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The ripples set off by Priyanka Vadra’s meeting with her father’s would-be assassin, Nalini Sriharan, have yet to subside. But dramatic as it was, the encounter was not perhaps entirely unexpected.

Going back in time, through detailed reports of the Nalini saga, a strange relationship manifests itself between the accessory to a ghastly crime and a family that suffered a great personal tragedy because of that crime. The relationship is built entirely on letters, most of them penned by a desperate woman who jettisoned her chance for a normal family life the day she signed up to join the assassination squad tasked with killing Rajiv Gandhi. From her bleak prison cell Nalini throws herself, time and again, at the mercy of the woman whose life she turned upside down on that fateful day in May 1991. And remarkably, Sonia Gandhi responds to those passionate pleas. It’s the stuff of which great novels are made.

Acareful tracking of the correspondence shows that Gandhi has extended a helping hand at every critical juncture in Nalini’s life. In 2000, she intervened to request the then President KR Narayanan to commute Nalini’s sentence from death to life to spare her five-year-old daughter, Arithra alias Megara, the trauma of becoming an orphan for no fault of her own. That singular event marks the beginning of their unusual relationship that saw Gandhi step in again to facilitate Megara’s trip to India in late 2005 to meet her imprisoned parents. Megara’s request to visit India was rejected by the Indian High Commission in Colombo on security grounds, prompting the little girl to write to Gandhi pleading for help. A few months later, Megara was granted a three-month visa to come to India. She finally met her parents in jail seven years after she was whisked away to Sri Lanka to live with her paternal grandparents when her mother and father were pronounced guilty and sentenced to death.

In recent months, Nalini’s letters to Gandhi have been more frantic. Since last November, she has written at the rate of one letter a month, begging Gandhi to help her secure an early release from jail. While the decision to release Nalini is not in Gandhi’s hands, what the family did do was send Priyanka Vadra on a secret mission to Vellore to meet the prisoner. In a way, the face-to-face encounter was the inevitable culmination of an extraordinary bond forged over the years. Reading between the lines of the statements made by Priyanka and Rahul later, the meeting was a way of signalling the family’s forgiveness. Now it’s up to the State to take a view on Nalini’s plea for freedom.

TAILPIECE
Gandhi herself has never written to Nalini but she has kept track of mother and daughter through intermediaries. Mohini Giri, daughter of late President VV Giri, is one such interface. She was the interlocutor who prepared the ground for Gandhi’s clemency plea for Nalini. Through her NGO, Guild for Service, she has kept Gandhi updated about Nalini in prison. There is an interesting exchange of letters that reveals the extent to which Gandhi has kept in touch with Nalini’s life. On February 8, 2002, Giri wrote to Gandhi informing her about Nalini’s various academic achievements in jail. On February 21, Gandhi wrote back to thank her for the update. She asked Giri to congratulate Nalini on her accomplishments and said she wished her well.

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net