MADRAS, INDIA: The countdown to Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in all probability began here in 1983, when his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, ordered Indian intelligence to arm and train Tamil rebels from nearby Sri Lanka.

That decision, pursued by Rajiv Gandhi when he took over after his mother’s assassination by Sikh bodyguards the next year, ensnared India and the ruling Gandhi family in a bloody ethnic war between the determination guerilla forces of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority and the Sinhalese dominated government in Colombo,

It turned India’s own Tamil Nadu State, whose population is also Tamil, into a rebel sanctuary and logistics base, only a half-hour dash from the SriLankan combat zone in a powerboat.

And ultimately, investigators here believe, it led a young Tamil ‘woman from Sri Lanka to put an end to Rajiv Gandhi’s life by Setting off the plastic explosives Strapped to her body that blew them both up at an election rally last week in nearby Sriperumbudur.

“Just as Indira Gandhi was consumed by the Punjab crisis”, said N.Ram, an influential Madras journalist, referring to the Sikh rebellion that led to her assassination, “now her son Rajiv has been consumed by the Sri Lanka crisis.”

A probe by the Central Bureau of Investigations has yet to identify the suicide assassin or her accomplices. But police and politicians in the Tamil Nadu state capital have little doubt that she had ties to the rebel groups and their sympathizers among 250,000 SriLankan Tamils who have taken refuge in the state,

Any one of a number of chapters in India’s involvement in Sri Lanka could have made Rajiv Gandhi the target of the assassin’s bomb.

Arming Rebels

An Indian official said Indira Gandhi’s initial order to help the Tamil rebels was backed up by an allocation of several million dollars’ worth of Indian rupees to buy arms and supplies. With help from the Research and Analysis Wing, Lebanese and Israeli veterans trained the Sri Lankan Tamils, and a ship was purchased to aid in the transshipment of weapons to the Tamil areas of northern Sri Lanka, he recalled.

But in July 1987, Rajiv Gandhi concluded an accord with the Sri Lankan government designed to “devolve” regional self-government to the Tamils in return for rebel disarmament. In what seemed like a triumph for the young prime minister, the Indian army was to enforce the accord as a peace-keeping force.

Short-Lived Accord

Within three months, however, the accord collapsed and the Indian force found itself locked in conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the very rebels that Indian intelligence had promoted and armed four years earlier, The army lost 1,200 soldiers before pulling out in March last year, leaving a trail of bitterness among its enemies and the civilian Tamil population.

Rajiv Gandhi, by then out of office, was a prime target of criticism.

Gandhi is reported to have met with a Tiger leader, Kasi Anandan, in New Delhi on March $ to discuss ways in which he could help Settle Sri Lanka’s bloodletting once he regained the prime ministership or at least bury the hatchet over his past actions.

Most Indians have speculated that the suicide bomber was dispatched by Velupillai Prabkaran, leader of the Liberation Tigers, to avenge Tiger followers killed by Gandhi’s peace-keeping force Washington Post.

Article extracted from this publication >> June 14, 1991