The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case

“When was the last time we had a drink together?” asks an SIT officer. “When was the last time we slept?” shoots back his colleague. It sums up the captivating 90-day hunt that writer-director Nagesh Kukunoor turns into a 7-part show, making the viewer walk in step with the untiring SIT that’s set up to find Rajiv Gandhi’s killers. We know the LTTE did it. We know why they did it. We know the deep hatred the LTTE had for the leader who sent the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) to quell the militant movement in Sri Lanka. We know they wanted him dead before he became the PM again. We know the LTTE, led by Prabhakaran, bombed, killed, tortured people in their fight for a separate Tamil state of Eelam in Sri Lanka. But there’s more.

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.

Given the censorship wrangles and politicisation of ideas these days, there’s a sense of nostalgia and wonder about watching a seven-episode investigative drama based on the murder of an ex-Prime Minister: no surrogate identities, no fake names, no “inspired by real events” disclaimers. Some of the suspense is self-inflicted; you keep looking for a hint, an agenda, a sign of loose fiction with(in) the facts. There is, after all, always a threat of offending someone, regardless of whose history is portrayed. On that count alone, it’s no small deal that The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case exists. The license to tell this particular story is no surprise in 2025, but what matters is the makers’ use of this license. Adapted from former India Today reporter Anirudhya Mitra’s first-person book, Ninety Days, Nagesh Kukunoor’s series sticks to the basics. It explores the SIT’s (Special Investigation Team) nationwide manhunt for the conspirators following the infamous suicide-attack at a Congress rally in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur in 1991. Headed by CBI officer Kaarthikeyan (the reliable Amit Sial) and operating from Malligai, the team features SP Amit Varma (Sahil Vaid), DSP Ragothaman (Bagavathi ‘Bucks’ Perumal), DIG Amod Kanth (Danish Iqbal), DIG Radhavinod Raju (Girish Sharma) and eventually, NSG Commando Ravindran (Vidyut Garg). Running parallel to their investigation is the widely-known story of the conspirators — the LTTE gang of operatives and sympathisers led by one-eyed mastermind Sivarasan (a locked-in Shafeeq Mustafa) — and their attempts to evade capture. From Madras and Madurai to Delhi and Bangalore, the chase spans safe-houses and tanker escapes, bus-station arrests and stalled raids.