Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi's Assassins

By Anirudhya Mitra

At 10.20 p.m. on 21 May 1991, a young woman bowed before Rajiv Gandhi at an election rally in Sriperumbudur, 42 km north of Chennai. And then there was an explosion.

This book is the definitive account of one of the most controversial crimes in contemporary India. It unravels the complex plot hatched by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) to ensure that Rajiv Gandhi did not return to power in the 1991 general elections.

Ninety Days provides a blow-by-blow account of how the Special Investigation Team of the CBI cracked the assassination plot, identified the assassins and chased the mastermind, Sivarasan, to his final hideout. The deaths from cyanide consumption of the members of the hit squad left several unanswered questions in their wake, which this book explores.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Jun 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9789394407619

Anirudhya Mitra

Anirudhya Mitra is a journalist and filmmaker. During a successful stint (1982-93) of news reporting in The Times of India and India Today, he broke several stories, including the Bofors scam, Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, drug wars in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, money laundering by the BCCI bank that led to its closure, corruption in the judiciary, the life and times of Indian-model-turned-spy Pamela Bordes, godman Chandraswamy and others. He moved to writing and creating television drama series with UTV in Mumbai in 1994 and also wrote and produced movies in South East Asia. 

Book preview

1

IT WAS 22 MAY 1991. SEVEN O’CLOCK, WEDNESDAY MORNING. TOO early to wake up. Especially after a late night. Anirudhya tried to figure out what she was saying by waving around the morning paper. He fumbled with the bunch of newspapers his wife had dropped right on top of him and said, ‘Rajiv Gandhi is dead.’ Headlines across the newspapers said the very same thing—the former Prime Minister of India had been assassinated the previous night at an election rally in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu.

Anirudhya’s wife, Rupa, had gone back to the kitchen. The telephone rang. Anirudhya picked up the receiver. The coordinator of the news desk of India Today magazine was on the line. Anirudhya had been called to office early. He had been working for India Today for just over a month and was always looking for a good story. But this appeared much more than that. The assassination of a former head of state who was tipped to be returning to power was much more than what he had been doing—investigative pieces on kickbacks paid in defence deals, political appointments of bureaucrats and narco-terrorism. He had left his previous job at another newspaper to chase bigger investigative stories. It seemed he had got that served on a platter.

Anirudhya parked his Kinetic Honda scooter in Connaught Place F-block and climbed the narrow, steep stairs that led to one of India’s most respected news fortnightlies. The magazine’s large newsroom encircled by editors’ cabins was usually quiet until about eleven, even if a sub-editor or two were at work. As Anirudhya peeped into the coordinator Harpal Singh’s cubicle to check if there was any message from Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie, he called from behind him, standing at the door of Managing Editor Inderjit Badhwar. Badhwar had been instrumental in getting Anirudhya over to India Today.

Badhwar told him that Senior Editor Shekhar Gupta was on his way to Madras (Chennai), so Anirudhya should hang around the ‘North Block’ and pick up whatever information he could about the ghastly incident from the previous night.

For a moment Anirudhya was disappointed. It was clear that he was not going to Madras to investigate. Shekhar Gupta was India Today’s senior editor. Naturally he would be the one sent to the scene of crime before anyone else. As Anirudhya stepped out of Badhwar’s cabin, Copy Editor Dilip Bobb caught him. ‘Get me your copy latest by six in the evening,’ he said.

The office was full at eleven. Anirudhya sat at his desk and asked the pantry for a soft drink with extra ice. People usually drank tea in newsrooms, but the culture in India Today seemed different. Here people spoke with an accent, were more stylishly dressed and had a chip or two on the shoulder.

Anirudhya tried to recollect what he had been doing the previous night. He was playing badminton with his friend in the CBI, Amit Verma, outside the latter’s Pandara Road official residence. Verma’s wife, Shobhana, had interrupted the game, telling Verma that he had an urgent call. The next thing Anirudhya knew, his friend had changed into jeans and a T-shirt and asked Anirudhya if he could be dropped at the Delhi residence of the chief secretary to the state of Tamil Nadu, T.S. Sundaram. He, a Tamil Nadu-cadre IPS officer, had been called for a meeting.

Anirudhya made three calls while waiting for his iced soft drink. First to a source in Delhi Police, second to another in the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and third to Verma and tried to piece together the events of the previous night. He thought he had better type a story straightway. Around 10.25 p.m. Sonia Gandhi received a call from someone asking if everything was fine. The Gandhis had been preparing to call it a night, and Rajiv Gandhi’s personal secretary, Vincent George, had left for the day. Sensing trouble, Sonia Gandhi immediately summoned George, who had just reached home and found every phone in his residence ringing—the callers were from Madras. When Sonia Gandhi got through to one of George’s lines, he was on another phone call with Madras. She waited for George to finish his call, but Rajiv Gandhi’s personal secretary could not muster up the courage to tell her what had happened on the phone. He chose to rush back to 10, Janpath, where he tried to narrate in fragmented sentences what had happened in Sriperumbudur.

By that time, Congress leaders had started gathering at 10, Janpath. According to some of them, Sonia Gandhi had an attack of asthma as she cried inconsolably. She was not in a position to take control of the events unfolding; no one knew what needed to be done. However, Priyanka Gandhi, her daughter, gathered herself and asked George to arrange for their travel to Madras, where the body of Rajiv Gandhi had been