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Congress alone responsible for Rajiv death, says VP

The Congress was responsible for the death of Rajiv Gandhi, not the persons named by Justice Milap Chand Jain Commission in its interim report, said former prime minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh.

It was a Congress worker who took Dhanu, the Liberation Tiger of Tamil Eelam suicide bomber, up to Rajiv Gandhi, making a mockery of security arrangements.

"The body of Dhanu and the dead Congress worker speak about what the Congress did. She could not have reached Rajiv without the Congress circuit," Singh said in a hard-hitting interview to Home TV, a Delhi-based television channel.

Singh said even the Congress had underrated the importance of the Special Protection Group. He pointed out that then Congress leader P Chidamabaram had admitted that though the party knew that Rajiv Gandhi would need security after he stepped down from premiership, it had not thought about the SPG.

Rajiv Gandhi himself was against SPG cover for ex-prime ministers. And Tamil Nadu, the state where Rajiv was killed, was under President's rule at the time. The governor, not the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government, was responsible for law and order, as alleged by the Jain Commission report.

Singh said that when he was prime minister, he had himself extended SPG cover for Rajiv Gandhi till February 9, 1990 though it was to have lapsed on December 3, 1989. Thereafter, 11 of the 12 officials who took the decisions on Rajiv Gandhi's protection had been appointed by him. "So how can you say they have been influenced by me?" Did the "same officials continue to take bad decisions, and be subdued by me," he asked.

He also castigated Justice Jain for quoting from unverified reports of the Research and Analysis Wing, which affected relations between India and Nepal, for indicting people like Chandra Shekhar, Chidambaram and many other officials without giving notice, and for "tarnishing the whole Tamil population for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi".

Singh said everyone was forgetting that no harm had come to Gandhi during his (Singh's) tenure in office.

He said he had a clear conscience on the matter. "Rajiv was totally safe and I had made the best arrangements that were advised to me."

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