New Delhi: In a scene from Sony LIV’s The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case, two Special Investigation Team officers are shown eating in a small restaurant in Tamil Nadu, one of them a north Indian. They discuss the many delights of Tamil Nadu’s cuisine. And the next minute, they’re speaking to an informant, receiving a tip-off on the conspirators in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. The scene sets up the show’s broader juxtaposition of the mundane and the meticulous—raids and investigation, and backache and mosquitoes.
“You think you know the whole story, but you don’t. That’s the beauty, and it’s what attracted me to the project,” said director Nagesh Kukunoor, who was last seen as businessman Kapil Reddy in the second season of Paatal Lok.
The show captures the Special Investigation Team (SIT)’s 90-day hunt for the conspirators.
Kukunoor was approached by Applause Entertainment to direct the 7-episode show. “I have to credit the narration for making my jaw drop to the floor. I asked, did these things really happen?” Kukunoor said.
For Kukunoor, the show stands out because it isn’t interested in propagating a certain version of events. Instead, it simply focuses on the investigation. The show is an adaptation of the first-person account by investigative journalist Anirudhya Mitra in his book, Ninety Days.
“I am not pointing fingers or making something political. The only thing I stuck to is to humanise both sides of the story,” said Kukunoor. At several points, the show delves into the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) operatives’ motivations behind the assassination.
When the investigation was ongoing, Mitra was a principal correspondent with the India Today magazine. At the time, he used his contacts in the CBI and IB to write about the developments.
“There was a lot of running around—waiting outside bureaucrats’ offices for hours, memorising off-the-record interviews because recording wasn’t always possible, and managing everything with limited financial resources to even meet or entertain sources. That was the nature of the job,” Mitra told ThePrint.
The 243-page book was published in 2022 and documents the team’s frustrations, mistakes, and bureaucratic red tape that slowed the process.
Kukunoor had conversations with Mitra over how he would portray some of the scenes. But for the most part, the book remained the source material to craft the seven episodes.
“Whatever was reported back then was done in broad strokes. But Mitra’s book is an insider’s PoV to what unfolded and how it unfolded. I guarantee the viewer does not know all of it,” Kukunoor said.
When Mitra broke the story in 1991 about the conspiracy and the assassination, many dismissed it as imagination. But 11 months later, the CBI chargesheet echoed the same details. Five years later, so did the sessions court verdict, and the Supreme Court, nine years on.
“While revisiting the case for the book, what stood out was how everything I had reported in that 15 July 1991 story had held up—every document I read confirmed it. That was both surreal and validating,” Mitra said.
An investigative slow burn
The Hunt makes a smart choice by not having a character play Rajiv Gandhi, except for a glimpse in the very first episode. It instead relies on archival footage to establish Gandhi’s charisma and popularity. It is the journalists, the conspirators, and the investigators who are foregrounded.
Gandhi, the youngest PM in India’s history, was assassinated at a rally he was to address in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur on 21 May 1991.
“The show begins right from the bomb going off. There is no delving into the past. It is about the 90 days of the investigation,” said Kukunoor.
In the show, the probe begins in Tamil Nadu, and soon expands to Sri Lanka after the LTTE’s role is established. Tip–offs and information from the public help the team arrive at the suspects. Based on photographs of the rally, the SIT starts off a 90-day manhunt, which also has some red herrings.
A parallel storyline follows the LTTE operators on the run, as well as the events leading up to the planning and execution of the assassination. At the centre of the conspiracy is Sivarasan, an expert bombmaker. His expertise in hiding and his determination to see the mission through are also explored in the show.
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Becoming DR Karthikeyan
Amit Sial, who recently appeared as a crooked IRS officer in the Ajay Devgn-starrer Raid 2, plays the upright CBI officer DR Karthikeyan in the show. Sial was recommended to Nagesh Kukunoor by Samir Nair, CEO of Applause Entertainment.
When Karthikeyan was asked to take charge of the SIT by PM Chandra Shekhar, formed a day after Gandhi’s assassination, he was an Inspector-General of the Central Reserve Police Force’s (CRPF), Southern Sector at Hyderabad.
Kukunoor had not watched Sial’s previous work, but relying on Nair’s recommendation, he decided to meet the actor. And he was immediately impressed.
“He is arguably one of the finest actors I’ve worked with because of the man’s ability to quietly disappear into a character,” Kukunoor said.
In the series, Karthikeyan is shown as a meticulous man who believes in teamwork. “There is a hierarchy for decision-making, but all of us are equal,” the character says in the team’s first meeting.
The SIT is composed of SP-CBI officer Amit Verma (Sahil Vaid), DSP-CBI Ragothaman (Bhagavathi Perumal), DIG-CBI Amod Kanth (Danish Iqbal), DIG-CBI Radhavinod Raju (Girish Sharma), and Captain Ravindran (Vidyut Garg), a National Security Guard commando.
“It is definitely a privilege to play the character, and also be part of a show that looks at those who shaped the course of history. But my wife is happiest because she is tired of me playing a nutcase or a villain,” Sial said with a chuckle.
The actor is known for playing a corrupt politician in Sony LIV’s Maharani and a corrupt cop in Amazon Prime Video’s Mirzapur. This is Sial’s first time playing a character based on a real person.
Sial was 16 years old when the assassination took place. Like everyone else at the time, he too was reading about it in the papers. But when he was cast, he revisited the case through the script. What fascinated him was how the team would work 16-18 hours a day, following up on every lead, especially during a time when landlines were the norm.
“I was well-informed about the case, but the one thing I had forgotten in all these years is how they had cracked open the case, without much technology available. There were no CCTVs, even,” Sial added.
The Hunt looks at the deluge of information the SIT had to sift through, as pictures of the suspects were circulated in Tamil Nadu and people called in to report ‘sightings’.
While there was not a lot of time between being cast and the start of the shoot, Sial tried his best to stick to the character he read in the script, and to Kukunoor’s instructions. To perfect his depiction, he watched video interviews of the officer.
“To pull this off, I had to be extremely responsible. Because it is not just about a person but also what he does, especially during the investigation of this case. You cannot play around with the character much or put much of yourself in it. I hope Karthikeyan is happy with what I have done.”
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)