The Hunt: The 'One-Eyed Jack' Who Masterminded Rajiv Gandhi Assassination

The 'wedding' was set for May 21. It was 1991, and a 33-year-old 5'4" swarthy, thickset man with one eye had been planning the 'wedding' for about a year. He had been entrusted with the task of changing the course of history of the subcontinent and he didn't want anything off. Sivarasan was confident. He got together a hit squad and landed in Tamil Nadu on May 1.

Twenty days later, India's former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was dead in Sriperumbudur. A human bomb had killed him.

India's most sensational political murder was "cunning in conception, meticulous in planning and ruthless in execution", said DR Karthikeyan, the IPS officer who led the Special Investigation Team that eventually cracked the case. The planning was LTTE. The execution was Sivarasan.

'One-Eyed Jack'

Chandrasekharampillai Packiachandran AKA Sivarasan hailed from Udupiddy, a town 32 kilometres from Jaffna in Sri Lanka. Sivarasan rose swiftly through the ranks of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), the separatist organisation founded in 1976 by Velupillai Prabhakaran and operational in Sri Lanka till 2009.

Sivarasan's fluency in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi helped him become LTTE's prime hitman. His Tamil, devoid of a Lankan accent, helped him evade suspicion. Added to that was the fact that he knew the Indian topography like the back of his hand. His linguistic prowess and knowledge of India made him practically impossible to nab.

Sivarasan lost an eye in a firefight with the Sri Lankan Army in 1987. Since then, his comrades called him "Ottaraikkannan" or "one-eyed person". The name got a Marlon Brando makeover in mainstream media and Sivarasan became known as "One-Eyed Jack" after the 1961 Hollywood film.

In June 1990, Sivarasan killed K Padmanabha, a leader of the pro-India organisation EPRLF (Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front) in Chennai (then Madras) in broad daylight. Thirteen of Padmanabha's associates were killed in the same attack. Sivarasan caught the eye of the LTTE's intelligence chief Pottu Amman. Sivarasan was chosen for the LTTE's most daring operation yet: the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.

The LTTE, The Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, And The War Against IPKF

Former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was fighting the 1990 general elections with AIADMK's Jayalalitha as an ally. Rajiv Gandhi had served as the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha till December 1990, after serving as the Prime Minister of India from 1984 to 1989. When Rajiv Gandhi was in power, India signed with Sri Lankan President JR Jayawardane the Indo-Sri Lanka accord in July 1987 that dissolved the LTTE and "envisaged a devolution of power to the Tamil-majority areas".

After the Sri Lanka accord was signed, the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF, an Indian military contingent) was deployed to Sri Lanka for three years to enforce it. The LTTE denounced the accord. Several months of tension followed. On October 7, 1987, the LTTE declared war on the IPKF. The last members of the IPKF left Sri Lanka in March 1990. The LTTE regained territorial control.

In early 1990, LTTE founder Prabhakaran emerged from the jungles of Sri Lanka. He wanted revenge. Against the Indian Army, and against the Indian Prime Minister who signed the Indo-Sri Lanka accord.

The Assassination Of Rajiv Gandhi

The LTTE leadership was alarmed by the Congress's 1991 election manifesto, which spoke of the party's commitment to upholding the 1987 Sri Lanka accord.

The idea of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi was born in the mind of the battle-scarred Prabhakaran and conveyed to Pottu Amman, the LTTE's intelligence chief. Pottu Amman handpicked Sivarasan for the operation, codenamed the 'wedding'. The Tigers smuggled 5 kilograms of gold into Tamil Nadu. Sivarasan sold it for Rs 19.36 lakh, which was then used to fund the 'wedding' expenses.

Two women were of the utmost importance in Sivarasan's hit squad: Dhanu, the bomber; and Shubha, the backup bomber. The plan was hatched. Rajiv Gandhi, Jayalalithaa's ally, was almost certainly going to visit Tamil Nadu as part of his general election campaigns. May 21 was the day he was going to be in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu. The Tigers were to strike him there.

A Blast In Sriperumbudur

Dhanu, in a loose-fitting green-and-orange salwar kameez, had boarded a state transport bus to Sriperumbudur along with Sivarasan and other members of the LTTE squad.

Sivarasan was disguised as a journalist. He was dressed in a white kurta-pyjama and had a cloth bag and a notepad in his hand; identifiers you usually associated with journalists back in the day. Sivarasan was to 'cover' the Sriperumbudur poll rally of Rajiv Gandhi. He gained access to the venue. It was lightly guarded. There were no metal detectors or frisking at the poll rally.

Sivarasan, along with Dhanu, melted into the mob.

Rajiv Gandhi walked down the red coir carpet at the Sriperumbudur temple grounds. A hectic day of poll rallies in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh had left him tired and by the time he reached Sriperumbudur. An enthusiastic crowd met him there. It was twenty past 10 in the night.

Sivarasan's job was to steer Dhanu towards Rajiv Gandhi. He did. She garlanded Gandhi with a sandalwood necklace and bent as if to touch his feet. Dhanu flicked a switch. Half a kilo of plastic explosives in her suicide vest exploded. Rajiv Gandhi was dead. So were 17 others in the blast.

Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, and Priyanka Gandhi at Rajiv Gandhi's cremation pyre in New Delhi. Photo: Getty Images

Sivarasan and his remaining squad disappeared from the Sriperumbudur grounds in the melee. But they left something behind.

Haribabu's Camera

Among the 18 people who died in the blast was also Haribabu, a photographer hired by Sivarasan to document the attack on Rajiv Gandhi. Haribabu's 35 mm Chinon camera lay at the blast site. It was picked up by the agencies and reached the Special Investigation Team investigating Rajiv Gandhi's assassination. The camera had photos of the entire assassination squad. It had a shot of Sivarasan's profile too.

A question that baffled the investigating agencies in the days after the attack was why the LTTE would leave behind a wealth of documentary evidence at the scene of crime. The answer was simple: the LTTE had a compulsive need for documenting their struggle. Photos of the cadres kept them motivated. Such was the need for documenting every step of their mission that the LTTE had a battlefield camera unit that filmed and photographed their cadres in action. The unit was called 'Nitharsanam' (which means reality or evidence in Tamil). True to its name, Nitharsanam served as the chronicler of the LTTE's reality.

The camera played a key role in the SIT zeroing in on the LTTE operatives involved in the attack. It took the DR Karthikeyan-led team two months to round up most of the key suspects. But Sivarasan was still at large.

Sivarasan On The Run

After the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Sivarasan fled from one hideout to another in Tamil Nadu till he ran out of safehouses in the state. He found 11 LTTE boys who resembled him and sent them to various places in Tamil Nadu in various disguises to waylay the agencies. So, Sivarasan would be 'spotted' in the state as a bald Hindu priest, a turbaned Sikh, a Muslim cleric and a Catholic priest, all at the same time. But Sivarasan knew that he couldn't keep up with it for too long. The agencies were closing in, and he had no place to hide in Tamil Nadu anymore.

So, Sivarasan travelled 350 kilometres from Chennai to Bangalore in a water tanker, evading about a dozen police checkpoints on the way. He holed himself up in a single-storeyed house in Konanakunte on the outskirts of the Karnataka capital. He had a reward of Rs 15 lakh on his head and eluding the forces was not easy.

In his book Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi's Assassins (Haper Collins India, 2022), journalist-author Anirudhya Mitra writes, "When he [Sivarasan] found that the police had surrounded his hideout in Konanakunte, he didn't immediately die by suicide. He knew the agencies would like to catch him alive, and yet he waited thirty-six hours for them to finally break into his hideout. It's only then that he shot himself through his temple. He was cunning, ruthless, brutal and devoted to his Tamil cause."

Death Of An Assassin

When Sivarasan left his last Chennai hideout two days after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, he took only a 9 mm pistol with him. Sivarasan was confident he would return to the Chennai safehouse.

He could not.

The Tiger safehouse at 158 Muthamil Nagar, Kodungaiyur in Chennai played an important role in the SIT cracking the assassination case. LTTE operative Jayakumar, a suspect in the May 21 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, told K Ragothaman, CBI's chief investigator, that the Kodungaiyur safehouse had a hole in the kitchen that seemed important to Sivarasan. Whenever Sivarasan went to the kitchen, he would send Jayakumar out of the room. The latter did not know what lay in the hole in the kitchen.

The hole, cut under a two-foot-by-two-foot kitchen tile, had in it a thick Tamil-English dictionary with a 9 mm pistol in it. This is the pistol Sivarasan shot himself with. The hole also held two small pocket diaries, a notebook, and a fake glass eye.

The diaries helped the SIT piece together the Rajiv Gandhi assassination plot. The diaries contained twenty days' worth of telephone numbers, addresses, financial transactions and codenames. Sivarasan began scribbling in them on May 1, 1991, when he landed in Tamil Nadu. His last entry was from May 23, two days after the assassination, when he fled the Chennai safehouse for Konanakunte, where he killed himself on August 19, 1991.

When the crack team from the National Security Guard broke open the door of the Konanakunte safehouse, they found six of Sivarasan's comrades dead inside. They had all bitten into the capsule of cyanide that they wore around their neck. The women died embracing each other; the men, with their arms around each other's backs.

Sivarasan, the 'One-Eyed Jack' with a 15-lakh reward on his head, lay at a distance, dead from a bullet wound to his head.