Commentary/ Mani Shankar Aiyar

Sonia Gandhi was little impressed with Narasimha Rao's gesture in putting Chidambaram in charge of the investigation into her husband's assassination

By 1989, the constitutional lawyer in P Chidambaram must have known that the five-year life of the Eighth Lok Sabha would be ending within the year. While even the India Today poll of mid-1989 conceded a winning edge to the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi, by the start of the monsoon session in July 1989, it became clear to the meanest intelligence that we were moving into an election with a difference. The two-member BJP contingent in the Lok Sabha walked out of the House saying they would not return in the life of the present Lok Sabha; the rest of the Opposition followed, and it became certain that the Index of Opposition Unity would rise dizzyingly, making a Congress defeat a palpable possibility.

It was in August 1989 that I broached with Rajiv Gandhi my desire to quit the civil service to become a politician. I remember telling him -- it was August 18 and we were in an IAF helicopter flying from Mysore to Anantpur/Cuddapah--that I was not wanting to quit in the expectation that he would win the election, for, I said, while he thought we would win and I thought we would win, everyone else seemed certain we would lose and, therefore, what I was proposing was, win or lose, to hitch my star to his own.

If the possibility of defeat was so evident to a mere civil servant seeking novitiate status in the world of politics, how much learner must this have been to a veteran -- if, in years, young -- politician of Chidambaram's vintage, a politician, moreover, who was universally regarded as the brightest of his generation and who, as minister, was in charge of looking precisely into such contingencies.

Yet, what did Chidambaram do? According to his testimony before the Jain Commission -- precisely nothing. With a persistence that would have been worthy of an ostrich in sight of a particularly attractive stretch of sand, Chidambaram buried his head and refused to even contemplate the security requirements of Rajiv Gandhi in the event of his losing the elections.

Is this what passes for ministerial responsibility, for ministerial efficiency, for ministerial duty? Not only has not one shred of evidence been laid before the Jain Commission to show that Chidambaram was even thinking about Rajiv's security in the run-up to the election of 1989, the man himself has cheerfully confessed before the commission that it did not even occur to him to do something about the job for which he -- and Seshan -- had been. Hand-picked.

Worse was to follow when Chidambaram was named minister in charge of the investigation into Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in May 1995. He has told the Jain Commission -- apparently with neither regret nor remorse--that he did not consider it his ministerial duty to follow up any of the charges he had laid at the door of the DMK, both before Rajiv Gandhi's assassination and after.

Confronted with a clipping from the leading Tamil daily, Dinamalar of November 12, 1996, which had published a compendium of his statements on the DMK link to the Rajiv assassination, Chidambaram, after first trying his standard ruse of hiding behind technicalities, confirmed the substance of the statements cited. These supplemented his wholesale condemnation in Parliament of the DMK's culpability, as accessories both before and after the fact, in the assassination by the LTTE of EPRLF leader Padmanabha.

Worse, he asserted, apparently without shame, that he had not cared, even as minister in charge of the assassination, to inform himself of the circumstances leading to Shanmugam, the key Indian involved in both assassinations, having had his fetters removed by the police, allegedly in the presence of the SIT chief, Karthikeyan, which gave him the opportunity of (allegedly) hanging himself, thus depriving the prosecution of its key witness.

Chidambaram also said he knew nothing of the destruction of the case diaries containing the statement volunteered by Thomas Charles, whose car had been hijacked by the LTTE assailants after murdering Padmanabha. Charles had identified Sivarasan, the lynch-pin of both assassinations, as the leader of the LTTE gang which had hijacked his car. As an independent witness, his statement, voluntarily tendered, was crucial to the prosecution case; Chidambaram said he knew nothing of it. Perhaps he didn't -- but surely that only shows him up for the totally incompetent minister he proved to be.

Perhaps, however, it was not incompetence which caused him to do nothing beyond removing procedural glitches in the way of expediting the trial in the designated court, which is how he described to the Jain Commission his understanding of his functions as minister. Perhaps more to the point was his appreciation of his electoral prospects.

With two of the assembly segments in the Sivaganga parliamentary constituency being in the hands of two of Jayalalitha's more notorious ministers, perhaps Chidambaram's strange reluctance to stretch his ministerial remit to the limits of its possibilities had less to do with his understanding of his ministerial duties and more to do with the political opportunism of what too much ministerial zeal might do to his hopes of riding back to the Lok Sabha on the back of the DMK.

No wonder Sonia Gandhi was so little impressed with Narasimha Rao's gesture in putting Chidambaram in charge of the investigation into her husband's assassination.