The evidence had been strewn across the international arrivals hall at Chennai’s Meenambakkam Airport: A burned wire, a fragment of brown fabric with residue from industrial explosives, shards of glass, broken concrete, bloodied bodies, and a severed head flung dozens of metres across the building. From behind an endless rosewood table, in a room shielded from the searing summer sun by elegant woven bamboo binds, one of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s senior-most aides patiently listened to what investigators had found—then gently suggested the macabre jigsaw puzzle ought never be put together.
“We had a duty to protect the Sri Lankan militants,” Tamil Nadu’s then-intelligence chief K Mohandas was to recall. “If we continued along the known line of investigation in the airport blast case, the Sri Lankan government would take advantage of it and proclaim to the world the existence of militant training camps in India, which had officially been denied.”
Forty years ago this August, the little-known Tamil Eelam Army sought to plant two suitcases fitted with bombs on an Air Lanka flight from Chennai to Colombo. The overweight suitcases were held back after the passenger who checked them in failed to board the aircraft, and exploded inside the customs area. Thirty-three people were killed, many of them ethnic Tamils from Sri Lanka. The perpetrators have never been punished.
The grim anniversary comes even as many in India celebrate an alleged covert campaign to assassinate terrorists sheltering in Pakistan and the diaspora.
Earlier this week, newspapers in India reported the killing of retired Pakistan Army officer Brigadier Amir Hamza, alleged to be involved in planning a 2018 jihadist attack in Jammu and Kashmir. The evidence isn’t compelling: Brigadier Hamza handled land acquisition in Lahore, not intelligence work, and was not named in charges filed by the National Investigation Agency. Few on social media, though, have let details dissipate their passion for righteous vengeance.
The bombing in Chennai is a cautionary tale about what can happen when spies are authorised to kill without careful consideration of tactical means and strategic ends. The patronage of Tamil terrorist groups by the intelligence services gave them short-term leverage over Sri Lanka. But it would end in the mindless sacrifice of the lives of 1,165 Indian soldiers, and the assassination of PM Rajiv himself.
The secret war
Long before the bombing at Meenambakkam, the proliferation of training camps for Tamil terrorists had become public knowledge: ThePrint editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta’s famous 1984 exposé was followed up by multiple accounts of terrorists being taught by the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) at its school in Chakrata, near Dehradun. Funds provided by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MG Ramachandran allowed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to purchase a huge arsenal: “The rooms in our house were full of AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades,” Australia born Adele Balasingham, former leader of LTTE’s women’s wing, recorded.
Sri Lanka, unsurprisingly, protested: LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran was, among other things, wanted for the 1975 assassination of Jaffna mayor Alfred Duraiappah and a string of attacks on police and the military. Thambipillai Maheswaran, the alleged leader of the Meenakbakkam bombers, had escaped from a maximum-security prison in Sri Lanka and again jumped bail when he was arrested after the attack.
Tamil insurgents staged bank robberies and attacked government institutions in Sri Lanka, journalist MR Narayan Swamy has written. They also coerced and killed pro-Sri Lanka Tamil politicians, ensuring secessionism emerged as the sole voice of the community.
Even though a magistrate in Chennai had issued a non-bailable warrant against Prabhakaran in 1983, journalist SH Venkatramani reported, authorities chose to ignore it, instead escorting the LTTE leader to multiple rounds of negotiations in 1985 and 1986. The charges related to an attempt to assassinate K Uma Maheswaran, leader of the rival People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam, in 1982. Sri Lanka demanded Prabhakaran’s extradition; India declined.
Large-scale massacres of Tamils in the summer of 1983 pushed New Delhi to unroll a massive covert assistance programme. Early in July, the LTTE had ambushed an army patrol near Sri Lanka’s Thirunelveli, killing 13 soldiers. Led by politicians of the ruling United National Party and Buddhist monks, scholar Neil De Votta has recorded, mobs killed over 2,000 Tamils, raped hundreds of women, and burned down homes. As refugees poured in, outrage erupted across Tamil Nadu.
Following fitness and theoretical instruction each morning, journalist T Sabaratnam recorded in a granular history of the LTTE, R&AW officers in the camps provided weapons and explosives training to a growing tide of Tamil volunteers. Some Tamil recruits were sent to an Indian Navy facility in Mumbai, to learn the rudiments of radio communication and navigation. Another unit was taught the craft of espionage, to gather intelligence of interest to India—the price of the deal.
Following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, political scientist Robert Kearney has recorded, Sri Lankan President Julius Jayewardene tried to hold the mirror up to India. “In India, some Sikhs are agitating for a separate State, Khalistan,” he said. “In Sri Lanka, some Tamils are doing the same, seeking to establish Eelam. In India, a few enraged Hindus massacred innocent Sikhs. In Sri Lanka, a few enraged Sinhalese massacred innocent Tamils.”
Despite Indira’s assassination, no one in New Delhi was listening. Like his mother, Rajiv was convinced coercing Sri Lanka was necessary to secure India’s geopolitical primacy. He saw R&AW and its client-terrorists as the best tool to secure this end.
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India’s motives
Even though New Delhi has long cast its support for insurgents as a response to ethnic Tamil anger at the 1983 pogrom, historians today offer more nuanced explanations. For Indira Gandhi, political scientist Sankaran Krishna argued in a superb book, that the pogrom was a pretext to educate regional rulers of the costs of defying her—the same lesson Pakistan had been taught in 1971. Tilting toward the United States, President Jayewardene’s government had irked India deeply. The Congress party also hoped it could recruit ethnic-Tamil sentiment for votes.
Tamil nationalism in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, however, had evolved in very different directions. Ethnic Sinhala majoritarianism—and its efforts to exclude Tamils from the polity—led the minority to move away from political accommodation to armed secessionism.
Ethnic Tamil demands for a Dravidanadu carved out of India, by contrast, first came about as an effort to win favour with Imperial Britain. EV Ramaswamy Naicker upended this politics, historian Mohan Ram noted, but the mainstream of his Dravida Kazhagam rejected secessionism as early as 1949. Tamil establishment politics in the mid-1960s was successful in pushing back against efforts to impose Hindi.
Tamils in Tamil Nadu were angered by the treatment of their ethnic cousins in Sri Lanka—but this rage fed no secessionist impulse. Within months, Tamil revulsion at the violence of the insurgents began to become evident. Events like an armed robbery in Chennai’s Anna Nagar brought home the consequences of the rising gun culture.
Former Directors-General of the Tamil Nadu Police, journalist Shobha Warrier reported, later joined to publicly assert that the insurgents opened the path for criminals, religious fundamentalists and ethnic chauvinists to acquire lethal capabilities.
The LTTE realised India only wanted to use Tamil insurgents to pressure Sri Lanka, but would not back the creation of a separate state. Thus, R&AW’s creation waged a savage war against the Indian Army peacekeeping mission in Sri Lanka, which began in July 1987. Trained by Indian instructors, equipped with Indian weapons, and armed with Indian money, the LTTE set down its own, independent course—a course that would lead to Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991.
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Turning the gaze inward
For decades now, Indians have rightly raged against terrorists finding safe havens in Pakistan and the West. The examples are depressingly well-known. Mohammad Aslam Mirza, alleged to be the assassin of the diplomat Ravindra Mhatre in 1983, was acquitted after a botched investigation; figures like Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and Jaish-e-Mohammed commander Masood Azhar Alvi are at large in Pakistan. The men who bombed Air India flight 182 in June 1985 succeeded in doing so because of gross neglect by Canadian authorities, which also led to their largely evading justice.
The same thing, we know from the story of the Chennai airport bombing, happened in India, too. Lognathan, Saravanabhavan, Chandrakumar, Vijayakumar and Balasubramaniam—accused of facilitating the plot on the basis of an approver’s testimony, were acquitted by the Madras High Court. Thambipillai Maheshwaran, the alleged bomber, was arrested in 1998 but also acquitted.
Little imagination is needed to see R&AW’s redoubtable chief RN Kao, and his deputy K Sankaran Nair, miscalculated the impact the state sponsorship of Tamil terrorist groups would have. For this, however, they shouldn’t alone shoulder the blame. Leaders like Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, seduced by the illusion of power covert means could give, allowed Indian foreign policy to become untethered from consideration of its real-world consequences.
The lives lost at Meenambakkam airport, as Mohandas was told at his meeting with Rajiv’s officials, might be trivial compared with the fate of billions. But their memory should compel us to remember that means do truly matter.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
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