Rajiv Gandhi
“The dessert cooler outside my bedroom made a squeaky noise that night. I had postponed lubricating it for far too long. Behind the door a cricket chirped incessantly. God had omitted lubricating it altogether. The two noises combined to produce an eerie effect. I was gradually slipping into sleep when the phone rang. There is nothing more exasperating than being interrupted in the first stages of sleep. I have this habit of looking at the clock by my bedside every time I am woken up by a phone call. It was 11 p.m. on May 21.
Shreyans Shah was calling from Ahmedabad. Shah, the owner of the Gujarat Samachar, the largest Gujarati daily in the world, asked me a matter-of-fact question. “Is it true that Rajiv Gandhi has been assassinated?” Without realising the shattering import of his question I said I didn’t know. Shah sounded pretty certain about the news, but since I live in New Delhi he probably thought that I would be better informed about such matters. I promised to get back to him as soon as I found out the truth.
I called Sam Pitroda to ask him if he had heard anything about Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. There was silence on the other end, a silence jagged by anguish. Pitroda had just recovered from a quadruple bypass surgery a few months before, and despite his protestations to the contrary he was still not fit enough to take such news with equanimity. If hurt could be seen on telephone, I saw it that night.”
I quote these opening paragraphs from my own 1992 book not because I love quoting myself but because May 21 was just two days ago and it marked the 19th anniversary of the macabre assassination of India’s former prime minister. And also because they accurately situate me in the context within 40 minutes of a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber setting off her explosive vest barely five feet away from Gandhi at 10.10 p.m. in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, where he had gone to address an election rally.
It was inevitable that as a journalist I did not sleep that night. Among the callers was the host of a news show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asking me to report on the assassination. I remember he asked me if there was any immediate suspicion as to the identity of Gandhi’s killers. I told him that given that it was a suicide bomber in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu it was more than likely that it would turn out to be a plot by the Tamil Tigers separatists of Sri Lanka. It did.
I had met Gandhi a few days before his assassination at a “high tea” in the forecourt of his residence. During a brief exchange I had reminded him that I was waiting for him to give me a couple of hours to finish my interview with him in order to complete Pitroda’s biography. “I promise you as soon as the campaigning is over,” he said.
The next time I was anywhere close to him was at the Delhi airport when his badly dismembered body was flown in by a special aircraft in a casket. Since those were pre-24/7 news channel days, there was no media frenzy at the airport. There were only two journalists—my friend and colleague Tarun Basu and I. Gandhi’s close friend and journalist Suman Dubey was among the men shouldering the casket as the former prime minister’s wife Sonia Gandhi came down from the aircraft looking poised but inscrutable. However, her eyes gave a glimpse of the profound sense of loss she must be feeling.
The passage of two decades has done nothing to erase the vividness of those 24 hours.