Commentary by Mani Shankar Aiyar Published on Rediff.

com in January 1997

P Chidambaram and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi

URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/jan/23mani.htm Readers will recall -- and the victim, I trust, will never forget -- my article exposing the hypocrisy and worse of Chidambaram's tie-up with the very forces he had so roundly condemned for their involvement in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. I ended the piece deploring his fall from moral grace but paying tribute to his 'technical brilliance'. Having spent most of the last three months following the proceedings of the Jain Commission, I am no longer sure I was justified in thinking he had so won his spurs in the various ministerial offices he held in successive Congress governments as to qualify for the sobriquet of 'brilliance'. His deposition over four sessions in the witness-box has shown him up to have been a most incompetent minister of state for internal security (1986-89) and most negligent as minister in charge of the investigation into Rajiv Gandhi's assassination from May 24, 1995, till his defection to the TMC on April Fool's Day, 1996. The Special Protection Group was established by executive order on the first day of April 1985. It was governed by the ordinary laws of the land but was given a mandate, powers, recruitment methods, training, equipment and other facilities unprecedented in the annals of India's security services. This was to meet the unprecedented contingency of protecting the son of an assassinated prime minister who continued to be the target of the very terrorists who had eliminated his mother, the threat to him having become more acute after he won from the people, in a free and democratic election, the largest plurality in the history of Indian democracy. At the time, Chidambaram was a first-term backbencher. Chidambaram's moment came on Gandhi Jayanti 1986, when the Delhi police fell flat on their face in preventing an assassination bid at Rajghat which, if it had succeeded, would have eliminated both the prime minister and the President of the country from the barrel of a single gun. The prevent a recurrence of the catastrophic consequences for the country of any repetition of such negligence, Rajiv Gandhi looked around him and decided to put two rising stars, of the political and civil services firmaments respectively, in charge of tightening security. The two stars he picked have in the past decade exploded into milky ways of their own in the universe of Indian politics: P Chidambaram as minister of internal security and T N Seshan as secretary, internal security. Chidambaram, as befits a barrister of some standing, took upon himself the task of drafting a law to cover the SPG. For over three years, the SPG had functioned on the basis of an executive order that gave it the greatest latitude. The SPG Act, which Chidambaram piloted through Parliament in May 1988, gave the SPG juridical definition but also circumscribed the ambit of its activity.

Principally, a crack police force, which had been formed for the protection of an individual threatened by special circumstances, was redefined by the new law as available to anyone who held the office of prime minister, irrespective of whether the incumbent faced the same level of threat as Rajiv Gandhi and irrespective of whether similar protection would be available to Rajiv Gandhi, or any other Indian similarly placed. Instead of the SPG being a specific security response to a specific threat perception, the SPG was converted by Chidambaram's Act into an institution of State, attached to an office-holder and debarred by law from extension to a person other than the office-holder. Had Chidambaram's legislative provisions not replaced the three-year-old executive order, there would have been no legal difficulty in extending SPG cover to Rajiv Gandhi even after he ceased being prime minister.

Chidambaram did nothing to plan for Rajiv Gandhi's security in the event of conspirators sinking the ship of state
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/jan/23mani2.htm It is this loophole that V P Singh has been trying to wriggle through in justifying before the Jain Commission his decision to let SPG cover for Rajiv Gandhi lapse some two months after Rajiv Gandhi laid down the office of prime minister. V P Singh's argument will not wash because, as V P Singh himself has had to concede, there was nothing in the SPG Act which precluded his taking the same legislative steps to amend the Act which, since the amendment of September 1991, has provided him, as an ex-PM, with SPG protection. The point, however, remains: Would you give your brief to a lawyer who fails to address himself to this elementary point when, as minister, he drafts a law on the subject? Confronted in the Jain Commission with the question of why he had not taken this contingency into account in drafting the SPG Bill, Chidambaram tried to slide down the escape hatch of saying that it was not his decision but the Cabinet's -- and he has not even a member of the Cabinet then. Asked subsequently whether it was not he who was responsible for the Note which went to Cabinet, he was cornered into confessing that he had indeed cleared the Cabinet note. In which case, the question remained: why, as the minister in charge, had he failed to bring this contingency to the attention of the Cabinet? And failed also to point out in the Cabinet note that the proposed legislation would fundamentally alter the position of the SPG from a force to protect the incumbent prime minister to a force that would not only protect any prime minister, whatever the level of threat perception, but more to the point, would legally debar the SPG from extending protection to the person for whom the SPG had been specifically created in the event of that person ceasing to be PM. The SPG Bill went before Parliament, P Chidambaram at the helm piloting the stormy course of the Bill. In the Rajya Sabha, P Upendra, then of the Telugu Desam, pointedly asked what would happen in the event to Rajiv Gandhi ceasing to be PM. Chidambaram, in his reply, said

he would now turn to Upendra's argument when D Ghosh of the CPI-M rose to his feet on another point; by the time that was over, Chidambaram forgot to respond to Upendra -- and so no one ever knew what Chidambaram had in mind by way of a reply to Upendra. The point is that even if the contingency of Rajiv Gandhi ceasing to be PM had not earlier been raised, and even if it would have been par for the course for Chidambaram to have given Upendra a witty or diverting reply, the fact is that any minister of internal security worth his salt should surely have been alerted to the need to deal with such a contingency in the secretary of the North Block, if not in the glare of the Rajya Sabha's proceedings. Yet, it would appear from Chidambaram's deposition before the Jain Commission that even after having been specifically alerted to the need for suitable alternative arrangements in the event of Rajiv Gandhi losing the elections, Chidambaram -- and -- Sesshan -- did absolutely nothing about it. They were content to play the politics of mindlessly muttering that the great Indian electorate would never reject the Congress. They totally failed in their professional duty of planning for such a contingency and, if required, going back to Cabinet with their proposals. Look again closely at the dates. If the SPG Act had been drafted in 1985, when Rajiv Gandhi had just secured three-quarters of the seats in the Lok Sabha, it might have been (barely) forgiveable for the minister of internal security to imagine that Rajiv Gandhi was going to remain PM forever. But by 1988, Rajiv Gandhi had lost every state assembly election bar Tripura since March 1985, the Jan Morcha led by V P Singh was in full cry, and a hundred political conspiracies were being hatched to unseat the ruling party. As minister of state in the home ministry, Chidambaram was privy to all intelligence reports. Those reports could not have said anything very different to what every editorial was underlining, that Rajiv Gandhi was in serious political trouble and could well be undermined at any time, even by his Congress colleagues let alone the Opposition. Yet, it appears from the Jain Commission records, the minister in charge of Rajiv Gandhi's security did nothing to plan for his charge's security in the event of the conspirators sinking the ship of state.

Sonia Gandhi was little impressed with Narasimha Rao's gesture in putting Chidambaram in charge of the investigation into her husband's assassination
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/jan/23mani3.htm By 1989, the constitutional lawyer in P Chidambaram must have known that the five-year life of the Eighth Lok Sabha would be ending within the year. While even the India Today poll of mid-1989 conceded a winning edge to the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi, by the start of the monsoon session in July 1989, it became clear to the meanest intelligence that we were moving into an election with a difference. The two-member BJP contingent in the Lok Sabha walked out of the House saying they would not return in the life of the present Lok Sabha; the rest of the Opposition followed, and it became certain that the Index of Opposition Unity would rise dizzyingly, making a Congress defeat a palpable possibility.

It was in August 1989 that I broached with Rajiv Gandhi my desire to quit the civil service to become a politician. I remember telling him -- it was August 18 and we were in an IAF helicopter flying from Mysore to Anantpur/Cuddapah--that I was not wanting to quit in the expectation that he would win the election, for, I said, while he thought we would win and I thought we would win, everyone else seemed certain we would lose and, therefore, what I was proposing was, win or lose, to hitch my star to his own. If the possibility of defeat was so evident to a mere civil servant seeking novitiate status in the world of politics, how much learner must this have been to a veteran -- if, in years, young -- politician of Chidambaram's vintage, a politician, moreover, who was universally regarded as the brightest of his generation and who, as minister, was in charge of looking precisely into such contingencies. Yet, what did Chidambaram do? According to his testimony before the Jain Commission -precisely nothing. With a persistence that would have been worthy of an ostrich in sight of a particularly attractive stretch of sand, Chidambaram buried his head and refused to even contemplate the security requirements of Rajiv Gandhi in the event of his losing the elections. Is this what passes for ministerial responsibility, for ministerial efficiency, for ministerial duty? Not only has not one shred of evidence been laid before the Jain Commission to show that Chidambaram was even thinking about Rajiv's security in the run-up to the election of 1989, the man himself has cheerfully confessed before the commission that it did not even occur to him to do something about the job for which he -- and Seshan -- had been. Hand-picked. Worse was to follow when Chidambaram was named minister in charge of the investigation into Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in May 1995. He has told the Jain Commission -- apparently with neither regret nor remorse--that he did not consider it his ministerial duty to follow up any of the charges he had laid at the door of the DMK, both before Rajiv Gandhi's assassination and after. Confronted with a clipping from the leading Tamil daily, Dinamalar of November 12, 1996, which had published a compendium of his statements on the DMK link to the Rajiv assassination, Chidambaram, after first trying his standard ruse of hiding behind technicalities, confirmed the substance of the statements cited. These supplemented his wholesale condemnation in Parliament of the DMK's culpability, as accessories both before and after the fact, in the assassination by the LTTE of EPRLF leader Padmanabha. Worse, he asserted, apparently without shame, that he had not cared, even as minister in charge of the assassination, to inform himself of the circumstances leading to Shanmugam, the key Indian involved in both assassinations, having had his fetters removed by the police, allegedly in the presence of the SIT chief, Karthikeyan, which gave him the opportunity of (allegedly) hanging himself, thus depriving the prosecution of its key witness. Chidambaram also said he knew nothing of the destruction of the case diaries containing the statement volunteered by Thomas Charles, whose car had been hijacked by the LTTE assailants after murdering Padmanabha. Charles had identified Sivarasan, the lynch-pin of both assassinations, as the leader of the LTTE gang which had hijacked his car. As an

independent witness, his statement, voluntarily tendered, was crucial to the prosecution case; Chidambaram said he knew nothing of it. Perhaps he didn't -- but surely that only shows him up for the totally incompetent minister he proved to be. Perhaps, however, it was not incompetence which caused him to do nothing beyond removing procedural glitches in the way of expediting the trial in the designated court, which is how he described to the Jain Commission his understanding of his functions as minister. Perhaps more to the point was his appreciation of his electoral prospects. With two of the assembly segments in the Sivaganga parliamentary constituency being in the hands of two of Jayalalitha's more notorious ministers, perhaps Chidambaram's strange reluctance to stretch his ministerial remit to the limits of its possibilities had less to do with his understanding of his ministerial duties and more to do with the political opportunism of what too much ministerial zeal might do to his hopes of riding back to the Lok Sabha on the back of the DMK. No wonder Sonia Gandhi was so little impressed with Narasimha Rao's gesture in putting Chidambaram in charge of the investigation into her husband's assassination.