Of Perarivalan's innocence and failure to probe the 'international angle'

Following a petition from Perarivalan, the judges were aghast to find the foreign trips made by investigators to unravel the 'international angle'

There was more fatigue than joy on his face as AG Perarivalan stepped out beaming from his house in Jolarpet in Tirupattur district of north Tamil Nadu on Wednesday to meet the growing crowd of friends and admirers cheering him lustily as the Supreme Court just a while earlier ordered his release in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.

"Arivu, here, take this," someone handed over a parai (an ancient drum instrument of the Tamil people used usually to convey messages to the public, such as the dynastic rulers' orders) to egg him on to join a young woman gustily playing on her parai to announce the good news. Another youth with his parai joined the celebration while Arivu's mother, Arputhammal, stood close by grinning with justified pride; she has been waging a relentless battle on the social, political, media and judicial platforms to get her son released, pleading he was innocent and the CBI's Special Investigation Team that probed the May 21, 1991, assassination, had wrongly framed him. She had handed him over to the SIT team when Arivu was only a month from his 20th birthday and on the threshold of a career that could have vastly helped the lower-middle-class family after completing a diploma in engineering. That was over three decades ago.

I will not go into the laboured details of the SIT charge sheet, for which I have no respect for multiple reasons, and would instead confine my narration to just a few details critically relevant to Arivu; also, it is not my case that the others in this list of seven lifers are absolutely innocent of the gruesome crime. The assassination case was conducted under the TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act), which made the statements of the accused, recorded by the investigating officer, admissible as evidence against them in the in-camera trial. The charge against Arivu was that he was party to the brutal assassination by a woman LTTE suicide bomber Thanu, as he procured the two nine-volt batteries to be fitted to her belt bomb.

The TADA court in Poonamallee, a suburb of Chennai, did not consider his plea that he was not aware why he was asked (by the LTTE killer squad) to procure the batteries and that the SIT investigator had failed to record this when he told him so. The judge did 'carpet-bombing' sentencing all the 26 accused to death on January 28, 1998; obviously choosing to play safe in such a highly sensational case that he knew would drag on through appeals and more appeals up to the Supreme Court. Only four of those 26 were 'condemned' to death row by the apex court, while three were sentenced to life and the rest acquitted. Arivu spent 16 years in solitary confinement, fearing the noose as the various mercy petitions from him and his dour mom knocked on multiple doors. In one of those petitions, Arivu had described his torturous life in jail, suffering from what is known as 'death row syndrome'. Ultimately, the death sentences of the four convicts were commuted to life terms.

As it turned out, Arivu's averment of innocence turned out to be true as the IPS officer V Thiagarajan, who was the SP drafted from the Kerala cadre to the SIT and given the task of recording the statements of all the accused, finally yielded to the feeling of guilt that weighed down his conscience and filed an affidavit in November 2017 — some 26 years later - admitting that he 'omitted certain crucial fact' while recording Perarivalan's statement, including his insistence that he did not know why he was asked to get the batteries. He had omitted that bit of Perarivalan being in the dark about the conspiracy because the very purpose of recording his confession would have been lost in the 'exculpatory system' that prevailed — meaning that the SIT needed to build a strong chain of the 'accused' and tie them up to the conspiracy and if one of the links falls, the chain collapses.

I was a witness to the gruesome assassination at the Sriperumbudur Congress election rally that night. Looking at the manner in which it had been carried out using a woman suicide bomber, it did not take me long to conclude it was an LTTE operation. And as someone who has been covering Eelam militancy from its infancy and the Tiger psyche, I knew that the deadly combination of Prabhakaran and his intelligence chief Pottu Amman would not reveal even a wee bit more information than what is absolutely necessary to the members of the squad assembled for a big kill; it would only be a 'need-to-know' basis. It had been revealed even from the SIT papers that the one-eyed Sivarasan, who headed the Rajiv assassination squad, had in his wireless message to Pottu Amman shortly before the operation had stated that 'only three persons' knew about the plot. Even if he had added on a couple of more Tiger operatives to the inner ring in the subsequent couple of months, that surely would not have included the poor teen, Arivu, who might have then been, at best, a sympathiser of the LTTE as a militant group fighting the Sinhala regime for Tamil rights. There have been so many such sympathisers in Tamil Nadu, including the late AIADMK chief minister M G Ramachandran, who had openly funded the Tigers.

But of course, SIT boss D R Karthikeyan continues to insist he did a great job sewing up the near-impossible case and bringing the culprits to book. They were all guilty, and if the Supreme Court chose to release someone now, well, he only 'respected' that 'expected' verdict, he has stated. It is anybody's guess why the much-decorated cop, or for that matter, anyone in the higher echelons of India's ruling class, does not question what happened to the Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA), comprising of officers of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) — and God knows who else — constituted in 1998 after the Jain Commission report to probe the possibility of an international angle to the Tiger kill.

In one of the many litigations relating to the Rajiv convicts, the Centre had told the Madras High Court (August 2020) that these seven lifers were "only arrows" to carry out the task, and the MDMA would uncover the "bows" from which the arrows were released. Later, when the Supreme Court called for the MDMA's so-called reports for its scrutiny, following a petition from Perarivalan, the judges were aghast finding that most of those reports had only spoken about the foreign trips made by the 'investigators' seeking to unravel the 'international angle' if any and contained no meaty material. And the MDMA continues; at least, no official announcement has been made if it's wound up as a useless white elephant drinking up taxpayers' sweat.

Legal pundits could still argue that the Wednesday's verdict from the Justice L Nageswara Rao Bench is open to appeal, and someone might even do that after Rao's retirement on June 3; but my parting shot would be, 'how much longer must we cling to the law books and keep this man in jail despite all the evidence of his innocence, just because we do not want the chain in the flawed SIT charge-sheet to be fractured?' I must take a step further ahead and raise yet another question, a heavier one now, as to why Arivu must not be paid compensation for being robbed of a good part of his life?

(R Bhagwan Singh is a senior journalist based in Chennai, writing on Sri Lanka since the 1980s)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.