating with him about a solution for the Lankan Tamil problem. I called a friend at the newspaper, who happened to be part of the management, and told him I was sure it was the LTTE and I was also certain that a certain kurta man I had met at the maidan had something to do with the blast. My friend asked me to come over to his office and on reaching his table, he pulled out a cover containing some photographs. I identified the kurta man in those pictures. “Talk to the CBI at once. They will reach you in a short while,” my friend told me. The CBI officers reached my house within 20 minutes and brought the same bunch of photographs for yet another identification.
Fate has strange ways of asserting its invincibility. Those were the days of celluloid film, a highly combustible thing. And yet, the camera and its film survived, though Babu wielding it perished in the blast. An alert cop picked up the camera and in quick time, the police team developed the 12-13 frames, showing the assassin team. The last frame was just a flash of brown-red flame, indicating that Babu was pretty close to the LTTE woman-bomber Dhanu, which only meant that he did not know about the diabolic plan.
It turned out that the kurta man was Sivarasan, the one-eyed leader of the killer squad and he had told Babu that Tiger chief Prabhakaran had made peace with Rajiv Gandhi and wanted photographs of Dhanu, as his representative, garlanding the Congress leader.
That film which survived the blast took the CBI team of Karthikeyan to the fleeing assassins, finally catching up with them in Karnataka. But for that little piece of providential evidence, the Tigers would have escaped across the Palk Strait and the news report in that English daily absolving the LTTE would have persisted. Perhaps the Eelam campaign would have gone a different way, continuing to gain from India’s support.
I ended up becoming Karthikeyan’s star witness. And carrying the nightmare for the rest of my life.
R. Bhagwan Singh