Today is
#RajivGandhi’s 35th death anniversary. In March 2013 I became the first and till date, the only Indian journalist to visit the bunker of the man who ordered his assassination — LTTE Chief Velupillai Prabhakaran.
I was then a reporter with
@indiatoday magazine & granted rare access to the erstwhile LTTE-controlled northern region where thousands of LTTE fighters and civilians had died in the final phase of Eelam War IV in May 2009. We saw the exact spot, Nanthikadal, where Prabhakaran was gunned down by troops of the Sri Lankan Army’s 53rd division. Prabhakaran lay on his back on a patch of mud-soaked grass, eyes wide, his head blown open by a high-caliber weapon. The Lankan soldiers had shown Prabhakaran as much mercy as he had shown former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991.
For someone who had followed India’s fascinating and bloody entanglement in Sri Lanka through India Today magazine, and the exclusives of
@ShekharGupta through the 1980s, this was a dream story.
How did a print story become a TV exclusive ? I’ll admit to some journalistic sleight-of-hand here. The Sri Lankan authorities had cleared us to report a print story, but we also shot high-res video footage on DSLR (standard-issue for print photographers). The story eventually played across all India Today group properties— TV, Mail Today and the magazine.
Five months after our story broke, the Sri Lankan army filled the bunker with explosives and destroyed it. (The Headlines Today story — don’t miss the TV panel at the end moderated by
@rahulkanwal— with
@Swamy39 and G Parthasarathy).