April 16, 2008	Wednesday	Rabi-us-Sani 9, 1429

NEW DELHI: The daughter of murdered former Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi revealed on Tuesday she had been to prison to visit a woman convicted of taking part in the suicide bomber assassination.

Priyanka Gandhi said meeting Nalini Sriharan last month at Vellore prison in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu was part of her efforts to come to terms with the 1991 loss of her father.

“Meeting with Nalini Sriharan was my way of coming to peace with the violence and loss that I have experienced,” the 35-year-old mother of two said.

“I do not believe in anger, hatred and violence and I refuse to allow it any power over my life,” she said. “I would like to say it was a purely personal visit that I undertook completely on my own initiative.” The meeting took place on March 19 and only came to light after a newspaper reported that a lawyer had sought details of it under India’s right to information act.

Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated on May 21, 1991, during an election rally in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur town by a woman suicide bomber believed to be a member of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger guerillas.

The killing was seen in India as retaliation for a 1987 Indian government pact with the Sri Lankan government to disarm the guerillas, who had been trained and armed by New Delhi in the early 1980s.

After that pact, the Tigers fought Indian troops deployed to the island by Rajiv’s government to supervise the accord. India withdrew its troops after 32 months in which it lost at least 1,200 soldiers at the hands of the rebels.

The Tamil Tigers have never admitted being behind the assassination, although Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran went on to honour the assassin’s father as a “great person who contributed to the Tamil cause.”

Nalini was one of several people arrested in the aftermath of the assassination and sentenced to death by a special court seven years later.

The death sentence was commuted to a life term following the intervention of Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, Sonia Gandhi, who now heads India’s ruling Congress party.

According to Nalini’s lawyer, S. Doraiswamy, Priyanka Gandhi “wanted to know who killed Rajiv Gandhi and why.” But Nalini “did not know anything about the conspiracy, what was the reason behind the killing,” as she learned about the plot only minutes before the assassination, Doraiswamy told CNN-IBN news channel.

According to the Times of India newspaper, Priyanka Gandhi had sat side-by-side with Nalini and told her: “My father was a good person. It could have been resolved through talks.” When asked if he too would meet Nalini, Rajiv Gandhi’s son Rahul — seen as being groomed as a future political leader — told the Press Trust of India that he had “a different way of looking at these things.” But he defended his sister’s meeting saying: “We don’t carry hatred. We don’t carry anger... She felt that she wanted to go and see the person.”—AFP