On 21 May 1991, an LTTE suicide bomber killed former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi at an election gathering in Tamil Nadu. Behind the assassination lay the bitter legacy of India’s intervention in Sri Lanka and fears about what Gandhi’s return to power might mean.
Rajiv Gandhi was campaigning to return to office when he was assassinated at Sriperumbudur, near Madras, now Chennai.
His killer, known as Dhanu, approached him among the people gathered to greet him and detonated a concealed bomb. The explosion killed Gandhi and others nearby, turning a political gathering into a scene of devastation.
The assassination carried Sri Lanka’s conflict across the sea into Indian electoral politics. To understand why the LTTE targeted Gandhi, we must look back to the intervention he had authorised four years earlier.
What was the Indo–Lanka Accord?
On 29 July 1987, Gandhi and Sri Lankan president J.R. Jayewardene signed the Indo–Lanka Accord.
The agreement sought to resolve Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict while preserving the country’s unity and territorial integrity. It recognised the island’s diverse communities and their distinct cultural and linguistic identities.
Its central premise was that Tamil grievances could be addressed within a united Sri Lanka.
That approach differed fundamentally from the LTTE’s goal of an independent Tamil Eelam. It also placed India in a position to influence the political and military future of the island’s north and east.
An agreement intended to bring peace would soon lead to another war.
How peacekeepers became combatants
The Indian Peace Keeping Force, or IPKF, entered Sri Lanka under the agreement. Its responsibilities included overseeing the disarmament of militant organisations.
Instead, Indian troops became engaged in sustained fighting against the LTTE. The force remained in Sri Lanka between 1987 and 1990. An Indian parliamentary answer subsequently recorded that 1,166 IPKF personnel died during the deployment, mainly in conflict with the Tigers.
For the LTTE leadership, India had become a military adversary capable of obstructing its ambitions.
The conflict also generated deep anger over the treatment of Tamil civilians. In its account of the assassination’s background, India’s Supreme Court identified hostility arising from the deployment and alleged IPKF atrocities against Tamils as part of the grievance behind the conspiracy.
Gandhi became personally associated with that intervention.
Revenge and fear of another intervention
The motive is often described simply as revenge. That captures an important element, but it leaves out the political calculation.
Gandhi had lost office in 1989. The last Indian troops departed Sri Lanka in March 1990. By the time of his assassination, the IPKF deployment had ended.
The 1991 election nevertheless raised the possibility that he might return as prime minister.
Historian Michael Roberts links the assassination to the LTTE leadership’s intense hostility towards Gandhi and its expectations about his possible return to power. His analysis presents the killing within a pattern of anticipatory action against perceived threats.
The distinction matters. The assassination concerned both a remembered enemy and a feared future.
That fear should not be confused with proof that Gandhi would actually have sent troops back. What the LTTE leadership believed might happen helped shape its decision; it did not establish what a future Indian government would have done.
Who was responsible?
The investigation and subsequent court proceedings established an LTTE conspiracy behind the assassination.
The Supreme Court proceedings examined evidence connecting the plot to the organisation’s leadership, including Prabhakaran and its intelligence apparatus. The judgments also considered the different roles and levels of knowledge of those accused.
The operation on the ground was led by Sivarasan. Dhanu carried out the suicide bombing, supported by a network that assisted the team in India.
This was an organised political assassination. Understanding it requires attention to the people who planned and enabled it, as well as the person who detonated the bomb.
What can we know about Dhanu?
Dhanu occupies a disturbing place in the story: a young woman whose final public actions are known through evidence, but whose private thoughts remain much less accessible.
It is tempting to explain her participation through a single experience or emotion. Such accounts can appear to make an otherwise incomprehensible act understandable.
Yet the organisation’s motives and the individual bomber’s motives are different questions.
Research on the assassination has acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding precisely why Dhanu undertook the mission. That uncertainty should caution us against presenting a speculative personal history as established fact.
We can examine the political environment, the demands of the organisation and the circumstances of the operation. We cannot confidently reconstruct every conviction, pressure or feeling that brought her there.
For a novelist, that boundary between evidence and imagination is especially important.
The people around Gandhi
The assassination’s political importance can draw attention away from the other people killed and injured.
The Supreme Court’s account recorded numerous deaths and serious injuries. Those caught in the explosion included people attending or working at the gathering whose lives were destroyed alongside Gandhi’s.
They were not incidental to the human meaning of the event.
A political explanation can describe why a leader was targeted. It cannot reduce the suffering of everyone nearby to a consequence of strategy.
The decision to attack him in a crowd placed all those people in danger.
What were the consequences for the LTTE?
The assassination intensified India’s confrontation with the organisation.
In May 1992, India banned the LTTE as an unlawful association. An Indian parliamentary account subsequently recorded both that prohibition and its designation as a terrorist organisation.
The killing had removed Gandhi, but it had also strengthened Indian hostility towards the movement responsible.
This reveals a recurring problem in political violence: eliminating a perceived threat can create consequences that extend far beyond the immediate objective. An operation may succeed in killing its target while damaging the wider cause invoked to justify it.
A connection to Till New Times Come
Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination took place more than thirty years after S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s death. It belonged to a different political moment, involving leaders and organisations responsible for their own decisions.
Yet it also formed part of the longer history of Sri Lanka’s unresolved conflict: failed accommodation, armed separatism, foreign intervention and violence spreading beyond the island.
In Till New Times Come, Dhanu becomes part of Bandaranaike’s imagined encounter with that later history. The novel explores an individual life within the machinery of political violence while recognising the limits of what the historical record can reveal.
The question behind her appearance is larger than why one assassination occurred. It concerns how political movements turn human lives into instruments—and what remains of the individual when a cause demands everything.