On May 21, 1991, a blast in Sriperumbudur decimated Rajiv Gandhi, as he bent to receive a garland from an eager woman who had inveigled herself into the receiving line. The hunt for the killers occupied frenzied column inches in the press as well as a special investigation team (SIT), as they examined the fragments of bone and body gathered from the site, well-trampled upon by shell-shocked survivors, and morbid bystanders.
In one of those miraculous breakthroughs that helped track the assassins, a Chinon camera was found intact in the jumble of bloody clothing fragments and footwear. It had captured a series of telling images, and the investigators got their first lead, which eventually led them to uncover the plot hatched by a group of LTTE militants who blamed the former prime minister (Rajiv Kumar) for sending Indian forces into Sri Lanka which they believed was anti-Eelam, a movement born to form a Tamil state in the island nation.
The seven-episode SonyLiv series, based on journalist Anirudhya Mitra’s book ‘Ninety Days’, and directed by Nagesh Kukunoor, gives us a ringside view of the CBI investigation, zig-zagging between parallel tracks of the hunters and the hunted. In one, we see the painstaking, dogged attempts of the pursuit by the team led by D R Karthikeyan (Amit Sial), Amit Varma (Sahil Vaid), Amod Kant (Danish Iqbal), K Ragothaman (Bagavathi Perumal), Radhagovind Raju (Girish Sharma) and Captain Ravindran (Vidyuth Garg).
In the other, we get a close look at those who were involved in the conspiracy, from LTTE sympathisers to the actual assassins, led by the one-eyed, chain-smoking Sivarasan (Shafeeq Mustafa). His single-minded focus is shared by his companions, which include Nalini (Anjana Balaji), Subha (Gouri Padmakumar), and Dhanu (Shruti Jayan) who becomes the human bomb. They are all convincing zealots.
Those with long memories will recall the struggle to document minus sensation: the photos we saw in the papers the following day (and later on the cover of newsmagazine India Today) only hinted at the patched-up remains of the body which was literally blown apart. That’s the tone that the show, written by Kukunoor, Rohit Banawalikar and Sriram Rajan, tries to keep to, and succeeds in most part. That’s also the reason why, sometimes, it feels as if it is in a loop, because that’s exactly what happens: yes, the chase is on, with on-going leads and false trails, capturing the stop-and-start nature and the enormous difficulties of the investigation — like finding a needle in a haystack, as a character puts it.
Watch The Hunt – The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case trailer here:
For the most part, The Hunt stays gripping, never taking its eyes off the ball for too long, while giving us the impression of hewing close to what happened, before, after and on the day of the assassination. Kukunoor’s direction (he is also the showrunner) is solid. So is the uniformly impressive cast: Amit Sial is excellent, navigating the treacherous waters of officialese as well as the on-ground grunt work, the show leaving us with a controversial peg — did he delay the final assault on the assassins because he was the kind of punctilious officer who would wait for orders ‘from above’, or was there something more to it? So is Vaid: good to see him not doing the hero’s BFF sort of role, for a change, as well as the other members of the team. The actors who play the LTTE activists-and-assassins are all scarily persuasive, and it is apt to hear them speaking in Tamil, with those on their trail trying to weed them out by their ‘Lankan accent’.
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There have been other films and shows revolving around the Rajiv Gandhi assassination: Shoojit Sircar’s ‘Madras Cafe’, starring John Abraham as the intelligence officer who gets embroiled in the case; Mani Ratnam’s Kannathil Muthamithal shows us how the potential recruits were trained for armed conflict, just as they are here. It also comes up in an edition of Raj and DK’s ‘The Family Man’, but not in as much detail as this one.
‘The Hunt’ is a welcome addition to shows looking back at recent times, which attempt to pin-point historical and political flashpoints in India with archival documentary footage. But it’s hard to overlook the constant irritating disclaimers against smoking and drinking: given that Sivarasan is never without a cigarette in hand, his appearance is invariably accompanied by that squiggle. And even in a show about an era which is truly done and dusted, you can see the footprints of silly censorship: in one frame, you can see the The Hindu, the biggest newspaper (prakhyat akhbaar, as it is described) of the South, being called something else (was it Bharat news?); in another, in the mention of Madras Press Club, the first word is muted.
Whatever. All we can do is to ignore, and soldier on, just like the team which cracked one of the toughest cases in modern India.
The Hunt – The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case cast: Amit Sial, Sahil Vaid, Danish Iqbal, Vidyuth Garg, Shafeeq Mustafa, Gouri Padmakumar, Bagavathi Perumal, Saurabh Dubey, Rajiv Kumar, Shrutie Jayan, Anjana Balaji
The Hunt – The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case director: Nagesh Kukunoor
The Hunt – The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case rating: 3.5 stars
