Credit: Special arrangement
Some stories fuel the imagination of filmmakers and showrunners like no other. More than three decades have passed since that tragic night in a sleepy town in Tamil Nadu. Filmmakers, however, keep circling back to former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination on May 21, 1991. Indeed, its implications still ricochet through the nation’s politics, and, turns out, its pop culture as well.
The event has spawned a surprisingly diverse range of screen interpretations across languages, genres and formats — from political thrillers to slickly dramatised documentaries and true-to-life investigative series. But a few rise above the rest — either for their storytelling rigour, standout performances or simply for their realism. The latest in the OTT Rajiv-verse is perhaps the most comprehensive of the lot. ‘The Hunt - The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case’ (SonyLIV), released a few weeks ago, is methodical and chilling — the focus is firmly on the operational complexity of the investigation, the red tape culture that seeps into everything and everywhere and the massive manhunt that was really, one-of-its-kind and remains so.
‘The Hunt’ may be the latest, but arguably the best is Santosh Sivan’s ‘The Terrorist’ (1998). While the film never directly references Rajiv Gandhi or the LTTE, the parallels are evident. Can terrorism be poetic? Seen through Sivan’s lens, yes. The movie’s power lies in its humanism — the assassin (played brilliantly by Ayesha Dharker) is guilt-ridden, courageous and wracked by doubt. Sivan employs stillness to convey dread and doom, and does so with such perfection that you have to applaud.
‘Cyanide’ (2006) in Kannada, directed by AMR Ramesh, deserves wider appreciation than it got. It reconstructed the final days of the key conspirators who were holed up in Bengaluru. A low-budget movie, its nerve-racking final stand-off is commendable for its tight, perfectly executed screenplay. Another sleeper hit, this time in Malayalam, is the rather forgotten ‘Mission 90 Days’ (2007), directed by Major Ravi (who was himself a part of the Special Investigation Team) and headlined by Mammootty, who played the major’s role. The film is admittedly dramatic and takes a few creative liberties, but it is a compelling race-against-time take.
Shoojit Sircar’s ‘Madras Cafe’ (2013) is a surprisingly sane version of the assassination drama, although Rajiv Gandhi is never explicitly named. There’s no dramatic background score and no typical Bollywood bravado despite the presence of John Abraham as the intelligence officer trying to make sense of the escalating civil war in Sri Lanka and its possible spillovers into Indian soil. Interestingly, the assassination is the climax, and the film is all about what led to the last act. Finally, there are the spin-offs, the most popular one undoubtedly is ‘The Family Man’ (Season 2, 2021). Samantha Ruth Prabhu plays Raji, a battle-hardened operative, perhaps a stylised echo of Dhanu, Rajiv’s assassin. The show is mostly masala-driven, but the references to Tamil rebels, human bombs and plans to assassinate a national leader make the inspiration pretty obvious.
What’s the fascination, one may ask. Well, because it’s got it all! The Rajiv Gandhi assassination case is part-thriller, part-human tragedy and part-true-crime procedural. Further, it offers the filmmaker a chance to dip into geopolitics, espionage and ‘villainy’ perpetrated by people who are not all black but various shades of grey.
Come to think of it, this real-life event is cinematic gold — a young, charismatic leader all set to regain power, the shocking use of a female suicide bomber, intelligence lapses, and the Gandhi legacy that was snipped so brutally. There’s also the swirling mystery around the case to keep poking at: Were there complicit political players? Do we know the whole truth, or will it be buried for ever under reams of red tape? Why is there a persistent stench of moral murkiness?
And finally, Rajiv’s untimely death changed the country’s political trajectory forever — it is a tragedy, which the nation looked upon in horror and grief. All the reasons why this unnerving story lives on — in that emotionally charged space between the reel and the real.