"I told my sister Priyanka that I'm not happy," Rahul Gandhi said on LTTE chief Prabhakaran's death
Highlights
- Rahul Gandhi said he has lost two members of his family to violence
- I wasn't happy because I saw myself in his(Prabhakaran's) children
- Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber of the LTTE in 1991
Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said he and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra were not happy after the terror group LTTE's chief Prabhakaran, who ordered the assassination of his father Rajiv Gandhi, was killed, as they felt "the violence inflicted upon him had impacted others, including his children".
The Congress chief said he has lost two members of his family to violence. "My grandmother (Indira Gandhi) and my father (Rajiv Gandhi) were both killed. So, I have suffered violence," Mr Gandhi said at the Bucerius Summer School in Hamburg, Germany.
"I am talking actually from experience. The only way you can move forward after violence is forgiveness. There is no other way. And to forgive you have to understand what exactly happened and why it happened," Rahul Gandhi said.
Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by two of her bodyguards in 1984, and her son and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber of the LTTE in 1991. Sri Lankan security forces shot dead Prabhakaran and destroyed the LTTE in May 2009, ending a quarter century of separatist war in the island nation.
"To deal with it is to actually listen and act non-violently. People think this is weakness. But in fact this is strength. My father was killed by a terrorist in 1991. In 2009, I saw the person who killed my father lying in a field in Sri Lanka," Rahul Gandhi said.
"I called up my sister Priyanka and said that this is very strange, but I am not happy. I should be celebrating that the person who is dead is the person who killed my father. But somehow I am not happy. She said 'you are right, I am not happy either'," the Congress chief said. "The reason I wasn't happy was because I saw myself in his children. So, I realised, him lying there actually means that there are kids like me who are crying," he added.
"He might have been a bad or an evil person, but the violence that was done against him was impacting others, like it had impacted me. If you go deep, you will find there is something that triggered that violence. It's not just a random event. Some action or violence done against him or her has triggered it," Rahul Gandhi said.
He also said that the only way one can fight violence is by non-violence. "There is no other way. You might be under the illusion that you can fight violence with violence, but it will come back. You might think that you are very powerful and that you can subdue somebody else, but they will find a way of coming back," Mr Gandhi said.