Former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Sri Lanka policy led to his assassination, former India’s external affairs minister Natwar Singh has said.
“He was badly advised… Rajiv Gandhi sent troops to Sri Lanka without telling the Cabinet,” Singh said in the second part of an exclusive interview to Headlines Today's, To The Point Show, telecast on Thursday.
Singh was referring to the decision to send the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka in July 1987 under the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord signed between then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan president JR Jayawardene.
“The IPKF was not prepared for what they were undertaking in Sri Lanka. There was no coherence in India’s policy. MGR (then Tamil Nadu chief minister MG Ramachandran) had his own Tamil Nadu policy; India had its own policy.”
In his autobiography to be released on Friday, Singh has shared his view on Rajiv Gandhi, his wife and now Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, and family.
The 83-year-old estranged Gandhi family friend has claimed Sonia and daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra visited his home on May 7 to dissuade him from writing about certain specific incidents in his autobiography, One Life is not Enough.
“No Indian would treat a man who had been close to the family for 45 years the way I was treated by Sonia,” he said.
Singh was forced to step down as a minister in December 2005 after a UN probe named him and the Congress as the "beneficiaries" of payoffs in an Iraqi oil-for-food programme. He quit the Congress three years later. His son Jagat Singh is a BJP legislator in Rajasthan.
In the first part of the interview telecast on Wednesday, Singh claimed Sonia was forced by son Rahul Gandhi — and not her "inner voice"— to decline the prime minister's job in 2004 because he feared that like his father and grandmother (Indira Gandhi), she, too, would fall victim to a political assassination.
On Sri Lanka, Singh said, “Rajiv thought there was a simple solution to the Sri Lanka problem. He was a trusting person…
“Rajiv had secret meeting with LTTE chief Prabhakaran. Rajiv was not a hardboiled politician; he trusted Prabhakaran… Prabhakaran double-crossed Rajiv.”
The IPKF was deployed in Sri Lanka’s troubled North and East between 1987 and 1990. It was sent to keep peace between Lankan government troops and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The IPKF was to disarm the rebel outfit.
The LTTE assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 — during a Lok Sabha poll campaign in Sriperumbudur around 40 km off Tamil Nadu capital Chennai — at a time when he was largely expected to return to power in India.