Death of a politician: Personal recall

THE ASSASSINATION OF RAJIV GANDHI
Neena Gopal
Penguin Viking
273 pages; Rs 445

Through the 1980s, assassination - or accidental deaths - of political leaders in the sub-continent was a common affair. At the very beginning of the decade, Sanjay Gandhi, the heir apparent of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, died in a plane crash under mysterious circumstances that still feed speculations. Then, on October 31, 1984, his mother and then Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was shot dead by her bodyguards, who had been turned by Khalistani militants - leading to a genocide against the Sikh community in Delhi. Four years later, Pakistan president Zia-ul-Haq died in a plane crash - also an assassination - on August 17, 1988. Finally, on May 21, 1991, Indira's son and Sanjay's brother Rajiv was assassinated by an LTTE suicide bomber during an election campaign in Sriperumbudur in south India.

One of the last journalists to meet him was Neena Gopal, who was covering the elections in India that year, for Dubai-based Gulf News. During the final car ride to Sriperumbudur, Rajiv told her: "Have you noticed how every time any South Asian leader of any import rises to a position of power or is about to achieve something for himself or his country, he is cut down, attacked, killed... look at Mrs [Indira] Gandhi, Sheikh Mujib, look at Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at Zia-ul-Haq, Bandarnaike..." Little did he know his name would join this list in a few hours.

The book begins in medias res with the explosion that killed the charismatic leader on a comeback trail - and then goes backward and forward, tracing the conspiracy to eliminate him and the geopolitical forces that rocked the subcontinent in those years.

The first couple of chapters trace the investigation into the assassination by the Indian agencies, and how they often bungled. It raises some important questions about the security for the former PM that could be so easily penetrated. Notoriously, then prime minister, V P Singh, had removed the top class security for Rajiv Gandhi. Senior journalist Sanjay Suri, in his book 1984: The Anti-Sikh Riots, recalls how he had simply walked up to Gandhi at an election campaign meeting while the former prime minister was taking a stroll behind a makeshift wooden stage, without anyone stopping him. But, Ms Gopal also raises questions about whose responsibility it was to ensure that the space where a senior - and vulnerable - political leader would meet people was sanitised. Also, she reports how the security agencies had failed to act on intelligent intercepts of the LTTE calling for Gandhi's assassination.

The messy politics of the sub-continent can be confusing for the uninitiated. Ms Gopal, through great erudition and some sharp reporting, manages to lay bare the long and complicated history of the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka and India's involvement in it. The twists and turns of how the Indian intelligence and army first armed the different Tamil insurgent groups in the neighbouring island and then tried to, disastrously, unarm them can be mind boggling. A few factual inconsistencies make it more difficult for the reader to negotiate these minefields of history. For instance, in the chapter "The Tamil Card-Strategy of Blunder?", while introducing Colonel Hariharan, Indian chief intelligence officer in Sri Lanka during the deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force in the country, Ms Gopal writes his tenure was "1987 to 1980". Surely this is an error.

Much has been written about the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and the investigation around after it. But this book is significant because it is also a personal narrative of a witness. At the very beginning of the book, Ms Gopal recounts how the incident changed her life: "It catapulted me from an unknown reporter to someone who would always be known as the last journalist to have interviewed Rajiv Gandhi, minutes before he died. A macabre twist. And not the kind of exclusive I had bargained for." Journalism is about hard work, about going the distance to get the story - but it's also about luck, about being in the right place at the right time.

For Ms Gopal, this might have, in retrospect, turned out to be a lucky break - but, as she recounts, she was a breath away from death. The bomb that killed Gandhi could have also easily claimed her. In a poignant scene, early in the book, she describes talking to her daughter, then a child, over the phone after returning home that night and thinking: "she needed a brother or a sister and should not be alone". This is the truth of journalism that's often excised in the cut-and-dry reports we read the morning after - and by bringing it out, uninhibited, in her book, Ms Gopal does a great service to the unsung heroes and heroines of the profession.