21 May 1991: The night India lost Rajiv Gandhi

May 21, 1991. Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a human bomb in Tamil Nadu.

Transcript

00:00It was supposed to be a campaign stop, a garland, a speech, a walk towards the

00:10dais in a small town called Sri Perambudur. But by 10.21 p.m. India's

00:14youngest former prime minister lay dead, brought down by a human bomb. Rajiv Gandhi

00:20was in Tamil Nadu stumping for Congress ahead of the 1991 general election. He

00:24just arrived at the rally when a young woman walked up, a garland in hand. A

00:29camera slung over her shoulder. She bent down as if to touch his feet and then a

00:34flash, a roar and silence. She was Athenmori Rajaratnam, codename

00:40Dhanu, a suicide bomber for the LGTE, the liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam. The LGTE

00:45was fighting for a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka. In 1987 Rajiv Gandhi sent

00:50Indian peacekeeping forces also known as the IPKF to broker peace but it spiraled

00:56into a war. Over 1,000 Indian soldiers died. The LTTE blamed Rajiv Gandhi for

01:01betrayal and bloodshed. Their revenge was therefore personal and symbolic and

01:05surgical. The assassination stunned India. This was the first time a political

01:10leader had been assassinated with a suicide bomb. A new kind of terror. The

01:15explosion killed 14 others and injured dozens more. It also introduced India to

01:19something it had not seen before. Terrorism driven by foreign conflict executed

01:24with chilling precision on home soil. Congress swept the sympathy vote. Narsimha

01:29Rao took office. Sonia Gandhi withdrew from public life. The SIT inquiry eventually

01:33convicted 26 people but key questions, who planned it, how India's security lapsed,

01:38still echo in classified files and the mastermind LTTE chief Prabhakaran was killed

01:43by Sri Lankan forces in 2009. Today Rajiv Gandhi's assassination marks anti-terrorism

01:48day in India. School children take oaths. Leaders place reeds at Veer Bhoomi. But

01:53beneath the ceremony lies a hard truth. The assassination did not just end a lie. It

01:58changed how India thinks about its borders, its politics and its vulnerabilities.

02:03Basically, what happened in Sri Perambudur is how history can sometimes turn with a

02:08garland, a handshake and a heartbeat. I'm Manish Abhikari. Thank you for watching the

02:13Culture Project On More.