Asian Window

(Updated on April 16)

From CNN-IBN:

Former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination is making news once again. This time it is because of his daughter Priyanka Vadra’s visit to a Vellore prison, where the only living member of Rajiv’s assassination squad, Nalini Sriharan, is lodged…

…”It’s completely personal, I don’t want to say anything about it. I needed to make peace with all the violence in my life,” she said.

“I don’t believe in anger or violence and I refuse to let it overpower me. Meeting Nalini (Sriharan) was my way of coming to terms with my father’s death,” Ms Gandhi said.

More:

And on CNN-IBN: My family doesn’t carry anger, hatred: Rahul Gandhi

The Priyanka-Nalini meeting is a moment of grace and humanity, rare in our public life says an editorial in The Indian Express

It is an almost novelistic encounter — Priyanka Gandhi meeting Nalini Sriharan, one of her father’s assassins in Vellore jail, “to make peace with the violence”. Nalini, an LTTE rebel, was part of the squad that killed Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 during an election rally in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, and would not even have lived if Sonia Gandhi had not pleaded for clemency on her behalf because she had a young child. Priyanka asked Nalini why her father had been so brutally killed, whether Nalini had known him — talking to her, trying to come to terms with his death and refusing to let “anger and violence overpower” her.

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Finally, Nalini believes her sins have been cleansed following her meeting with Priyanka, writes Radha Venkatesan in Times of India

To the world, it was a stunning revelation to learn that Priyanka Vadra had met Nalini, serving a life term for involvement in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.

For Priyanka, it was an attempt to attain closure, to come to terms with the tragic loss of her beloved father. But how did Nalini feel about the meeting?

According to the account she gave to her brother, it was a singularly emotional encounter. “I feel all my sins have been washed off by Priyanka’s visit…I feel she has pardoned me by calling on me at the prison…. I am indebted to her all my life,” she told her younger brother P S Bhagyanathan a few days after her March 19 meeting with Priyanka behind the majestic walls of Vellore prison.

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