Why Priyanka must not pursue Rajiv’s murder trial - I

Standing from a distance and looking at Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, may make us envy her but given a chance would you dare to get into her shoes? As said a rose is not a rose without thorns, living a life with a constant threat of an end does not come easy.


NO DAUGHTER, wife or mother in India, in her senses, would ever wish to have Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s life. Ironically, nobody can find fault with her father, husband or her children. Moreover, Priyanka was born with a silver spoon, in arguably the wealthiest and most powerful family of India. Yet, she deserves all the sympathy from even complete strangers, because of her unenviable fate. It has made her undergo numerous grave tragedies in life.

Her father, Rajiv Gandhi, was the son of Indira Gandhi, who was considered as the most powerful woman of India in her days. Rajiv’s father Feroz was a noted anti-corruption crusader, who had crossed the path of Nehru and his corrupt cronies. He exposed a huge insurance scam that saw the downfall of the then finance minister. Living apart from the power-corrupted Nehrus, he died mysteriously at the age 48, when in Kashmir with his teenage boys Rahul and Sanjay. Rajiv, apparently troubled by his father’s fate, kept himself aloof from all palace intrigues. He preferred to live in peace with his Italian wife Sonia and kids, working as a pilot.

Priyanka’s peace was shattered when she was just eight years old. Her uncle and Rajiv’s younger brother Sanjay died in a mysterious air crash. He was a cunning politician, set to outdo his own mother and grandfather in intrigue. Rajiv was forced to jump into the cesspool to help out his mother because, as he said, “My bereaved mother called to me in her loneliness… I left my love for flying and joined her as a political aide…I had no love for politics. I treasured the privacy of my happy family life…”

Then, when Priyanka was twelve, grandmother Indira fell to bullets fired by her own security guard. The she had earned countless enemies within the establishment and outside due to her autocratic ways. Inexplicably, the ‘assassins’ themselves were assassinated, rendering the whole affair an unsolvable mystery. Rajiv too became a virtual prisoner of an intrigue.

He started earning bitter enemies since the time he commented on the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi in the wake of his mother’s assassination allegedly by her ‘indoctrinated’ Sikh guard, “When a large tree falls, the earth is bound to shake!” Like this tacit approval of the anti-Sikh riots, which claimed the lives of 20,000 innocents, he kept on associating himself with undesirable mafia elements. He became part of the high-stakes New Delhi politics, which is full of intrigue, played by powerful bandicoots. The government of India provided him with high security, spending crores of rupees of public money, but that was more of a harassment to the family.

The family lived in virtual house arrest, every movement being watched by elite guards. Entrenched cronies started directing the personal affairs of Rajiv. Cousin Arun Nehru (now defected to BJP!) even had the audacity to order the Intelligence Bureau (IB) to arrest a private tutor of Priyanka for not paying him due respects. Despite these cronies, Sonia could still be relatively free to provide a semblance of motherhood to the children.

Tragedy struck again, as Rajiv too met with premature death in a suicide bomb attack, when Priyanka was still a teenager. Virtually an army of security people were pressed for the ‘security’ of the survivors, spending more millions from the exchequer. People wonder what sort of marital life she could have with husband Robert Vadra with their every moment under the scanner by ‘well-wishers’ of IB. The dysfunctional outfit, which has a pathetic record of collecting real intelligence, harassed even hospital patients when their children undergo routine consultation, thus alienating everyone from the family.

Given this scale of personal tragedies in life, anybody’s mental peace is bound to be shattered. So, the desperation of Priyanka Vadra, who cannot get rid of the curse of the Nehru dynasty in any way, is quite understandable. She reportedly called on Nalini Sriharan, undergoing commuted death sentence at Vellore prison in Tamil Nadu, in an effort to seek some peace on March 19.

“Yes, I did visit Vellore to meet my father’s assassins”, she told a private television network. She however refused to go into the details, saying, “It’s completely personal, I don’t want to say anything about it. I needed to make peace with all the violence in my life.”

Speaking to reporters in Delhi, Priyanka Vadra’s brother and the heir apparent to the jinxed Congress ‘dynasty’, Rahul Gandhi, admitted knowing about the visit and said, “Both me and my sister don’t believe in violence, and her meeting Nalini was in this context”.

But, if reports in newspapers quoting lawyers involved in defending Nalini are to be believed, Priyanka wanted to elicit as much information as she could from her father’s ‘assassin’ to pursue the murder trail – why a “good man” was killed. Priyanka is reported to have particularly probed about masterminds behind the murder and the involvement of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the conspiracy. Perhaps, she is convinced with the story peddled by Indian agencies, including judiciary, about the culprits responsible for her father’s death. Maybe, like millions of people across the world, with some rational thinking power, she finds gaping holes in the LTTE conspiracy theory and wants to pursue for herself the real truth behind her father’s murder.

LTTE is notoriously punctilious and calculative. The outfit committing its overstretched resources on an assassination unlikely to bring it closer to its goal is rather far fetched. Although the outfit had no love lost for him, there was nothing for it to gain by his elimination. In fact, it was obviously a move that could harm it. It was, however possible, that a group of Sri Lankan Tamil victims of Colombo’s crack down or the atrocities by Indian peace keeping forces (IPKF), may have taken a revenge. And maybe, like most Tamils, they incidentally accepted LTTE’s leadership.

Natteri Adigal, 16 April 2008, Wednesday merinews

Why Priyanka must not pursue Rajiv's murder trial – II