A day after Sonia Gandhi hit out at the slow pace of investigations in her late husband Rajiv Gandhi's assassination case, Union Commerce Minister P. Chidambaram announced that the probe would be completed by December 1995. And although hearings continue at the specially designated TADA court in Madras and the Jain Commission in Delhi, the assertion seems like a wildly exaggerated claim.
The reasons are plain to see:
As for the Jain Commission probing the "sequence of events leading to the assassination" and the "conspiracy" angle into Rajiv Gandhi's killing, it still has a very long way to go. When the Commission was set up by the Government on August 23, 1991, under the Commission of Inquiry Act, it seemed like an open-and- shut case and only a matter of time before the truth was unravelled. But the problems have multiplied since. It took a full year for the Commission to get office space in Delhi's Vigyan Bahaman, with Justice M.C. Jain himself leading the charge that the Government was disinterested.
Justice Jain had also observed in one of his orders: "It must be remembered that the Commission has no investigating agency under its control. True. With not a single investigator on its payrolls, and government officials not exactly keen to produce relevant documents, the task is decidedly uphill. Security advisor S. Ramani, whose term expired last year, has still not been replaced. In addition, the day to day working of the commission is caught up in antiquated red tape. "There is no cataloguing of information. All affidavits and relevant documents are tied up in red cloth bags, in the manner of patwari offices in the country's rural government offices," says an official in the commission.
If this is not enough, the welter of fantastic charges that some of the 'star witnesses' are coming up with will undoubtedly lead to further bottlenecks in the proceedings. This possibility surfaced on October 14, when the Congress counsel at the Commission asked the CBI's Special Investigation Team (SIT) to present relevant papers, including sensitive confessions and case diaries recorded at the in-camera trial currently being held in Madras.
The SIT, in turn, declared that it had arraigned 41 accused, including LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, in the conspiracy to assassinate Rajiv on the basis of investigations which had lasted nearly a year and resulted in a chargesheet substantiated by over 1,000 witnesses, 907 documents and 1,984 material objects. Consequently, SIT chief D.R. Karthikeyan observes in his petition before the TADA court: "The various theories now being advanced (by the star witnesses) before the Honourable Jain commission are being taken advantage of by the accused facing charges before the designated court." According to him, this was leading up to a virtual exoneration of the LTTE. And hence, the LTTE would obviously want the case to stretch on.
This fact is borne out by a petition filed by Nalini, one of the main accused, at the TADA court. It accused the SIT and the CBI of not really being interested in producing relevant documents before the Commission in order to find out who the real culprits were. Officials fear that if that is taken as a basis of further investigations, it may not be possible to say whether Rajiv was a victim of the LTTE at all.
Moreover, the high-profile commission has to sift through more than 250 affidavits from agencies as diverse as the Tamil Nadu Congress to the Intelligence Bureau and freelance journalists, all of whom now claim to have classified information on the killing that rocked the country in 1991. All this is likely to have far-reaching implications in the run-up to the general elections next year.
Some of the affidavits and depositions received by the Commission may not quite fit the description of 'classified'. M.V. Thomas, a retired senior police officer from Tamil Nadu, for example authoritatively told the Commission early this year that the KGB and Palestinian Liberation Organisation were behind the killing. His information: pure vision, he informed the Commission, on record. Congress leader Ratnakar Pandey told the commission that "V.P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar, and BJP leaders were behind the assassination". They were "acting at the behest of the CIA," he said.
Then there's the evidence of little-known Akali leader, Mahant Seva Dass. His theory: the conspiracy was hatched in London by Jagjit Singh Chauhan of the Khalistan Council and other militant Sikh bodies. Former minister K.K. Tewary talked of the multi-layered' plot with 'international ramifications', one which included V.P Singh, Chandra Shekhar and P.V. Narasimha Rao aided by Subramanian Swamy, Chandraswami and O.P.Chauthala. Swamy, Chandra Shekhar and T.N. Seshan, on their part, all voice suspicions about foreign involvement.
In three appearances before the Commission this month, Chandraswami pretended amnesia, provoking Justice Jain to say: "You are completely sane. How come you do not remember anything?" While these affidavits have not really added to the evidence, Justice Jain seems to be up against another problem. Requests for crucial documents and files that may reveal the truth are being turned down by the Union Home Ministry on the ground that "they are not available". "Such a comprehensive turning down of a commission of inquiry as important as Jain has never happened before, " fumes Tewary .
But the Commission itself has come up for criticism from various quarters. Former prime minister Chandra Shekhar hints at the inherent confusion when he says he does not know what the Commission wants. "I answered questions. Can't say I remember them," he says with remarkable candour. Some others accuse the Commission of not being able to "move out of the shadows of the Verma Commission". The Verma Commission, which was set up to look into 'official lapses' leading to the assassination, submitted its report in 1992 and held four former senior officials guilty of being directly or indirectly responsible for the removal of SPG cover from Rajiv Gandhi--cabinet secretary Vinod Pande, Intelligence Bureau chiefs R.P. Joshi and M.K. Narayanan, and home secretary Raj Bhargava. Only Pande and Bhargava have so far been summoned before the Commission.
"Till now, the Jain Commission does not seem to have arrived even at the level of the conspiracy angle. It is just examining the events leading to the event," says one official connected with the investigations. Just what the future holds for such a long winded probe is difficult to foresee. But people like Tewary feel that the Commission will end with no serious findings. "The officials are not going to cooperate and after a time people are going to lose interest," he says.
There are still others who believe that the Jain Commission, by declaring that it will "for the present not go into areas covered by the SIT chargesheet and will probe into areas outside it", has literally turned its back on the case. Some others comment that the Commission is yet to begin investigations. "After all, it is still examining witnesses," says an official.
Karthikeyan himself remains modest. "The nation owes its gratitude to the prosecution witnesses. Many of them are ordinary men and women who courageously deposed only out of a commitment to truth and a sense of patriotism," he said. The question remains whether this patriotism will lead merely to flights of fancy or whether it will dredge up the truth from the reams of evidence furnished before the Commission.
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