Rajiv Gandhi Assassination: Nation remembers India's youngest Prime Minister

Chennai

Rajiv Gandhi’s untimely death devastated the Congress party and the general public alike. While the masterminds behind the assassination were arrested and still serving their jail term, his funeral procession saw several world leaders from over 60 countries.

• Rajiv Gandhi who from an early age aspired to fly, became a professional pilot for the state-owned Indian Airlines.
• Rajiv Gandhi joined the Congress party after brother Sanjay Gandhi’s untimely death. He later contested from Amethi, his brother’s parliamentary seat to become the member of Lok Sabha. He later became the PM of India, when his mother Indira Gandhi was assassinated in the hands of the Sikhs in retaliation to Operation Blue Star.

•  LTTE, a militant organisation from Sri Lanka, angered over the fact that Rajiv Gandhi had sent Indian Army to Sri Lanka during the civil war hatched a plan to assassinate him.
•  In the year 1991, Rajiv went to Sriperumbudur to attend an election rally despite the fact that the intelligence agencies had warned about a terror plot against him. This was Rajiv Gandhi’s last public meeting.
•  A woman later identified as Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, came near Gandhi in public and greeted him. She then bent down to touch his feet and detonated RDX explosives tucked under her dress. The blast killed at least 14 people including Gandhi.
•  This entire episode was made into a film called Madras Café. The film which was set in the late 1980s and early '90s, during the time of Indian intervention in the Sri Lankan civil war and assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
• Nalini Sriharan is the lone surviving member of the five-member squad behind the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and is serving life imprisonment. Arrested on June 14, 1991, she was sentenced to death, along with the other 25 accused. However, the SC confirmed that the death sentence was given to only four of the convicts, including Nalini, on May 11, 1999.
• A few years ago, the top court had commuted the death sentence to life term for the other three, including Nalini's husband Murugan, citing inordinate delay by the President's Office in disposing their mercy petitions.

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