A Group Sentence

The judgement is clear on the court's reading of who is guilty and how much: "From the evidence, oral and documentary, it is established by the prosecution that the conspiracy to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi was hatched by the LTTE supremo V Prabhakaran.... In this case, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in pursuance of a diabolic plot, carefully conceived and executed by a highly organised foreign terrorist organisation, the LTTE. Sixteen innocent lives were lost and many sustained grievous/simple injuries. Considering the above circumstances, I hold this the rarest of rare cases and I award the death sentence for the accused."

 Interestingly, the judgement, which runs to nearly 2,000 pages, identifies only two among the 26 who stood trial responsible for murder—Nalini and Perarivalan—under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code. The judge held that Nalini shared the common intention to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi and convicted her on 16 counts. He also found her guilty under section 3(2) of the TADA Act as the assassination was a terrorist act committed on Indian soil. The charge against Perarivalan was that he purchased two 9-volt battery cells used by the human bomb Dhanu to detonate the belt bomb.

The two most significant aspects of the judgement are: the observations about the Jain Commission and a negative observation about only one political leader, MDMK general secretary V. Gopalasamy. Defence counsel Doraiswamy had argued that since the Jain Commission was inquiring into the conspiratorial angle to the assassination, the designated court could not act on the evidence vis-a-vis conspiracy proved in this case. The judge disagreed: "A commission of inquiry is not a court, except for a limited purpose. The procedure of the commission is inquisitorial rather than accusatorial. Based on a Supreme Court verdict, I am unable to accept the contention of the defence counsel in this regard. Further, in law, a criminal court which took cognisance of this case is seized of the matter and a judicial finding can be given only by such a competent court of law."

 The judgement also observed that Gopalasamy was one of the four hostile witnesses. Gopalasamy had earlier said at an international conference at London that Rajiv Gandhi had stabbed Prabhakaran on his back, but when he was questioned he denied making such a statement. Later, the prosecution could prove it. Secondly, he spoke in a meeting at Palayamkottai on August 5, 1990, where he contended that the Indo-Sri Lankan Agreement was thrust on the LTTE. When the video recording of the meeting was played in the court, Gopalasamy admitted that he could be seen speaking on the cassette but claimed that the voice was not his. The Chennai IIT examined the cassette and declared that the audio and video components in the cassette were recorded simultaneously and that both corresponded to the same speaker. Apart from this reference, the only other political leader who has been mentioned in the judgement is Vazhapadi K. Ramamurthy, whose deposition that the Congress was committed to the Indo-Sri Lankan accord, was cited as one of the reasons for the plot conceived by the LTTE.

And for the first time, the method adopted by the SIT to crack the case was also made public. The unique feature was the design and the modus operandi adopted by the culprits—a human bomb, the way it was executed, cunning in conception, precise in planning and ruthless in execution. But it missed the perfection it sought to achieve, observed D.R. Karthikeyan, the leader of the SIT. Most of the documents used to prove the case come from the publication division of the LTTE.The two-volume compilation of various critical reports about the role of the IPKF published by the LTTE under the title The Satanic Forces—for which LTTE ideologue Anton Balasingam has written the foreword—is the main document cited to establish Prabhakaran's hatred for Rajiv. Interestingly, The Satanic Forces was printed in India and even before it could be sent across the Palk Strait, Rajiv was assassinated and the entire print run of the 4,000-page compilation had been seized by the CBI. In fact, today only the CBI has the copies of The Satanic Forces.