Rajiv Gandhi’s Assassins: The Wrong Appeal

THIS MAY, a quarter century ago, a bunch of Tamil terrorists from Sri Lanka blew up Rajiv Gandhi. Killing any human being is brutal, but the trademark suicide bombings perfected by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) took murder to an almost indescribable scale of cruelty.

With the efflux of time, much has been forgotten of that event. Velupillai Prabhakaran is dead and so are Sivarasan and Subha; few will remember the ‘one-eyed jack’ and his accomplice who committed suicide on the outskirts of Bangalore. The only survivours are the seven low-level operatives who took part in the conspiracy to kill India’s former Prime Minister. Their position in the conspiratorial chain, however, does not lessen their crime in any way.

It is these seven—some of them spared the gallows by the Indian Judiciary—who now want to be released because they have spent more than 20 years in prison. Strangely, almost all political parties in Tamil Nadu want their release. This has been going on for more than a decade now. It does not matter where you are located on the Tamil political spectrum—on the separatist fringe or with parties that are part of the Indian establishment—it appears to make political sense to champion the cause of the seven.

The only thing in favour of the seven accused—if ‘favour’ is a right word to use here—is the passage of time. In India, any crime somehow ceases to be one after a while. Mercy kicks in almost as soon as one has been convicted. But think harder: does killing for the sake of achieving a political goal deserve clemency merely because a lot of time has passed between the act and the present? If that happens, not only will it embolden secessionists everywhere but also beckon anarchy in an already ‘difficult’ country. The last time such an appeal was made, a chorus went up demanding similar treatment for convicts in other parts of India.

At the moment, the case for the release of these convicts is somewhere in the judicial pipeline. But everyone, the courts, and certainly the Union Government, must think carefully about the consequences of releasing convicts accused of high political crimes. Law, not politics, alone must decide the fate of Nalini, Santhan, Perarivalan, Murugan, Jayakumar, Robert Payas and Ravichandran.

CongressLTTEPrime MinisterRajiv Gandhi assassinationTamil Nadu