'The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case' Ending Explained & Series Recap: Is Sivarasan Dead?

Directed by Nagesh Kukunoor, The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case does a commendable job in gathering all the facts and presents a complete documentation of the events that transpired after the assassination of the ex-prime minister. But that said, I felt that the series suffered from a lack of characterization, and it seemed more like a collection of data and facts put together. It felt as if the series somewhat abstained from giving us that unique insight from the perspective of somebody who was involved in the entire investigation process. Yes, I do believe that through the character of Amit Verma, the filmmaker did seek to achieve that, but that entire aspect was still downplayed to a great extent. So let’s find out what happened in the series and the kind of challenges the special investigation team had to face to find the perpetrators.

Spoiler Alert

How did the SIT find out about Sivarasan? 

The biggest challenge in front of the Special Investigation Team, SIT (created to find the mastermind behind the Rajiv Gandhi assassination) was that nobody knew what had happened on that fateful day, since no terrorist organization had taken credit after the incident. It actually felt like Karthikeyan (the team leader) and his officers were firing in the dark, hoping that they would get lucky. Kaarthikeyan told his boss, Vijay Karan, the director of the CBI, that he wanted to select his own team so he could pick people he could trust and also those who he knew had the potential to solve such a tricky case. DIG Amod Kaanth, DIG Raju, DIG Ragothaman, and SP Amit Verma were chosen to be a part of the core team, and together they started the manhunt to find the killers of Rajiv Gandhi. Kaarthikeyan inspected the crime scene with his men, and before he could start his investigation, it came to be known that a report had been published in the local newspaper where the publishers had claimed that a woman wearing saffron-colored attire was the suicide bomber who had killed Rajiv Gandhi. Kaarthikeyan was livid, as such information should not have been leaked in the first place. They got to know that a forensics expert named Chandra Shekharan had been able to find clues that led him to make that deduction, and he probably wanted the credit for his work, which was why he leaked the information to the press. The SIT got their hands on a camera used by a journalist named Haribabu to click pictures of the event. It didn’t take long for them to realize that Haribabu had been specially hired for the job, but just because he had accidentally gotten too close to the suicide bomber, he had ended up meeting his fateful end. There was an unknown man standing in one corner of that picture, but surprisingly, when the newspaper published that photo, they cropped him out. Kaarthikeyan knew that there were people in the system who were trying to protect him, who didn’t want his identity to be revealed.

LTTE, the rebel group operating out of Jaffna, was suspected to be the ones behind the attack. But strangely, they had not claimed responsibility for the assassination, and that was out of character for them. Kaarthikeyan and his team got lucky when a journalist named Bhagwan Singh came to them and told them that he had met Haribabu at the event and that he did feel that he was up to something at that time. It came to be known that two well-known journalists, Shubha Sundaram and Baby Subramanium, who were LTTE sympathizers, were involved in the conspiracy, and that they knew about the entire plan. Through evidence procured from the crime scene and some good work by the SIT officers, the modus operandi of the attacker came to be known. A woman had approached Rajiv Gandhi and, on the pretense of welcoming him, got close to him to take his blessings. She then detonated a suicide bomb, making sure that the  ex-PM didn’t survive at any cost. An SI named Anusuya, who was a part of the security team for the event, had managed to survive. She told Kaarthikeyan and his team that she had literally seen the suicide bomber right in front of her eyes; in fact, she was constantly telling her to back off. She confirmed that the SIT was going in the right direction, and the woman in the picture was in fact the suicide bomber. But the biggest breakthrough was achieved by the SIT when a small-time LTTE operative was caught by the local police under suspicion of being involved in the conspiracy. Shankar didn’t want to reveal anything, but Kaarthikeyan and his men knew how to tackle the situation and break down a person. Shankar finally told the SIT that apart from the suicide bomber named Dhanu, there was a couple named Nalini and Das who played a key role in the plan. But the biggest victory for the SIT was when they found that the man, who had been cropped when the newspaper published that photo, was the mastermind behind the assassination. The man was Sivarasan, a high-ranking LTTE member who had devised the entire plan and led the team from the front. That revelation kickstarted a manhunt that went on for more than two months, and Kaarthikeyan and his men encountered multiple roadblocks before they could finally get to the root of the matter. 

How did Ravindran make Das and Nalini confess? 

Haribabu, the journalist hired to photograph the event, had a girlfriend whose house was often used by the LTTE operatives as a safehouse. Kaarthikeyan ordered his men to keep a close watch on the house, as he knew that somebody important would come there eventually. Kaarthikeyan was not wrong, as Nalini and Das did come there, but they were not able to catch them because of a lapse of judgment by the officials who were present at the site. Kaarthikeyan and his team got hold of a man named Ravisankar, whose camera had been used by Haribabu to click pictures on that day. Through him, the team got to know that a man named Bhagyanathan, who ran a printing press, was also somehow involved in the conspiracy. Bhagyanathan and his mother were brought in for questioning, and the SIT had to really put in a lot of effort to make them spill their secret. A shocking revelation was made when it came to be known that Nalini was Bhagyanathan’s sister, and the family knew about how deeply attached she felt to the cause of the organization, i.e., a separate state for Tamil minorities. Soon after that, Nalini and Das, whose actual name was Murugan, were caught. For many days the two didn’t utter a word, and they made it very clear that they wouldn’t betray their cause. It was then that Captain Ravindran, from the National Security Guard, requested Kaarthikeyan to let him try a different tactic to break them down. He knew that he would have to cross certain moral and legal boundaries to do so, but Kaarthikeyan gave him a green signal because he had also run out of ways to make them confess. Ravindran triggered Murugan by pretending to have lecherous intentions for his partner, Nalini. He locked Murugan up and then went inside Nalini’s room and made her feel that he was going to physically abuse her. Nalini started yelling, and without even laying a finger on her, Ravindran was able to break both of them down. Murugan agreed to give up all the information he had, as he didn’t want anything to happen to Nalini. Through the information he gave, the SIT conducted raids on all the safehouses of the LTTE, and they got hold of a bunch of operatives working on Indian soil.

How Did Sivarasan Die? 

Sivarasan was a complicated man, and at times his thinking, his way of dealing with a certain problem, did not match with that of the LTTE leadership. Sivarasan didn’t want to stop after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, he wanted to attack other politicians and send a strong statement to the Indian government. His next target was supposedly Jayalalitha, but LTTE leadership quite strictly told him not to attack her. Trichy Sanathan, the head of the political wing of the terrorist organization, made frequent visits to Sivarasan’s safe house, and he just kept telling him to lay low for a certain period of time. Trichy wanted to send Sivarasan back to Jaffna, but after Shanmugam, the smuggler whose ferries were used by these militants to travel to Jaffna, got caught, things became a little more complicated. Shanmugam was taken into custody, and he had to be eliminated as the LTTE did not want him to leak any information to Kaarthikeyan and his team. Sivarasan tried to escape via the sea route once, but he couldn’t do so because of the heavy patrolling in the area. A petrol tanker was used to shift Sivarasan and his people to Bangalore, as Trichy believed that from there they would find a safe passage to go to Jaffna. But the truck driver got caught, and he told the SIT about Sivarasan’s whereabouts. Though the SIT didn’t know the exact location, they eventually were able to track the LTTE commander down. They found the house where he was hiding with his people, and the plan was to break into the house and catch him alive. But something unprecedented happened that left Ammit Verma and all the other SIT members in a state of surprise. Kaarthikeyan told his team that decisions from then on would be made by Vijay Karan, and that until the time he reached Bangalore, they were not authorized to carry out an attack. The NSG commandos, the SIT members, and everybody else waited there, and Amit Verma just couldn’t understand why they were doing so. Once Vijay Karan arrived at the scene, another delay happened as the SIT was told that the injections they were using as an antidote to save the LTTE members who tried taking their lives by consuming cyanide had all expired. Captain Ravindran literally begged Vijay Karan to let him attack while there was still an element of surprise, but he wasn’t allowed to do so. At the end, when the assault team finally got orders to break inside that safehouse, it was already too late. Sivarasan and the others had taken their own lives, and so many secrets that probably could have shaken the entire system never came to be known. 

In The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case’s ending, Amit Varma told Kaarthikeyan that he did not think that it was a victory for the SIT. He said that they literally missed out on opportunities when they could have easily gone down and captured Sivarasan. Amit didn’t say it, but it felt as if he suspected some foul play. It could have been possible that there were people who didn’t want Sivarasan to make it out alive because of various reasons. Maybe there was political involvement too, which was why Vijay Karan made those unnecessary delays. Kaarthikeyan had still accepted that that was how the system worked, to some extent, but Amit just couldn’t come to terms with it. 

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