Priyanka and I were not happy after Prabhakaran was killed: Rahul Gandhi
Hamburg (Germany), Aug 23: Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said he and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra were not happy after his father's (Rajiv Gandhi) killer, LTTE chief Prabhakaran was killed, as they felt "the violence inflicted upon him had impacted others, including his children".
While addressing a gathering at Bucerius Summer School here, Gandhi said he lost two members of his family due to violence.
"My grandmother (Indira Gandhi) and my father (Rajiv Gandhi) were both killed. So, I have suffered violence. 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."
He said: "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.
He went on to say: "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 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," he also added.
Indira Gandhi was shot dead by two of her bodyguards at her official residence here on October 31, 1984 while a suicide bomber from Sri Lanka's now vanquished Tamil Tigers group blew up Rajiv Gandhi at an election rally in Tamil Nadu on May 21, 1991.
Sri Lankan security forces shot dead Prabhakaran and virtually destroyed the Tamil Tigers in May 2009, ending a quarter century of separatist war in the island nation.
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."
"Violence is being cause because of a certain anger inside. Until you understand and remove the anger, it is going to remain there. You can't fight violence with more violence."
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MP boat tragedy: Death toll climbs to 13; body of last missing person recovered
Jabalpur (PTI): The bodies of a five-year-old boy and his uncle were recovered from Bargi Dam in Madhya Pradesh's Jabalpur district on Sunday morning, raising the death toll in the cruise boat tragedy to 13, police said.
The boat, around 20 years old and operated by the state tourism department, capsized during a storm on Thursday evening.
"The bodies of Mayuram (5) and his uncle Kamraj (around 50), an employee of the Ordnance Factory in Khamaria, were found floating and were fished out of the dam," Bargi Sub Divisional Officer of Police Anjul Ayank Mishra told PTI over the phone.
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All 13 missing persons identified have now been accounted for, he said, adding the bodies were sent to a government hospital for postmortem.
Teams comprising around 20 Army divers airlifted from Agra, along with personnel from the National Disaster Response Force, State Disaster Response Force and local divers, were involved in the search operation, the police said.
Of the 41 identified passengers on board the vessel, 28 were rescued after the incident, according to the police.
The CCTV footage near the boarding point showed 43 people heading towards the boat, though the identities of 41 passengers have been confirmed so far, they said.
The state government on Friday ordered a probe into the incident and dismissed three crew members. It also banned the operation of similar vessels in the state.
