So, who paid to assassinate Rajiv?

Curiously, six months after godman Chandraswami died a natural death and 18 years after the Supreme Court awarded the death sentence to four of the accused in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, Justice KT Thomas, the senior most of the three judges, has spoken out against the failure to probe the role of Chandraswami, who was close to not one but three Prime Ministers of India, namely PV Narasimha Rao, Chandra Shekhar and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in the assassination.

The judge now wants Congress President Sonia Gandhi and the rest of the family members of the deceased Prime Minister to be magnanimous and ensure the release of the four accused on the death row and three others who are serving life sentences. There were, the judge now says, serious flaws in the investigation conducted by the CBI. The failure in particular to establish the source of ₹40 lakhs found on one of the key conspirators, Sivarasan, Justice (Rtd) Thomas now feels, was “an unpardonable flaw in the Indian Criminal Justice System.”

One of the convicted accused, he now recalls, had told a weekly newsmagazine that the amount had been paid by Chandraswami but CBI officials had warned him against pointing his finger to the godman. Thomas is apparently referring to Ranganath who owned the house in Bangalore where Sivarasan was gunned down by the SIT. Ranganath was convicted for being an accomplice and harbouring the criminals. He remains one of the few survivors, who had interacted with Sivarasan regularly.

“The main accused were all from Sri Lanka. I told the Solicitor General Altaf Ahmed that I can understand a few Sri Lankan currency but ₹40 lakh was such a huge amount…means there were financially powerful forces behind those who were arrested. I asked him whether he investigated the origin of that cash. After a brief chat with SIT chief D R Karthikeyan, he sought time to reply. The next day Ahmed told the court that the investigators couldn’t find the source of the cash,” Justice Thomas now discloses.

That is not all. “Under the conventional Evidence Act, a confession can be used only as corroborative piece of evidence…” But in this case, Justice Thomas claims that he had to relent in the face of the stand taken by Justice DP Wadhwa and Justice Shah Mohammd Quadri. AG Perarivalan, who was a teenager when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated and served a death sentence by the court for ostensibly purchasing a 9 volt battery, said to have been used to detonate the bomb that killed Rajiv Gandhi and 18 others, has all along pleaded that he had no personal knowledge of the real purpose of this battery and was not privy to the actual conspiracy. But a confessional statement was extracted from him apparently under duress as with all the other accused and all of them sentenced on these statements deemed as prime evidence. This is at complete variance to the Indian Evidence Act, which calls for primary evidence and not confessions.

But Thomas now tells us “I was upset over these serious flaws and shared my concern with the two others on the bench. They suggested we shouldn’t criticise the CBI in the final order considering their efforts. Then I suggested a condition: no criticism or kudos for the CBI in the final order. They agreed. After drafting the final order, we exchanged the drafts for reading. But on the day of the judgment I was shocked to hear Justice D P Wadhwa’s judgment praising CBI officer Karthikeyan whole-heartedly. That made headlines and sent out a message that the Supreme Court was happy with the probe.”

Strangely all these years Justice Thomas kept his counsel and provided no inkling to how the Special Investigation Team (SIT), constituted by none other than Subramanian Swamy, wilfully botched up the case and kept the real conspiracy under wraps. He now suggests that the recovery of `40 lakhs in cash could have been a part of the advance payment made to Sivarasan to eliminate Rajiv Gandhi in Tamil Nadu.

In my book titled, ‘Rajiv Gandhi Assassination: An Inside Job,’ I argued that the entire CBI thesis of Rajiv Gandhi being killed out LTTE’s fear of his return to power or as a revenge for the IPKF operation in Sri Lanka, was bogus. I had also pointed out with evidence that Sivarasan, the chief conspirator, was quite capable of contract killing, mentioning the possible role of Chandraswamy in this context.

That there was considerable circumstantial evidence to suspect Chandraswami, was evident from the fact that the then National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government constituted a Multi Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA) to probe the godman’s role. Chandraswami is dead and gone. But the MDMA still exists and God knows what it has done in the 17 years of its existence.

All that it succeeded in doing all these years is to thwart all attempts of this one- time all powerful godman to flee the country, maintaining in the courts that his role in Rajiv Gandhi assassination case was being probed.