19 May 2000

From Jal Khambata

NEW DELHI: Has senior Congress leader Arjun Singh any links with the Srilankan Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that was banned in India after it liquidated former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi?

Why did he and some others in "higher places" keep spreading disinformation to let the LTTE off the hook in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case? Of course, in the ultimate they failed to derail the courts.

A needle of suspicion is pointed at Arjun Singh by former Union Law Minister and Janata Party President Dr Subramanian Swamy in a book entitled "The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi -- Unanswered Questions and Unasked Queries" slated for release next week.

"Arjun Singh amongst politicians, and Vir Sanghvi (editor of The Hindustan Times) in the media were the principal sources for calibrating the disinformation campaign that the American agency CIA or the Israeli Mossad or both or some persons in India had masterminded the assassination, says the book.

Dr Swamy writes that it was now beyond any doubts after the Supreme Court, had held LTTE guilty of organising the assassination and the LTTE itself pleading guilty before the highest court in the land to the charge.

CREATING DOUBTS: "The nation must move on now to discover those in the 'higher places' in India on whom the LTTE had depended all these years for the vicious and sinister disinformation campaign to try and get off the hook," says Dr Swamy and adds: "These persons may not be conspirators in the murder, but they certainly are guilty of impending the investigation and attempting to confound the evidence."

Dr Swamy says the disinformation campaign was deliberate to derail first the investigations and then the court trial and points out that "even after the trial court judgment found the LTTR guilty, the disinformation machine began spinning out a new line: LTTE plus who ? -- to mitigate the LTTE perfidy." The Supreme Court judgment devastated that attempt.

"But the matter does not end there. The question remains who are these persons in high places in whom the LTTE places so much faith, and why these persons chose the LTTE over the nation?"

"On August 7, 1998, writing in The Hindustan Times Sanghvi titled his article "Unsolved Mystery," and wrote: "The Murder of Rajiv Gandhi was a blow to our sovereignty. But our refusal to find out who did it and why, shames us as a people."

"By then," Dr Swamy writes, "even the LTTE had admitted to killing Rajiv Gandhi, but Sanghvi was like a robot still at it, raising doubts, asking "who did it."

Dr Swamy notes that even the Supreme Court had observed that the assassination decision was made by LTTE supremo Prabhakaran after being provoked by two interviews of Rajiv Gandhi taken by Vir Sanghvi and published in the "Sunday" magazine he used to edit at that time.

WHO ALL?: Among the names Dr Swamy has dropped are then Chief Election Commissioner T N Seshan and former Union Cabinet Secretary Zafar Saifullah who saw the Mossad hand in the assassination and Ashok Tandon, the media adviser of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who had concocted an interview with an ex-British intelligence agent just after two days of the killing to claim that some persons had offered him pounds 100,000 sterling to kill RG but that he had demanded five times the money.

Dr Swamy says he does not "subscribe yet to the view that he (Arjun Singh) was privy to the knowledge in advance that the LTTE was plotting the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, but certainly that he, for some inexplicable reason, went to great lengths to see if the murder could be pinned on some other than the LTTE."

However, just a paragraph later, Dr Swamy tries to decipher Arjun Singh as "Nero" a character who plots to kill the Prime Minister of a country and who alone survives among the collaborators in a 1993 novel "The Assassination" written by former Tamil Nadu Director General of Police K Mohan Das. He says Das conceded that the novel was about Rajiv's assassination but "neither confirmed nor denied my decoding of the characters in his novel."

3 POINTS: Dr Swamy says he has three "irrefutable facts" to give credibility to his charge that Arjun Singh abetted the LTTE in its disinformation campaign to fob off the responsibility for the crime of assassinating Rajiv Gandhi:

-- Arjun Singh tried to overthrow Rajiv Gandhi as the Prime Minister to ascend to the post himself but then President Zail Singh exposed his sinister plan to Rajiv Gandhi;

-- Arjun Singh never publicly held LTTE responsible for the assassination, never sought ban on LTTE and it was inexplicable that he approached the Home Ministry to provide police protection for a person convicted for harbouring the assassination mastermind Sivarasan;

-- Manipulated the Jain Commission to make out that the CIA/Mossad were the culprits and tried to frame then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao in the plot.

Dr Swamy has included in his book the transcript of a tape as published in magazine "Sunday" and reportedly submitted by one Rajendra Jain, who died mysteriously last year, to the Jain Commission as revelations by then Law Minister H R Bharadwaj implicating Arjun Singh in his attempts to become the Prime Minister.

LTTE BECOMES RSS: The Janata Party leader writes that Arjun Singh's "palpable hatred of the Nehru family is no secret" but Sonia Gandhi did not realise it even when he tried to cover up the LTTE threat to her life by suddenly shifting focus on Mahatma Gandhi's murderers.

He points out that the Government had tightened Sonia Gandhi's security in mid-1999 following reports received from South Africa that LTTE personnel there had discussed assassinating her. After a Congress delegation called on Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Arjun Singh rushed to the Press to allege that "those responsible for the murder of Mahatma Gandhi were now planning to assassinate Sonia Gandhi."

Swamy asks: What provoked Arjun Singh to get it all wrong? Was it because of advancing age? Or, did the mention of South Africa revive his memories of Mahatma Gandhi? Or, more likely, was he under pressure to cover up for the LTTE? Only a probe can tell for sure. But his behaviour was indeed curious."

He claims "Rajiv Gamndhi disliked Arjun Singh and was planning to dump him after the 1991 elections" and affirms in italics "Rajiv Gandhi told me so." He further claims that Rajiv Gandhi as the Prime Minister already had Arjun Singh investigated by Home Minister Buta Singh on reports of despicable corruption.

"Then there are reports of Arjun Singh's confidant, a businessman from Indore, who maintains a close liaison with Libya, and recipient of deposits made into an account in Cyprus. No doubt that Libya must be thrilled with the Mossad theory peddled by Arjun Singh."

Dr Swamy claims Arjun Singh "has nothing to fear as long as the BJP is in power" and describes him as their "asset" and shows how he prevented dismissal of the Kalyan Singh's government by Narasimha Rao, by declaring the Babri Mosque was safe "after a sumptuous lunch with the UP Chief Minister just a couple of days before the demolition."

RSS LINKS: The Janata Party leader even tries to expose Arjun Singh's RSS past. "There are those who claim to have seen RSS chief M S Golwalkar who had stayed at his father's residence in early 1950s, along with a young Arjun Singh in Khaki shorts and black cap (RSS uniform)!" But then Dr Swamy plays safe: "I believe them, but cannot yet vouch for it."

But if that were true, why Arjun Singh does not miss a single opportunity to spit venom against RSS and BJP? Dr Swamy has an explanation for even this. He says Arjun Singh had a problem with the RSS in Madhya Pradesh because of the Churhat lottery scandal pursued on a private complaint by an RSS worker and former Chief Minister Kailash Joshi.

"But he had common enemies, or chose to make such enemies, and thereby soon he had established a compact with the RSS. Very soon after that, the complainant in the Churhat Lottery scandal lost interest, and Arjun Singh was freed from that litigation." END