Lure of the Hunt

WHEN FILMMAKER Nagesh Kukunoor first heard of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination on May 21, 1991, he was two months into his first job as an environmental consultant in Dallas, Texas. He remembers buying the Sunday edition of The New York Times to keep track of the plot to kill the former prime minister. Halfway across the world, in Chennai, Sameer Nair, then working as an advertising executive in a firm called Goldwire Communications, heard about it that night and then the first details the following morning.

Those were the days of slower 24-hour news cycles. The next three months were quite dramatic in Chennai, he recalls, with daily news updates and developments, as the Special Investiga­tion Team (SIT) and the Tamil Nadu Police relentlessly proceeded to disman­tle the entire network of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in India.

Says Nair, now head of a media pro­duction company, Applause Entertain­ment: “I have a very vivid memory of the time. The audacity of the assassination and then the relentless subsequent hunt was always a story waiting to be told and I’m glad we got to do it. I’ve been pursu­ing this idea since 2019, but it really came together after we first guided journalist Anirudhya Mitra in the direction of writing a book on it, and then onboarded Nagesh after we acquired the book rights, around 2023.”

The result? The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case, based on Mitra’s book, Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi’s Assassins, currently on air on SonyLIV, which painstakingly puts together the pieces of the plot to kill the former prime minister who was on a campaign trail for the 1991 General Election, one that he seemed likely to win. Nair and Kukunoor have had a fruitful relationship, having worked on three seasons of JioHotstar’s City of Dreams, a fictional tale set in the world of Maharashtra politics. Says Nair: “I like Nagesh’s style of storytelling—raw, gritty and devoid of melodrama, with a penchant for new/unfamiliar faces—and that’s what we wanted for The Hunt.”

In seven densely populated episodes, shot over 56 days, Kukunoor uncovers the LTTE plot with devices that seemed like fiction. “I had so many OMG moments, things that I can’t believe actually happened. Take the ridiculousness of the camera (belonging to Haribabu, a co-conspirator) remaining intact in a detonation that incinerates people, which prompted Dr P Chandrasekharan to crack the fact that it was a suicide bomber. Or arresting Koneswaran, one of the nine plotters at a random traffic stop. Or another lucky arrest revealing the tanker in which Sivarasan, the main strategist, was trans­ported to Bangalore by a police officer on a break who noticed three guys speaking in Sri Lankan Tamil at a time when the whole nation was looking for Sri Lankan Tamils. Or when Captain Ravindran catches Murugan at the bus stop and tries to prevent him from biting into the cyanide pill.” What excited Kukunoor the most was that he could present it like a true crime thriller, a police procedural, and take a piece of history that people are familiar with but not with the intricate details of the assassination.

This was years before 9/11, points out Kukunoor, where there was no cen­tralised database, several agencies were working at cross purposes, and there were individual pockets of the plotters. “There was no one common thread and yet the SIT team cracked the case,” says Kukunoor. Add to that the series doesn’t end in a blaze of glory. By the time Captain Ravi’s commandos storm the safehouse, Sivarasan is dead. Has Kukunoor resolved what happened? Why did the SIT delay the assault on the Konanakunte safehouse by 36 hours? Was it a result of the top bosses in Delhi wanting to claim credit for the operation and delaying its culmination till their arrival? Or was it a darker conspiracy involving Congress party stalwarts?

There are enough hints—a conversation between Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and CBI director Vijay Karan which is held off camera is prime among them.

It was such a pressure cooker atmo­sphere with the nation’s biggest man­hunt, says Kukunoor. “It is all too easy to judge history. My chief responsibility was to take the audience there, to make them a mute witness to what was going on. It was a successful investigation but it could have been so much more successful.”

In political assassinations, the web is wide. The book jumps points of view, timelines and magnifies certain events. “It is so different from writing a movie, where we had to simplify the investiga­tion, and connect the dots,” says Kukunoor. Then there is the casting, which has to have the visual match, but also the acting chops. And sometimes serendipity strikes. For Amit Verma, they needed a Punjabi IAS officer who spoke Tamil fluently. Voila, there was Sahil Vaid, a Punjabi actor who grew up in Salem and spoke fluent Tamil. He is the eternal dissident in the group, the one who questions every wrong decision.

As for Amit Sial, who plays DR Kaarthikeyan, the stoic head of the SIT, tasked by Vijay Karan to create and handle his own team drawn from various departments, Kukunoor calls him borderline sublime. “His work is like threading a needle, it is so delicate. Not since I directed Naseeruddin Shah in 3 Deewarein (2003) have I been caught so off guard,” he says. For a director, says Kukunoor, sometimes the great revelation is when the shooting is done, in the quiet of the editing room, with only the air conditioning for com­pany. It was an aggressive shoot, in peak heat, in Chennai and Madurai. But the bulk was shot in rural Maharashtra, and some in the outskirts of Hyderabad.

Sial has been on the verge of break­ing out several times. Sial once told me that every time he would think of giving up and returning home to Kanpur, god would send him a sign. In 2010, after six years of being in Mumbai, it was LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha, where he played a somewhat sleazy journalist. “It was like a supreme power wanted me to persist. It was like divine intervention,” he says. In 2015, it was Titli, Kanu Behl’s dysfunc­tional family drama. “One day, I talked to god and told him if you can’t make me a leading man, or give me a good part, at least make me the worst villain in the country,” he said. And so, it was in 2017, when he got the part of the rough-edged off-spinner Devender Mishra in Prime Video’s web series, Inside Edge, where he acted out all his angst. Educated at the Delhi College of Arts and Commerce, Sial did theatre with Barry John. From lighting to sound to acting, he learnt almost all aspects of theatre with him. At 50, the role of Karthikeyan may well be the biggest feather in his cap.

Since he first showcased Hyderabad to the world in Hyderabad Blues (1998), Kukunoor has divided his time between Scottsdale, Phoenix, Arizona, where his brother, an oncologist, and sister, a school teacher live; Narayanguda in Hyderabad where his parents inhabit the house he grew up in, located in the heart of the old city; and Mumbai, where many of his movies are developed.

But he has always stayed on the margins of the film industry, making movies across genres and geographies, whether it was Iqbal (2005), where he told the story of a hearing-impaired fast bowler trained by a drunken coach, or Dor (2006), where two women decide the fate of a man whose life is hanging by a thread. His ability to find the perfect actors for the job is a legacy perhaps of the reason he first entered the industry in 1995, wanting to be an actor. He had trained for three years at the Warehouse Theatre in Atlanta. He fulfilled the desire again most recently and avidly in Paatal Lok Season 2 where he played a particularly venal wheeler-dealer.

The original Hyderabad boy who was followed by two other diasporic Telugu boys Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK who are now creators of Go Goa Gone (2013) and The Family Man (2019), is delighted that with The Hunt he has been able to put the first Telugu prime minister on the map.

Nair believes revisiting contempo­rary history is important, as it helps us better understand key events, with the benefit of hindsight. This is not the first time the assassination has been dramatised—Santosh Sivan’s The Ter­rorist (1998) and Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Café (2013) have covered this ground before. But Kukunoor’s The Hunt comes at a time when the retelling of history according to one’s political ideology has become fashionable. Kukunoor steers clears of sensationalism, and shows the actual horrific blast only as a suggestion.

What was his first reaction when he heard the news? Kukunoor says it was pretty much like Kaarthikeyan’s response in the series: that the Gandhis are truly unlucky, having suffered three succes­sive unnatural deaths, Sanjay Gandhi in the air crash of 1980, Mrs Gandhi in a hail of bullets fired by her own security guards, and Rajiv Gandhi by someone he thought was eager to greet him.

The year 1991 was cataclysmic for the world. The Soviet Union ceased to exist not long after the Berlin Wall was brought down, India learnt to love the markets, and there was the Mandal Commission and Ram Mandir. A year later, the Babri Masjid demolition and the Mumbai bomb blasts changed the nation’s social fabric. “I am young, I too have a dream,” Rajiv Gandhi’s 1985 speech to the US Congress, borrowing from Martin Luther King Jr, had stirred hope in the hearts and minds of those who came of age in the 1980s. Its destruction, embodied in a broken body, would haunt India and its people for many years.

assassinationBollywoodcinemaNagesh KukunoorRajiv Gandhi