Gandhi's daughter pays visit to one of his assassins

INDIA: PRIYANKA GANDHI, daughter of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, says she has visited the woman convicted for assassinating her father in prison.

"I met Nalini Sriharan on March 19th. It was purely a personal visit on my own initiative which must be respected," Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra declared after the Times of India reported the meeting at the Vellore jail in southern Tamil Nadu state.

"I do not believe in anger or violence and I refuse to let it overpower me. Meeting Nalini was my way of coming to terms with my father's death," she said.

Nalini (43) was sentenced to death 10 years ago by a special court for her involvement in Gandhi's assassination at Sriperumbudur near Chennai (formerly Madras) in May 1991.

This sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment after Rajiv's widow and ruling Congress Party head Sonia Gandhi petitioned for clemency for the sake of Nalini's five-year-old daughter who was born in jail.

According to what Nalini told her lawyers, an emotional Priyanka sat next to her during their meeting and asked several probing questions relating to her father's murder by a female suicide bomber from Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger terrorist group.

Nalini, an Indian national and the only surviving member of the five-member assassination squad had accompanied Dhanu, the Sri Lankan bomber who blew up Rajiv Gandhi, killing 14 others alongside.Priyanka reportedly questioned Nalini in detail about her father's murder: why it happened, what purpose it had served and when she had seen him last.

Meanwhile, Priyanka's brother Rahul Gandhi, who is being projected as the Congress Party's prime ministerial candidate in general elections scheduled over the next few months, said the two siblings did not believe in violence.

"Her meeting with Nalini was in this context," he said.

© 2008 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times