Four convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case
Rahul Gandhi today said he was sad that seven people convicted of killing his father, former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, were being released by the Tamil Nadu government.
"Rajiv Gandhi's killers are being set free, I am saddened by this. I am personally against the death penalty but this is not about my father. If a Prime Minister's killers are being released, what kind of justice should the common man expect?" Mr Gandhi said, hours after the Jayalalithaa government announced that all the convicts would be freed, a politically significant decision ahead of the national election, due by May.
The convicts have been in jail for 23 years. One of them, Nalini Sriharan, was granted mercy in 2000 on the intervention of Rahul's mother and Rajiv Gandhi's widow, Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday spared three of the convicts, Nalini's husband Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan, from execution, citing the 11-year delay in a decision on their mercy plea, and left it to the Tamil Nadu government to release them. Chief Minister Jayalalithaa acted fast, and gave the Centre three days to respond to her decision, after which, she said, she would invoke her own powers to free the convicts.
Top sources say the Centre also has a say in the decision and there is "no question" of letting off the assassins of a Prime Minister.
Shortly after Rahul Gandhi's comments, his Congress party officially denounced the Jayalalithaa government's decision, calling it "irresponsible, perverse and populist."
Congress leaders from Tamil Nadu, however, may find it difficult to share this view given the largely pro-Lankan Tamil sentiment in the state. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a woman operative of the Lankan Tamil separatist outfit LTTE, who greeted the Congress leader with a sandalwood garland and a bomb strapped to her chest during a rally in 1991.
"Our grief arises out of the fact that Rajiv Gandhi was killed brutally. It's the decision of the Supreme Court... I am neither happy nor unhappy," union minister P Chidambaram, who is from Tamil Nadu, told NDTV. "I do not see this as cynical politics."
All Tamil parties have campaigned for the convicts' release and they all welcomed it today. The BJP, which is aiming for a poll tie-up with Jayalalithaa's AIADMK, has reacted cautiously. (
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