Former BJP leader K.N. Govindacharya on Tuesday said even 23 years after the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the country did not know the whole truth behind the murder.
Speaking at the release of a book, Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi: An Inside Job? written by Faraz Ahmad, the former Swayamsevak said the author had given a sociological context to the assassination and had identified the people who benefitted from the demise of the former Prime Minister. “Like Mahatma Gandhi, Netaji Bose, Jayaprakash Narayan and Deendayal Upadhyaya, questions still remain over the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. The common man still wants an answer,” he said.
Senior journalist Vinod Mehta, who released the book, said he welcomed the trend of reporters writing books. “It is a good trend as there is an excess of books by editors who pontificate and preach. Faraz [Ahmad] has followed leads that commissions of inquiry deliberately did not follow,” he said.
“I had my suspicions [over the assassination] from day one, but I neither had the courage nor the wherewithal to write a book. There was a deliberate and conscious effort to cover up the assassination and hardly any effort to expose the real perpetrators,” said Mr. Ahmad.
He added that although he could not name the alleged perpetrators, for fear of legal action, readers would get a clear idea of who they were. “This was a contract job that had nothing to do with the ideology or the larger cause of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam [accused of the crime],” he claimed.
