Rahul in Parliament. Picture by Rajesh Kumar

New Delhi, April 15: Priyanka Vadra has confirmed she met Nalini Sriharan, a convict in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, at a Vellore jail last month.

She said it was her “way of coming to peace with the violence and loss that I have experienced” after her father was killed by a suicide bomber on May 21, 1991.

“I do not believe in anger, hatred and violence and I refuse it any power over my life.”

In a signed statement, Priyanka said the March 19 visit was “purely personal” and undertaken completely on her own initiative. “I would be deeply grateful if this could be respected.”

The Gandhis have ensured that their engagements with Rajiv’s killers have stayed private. They kept the Congress out of them and saw to it that they were never politicised.

This was perhaps one reason why Priyanka’s Vellore visit went unreported for nearly a month.

Congress spokeswoman Jayanthi Natarajan refused comment, saying: “We respect her desire for privacy.”

Rahul Gandhi said he had no problems with his sister meeting Nalini. “We don’t carry hatred. We don’t carry anger. It’s not an exercise. She felt that she wanted to go and see the person. She has been feeling it for some time.”

Asked if he, too, wanted to meet Nalini, he said: “I have a different way of looking at these things.”

Nalini had been sentenced to hang with husband Murugan and two others. But in November 1999, Sonia personally asked the then President, K.R. Narayanan, to commute the sentence to a life term for the sake of Nalini’s eight-year-old daughter, Megara.

The Congress was clueless about her move although she was the party president.

Priyanka had wanted to meet Nalini for some time. Nalini’s lawyers revealed that at the hour-long meeting, Priyanka said her father was a “good person”. She added that had the assassins known about his “good nature”, they would not have killed him but tried to resolve the issues through talks.

When was the last time Nalini saw Rajiv, Priyanka asked. After he got out of the car at Sriperumbudur on the day of the assassination, Nalini replied.

Priyanka asked Nalini who had plotted the assassination and if the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam were involved. She wanted to know if Murugan was an LTTE member.

Nalini said that Dhanu, the human bomb who had RDX strapped to her feet, was the only person who would have known about the mastermind. She was vague about — or ignorant of — the LTTE’s involvement and her husband’s links with the outfit.