Sudheendra Kulkarni would never be able to understand the pain and grief of a young adult who loses a parent to the assailant’s bullet or bomb. Unfortunately, you have to experience it to understand it. One moment the parent is there, and the next moment gone forever. While Kulkarni in his article, ‘Why Priyanka’s Vellore visit is not personal’ (The Sunday Express, April 20), condescendingly points out that “time is the greatest healer in all tragedies”, he does not realise that while the passage of time may numb the pain and help internalise the tragedy, it does not bring about a closure. The mind keeps trying to make sense of the senseless, to find a rationale for irrationality. Even many years after the incident, the question ‘why did it happen’ comes back to haunt the near and dear ones, at the unlikeliest places and at the most random times.

It is indeed a quixotic logic that Kulkarni espouses when he writes that the visit cannot be treated as personal merely because “some newspapers reported that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra apparently wanted to know from Nalini Sriharan as to who were the conspirators responsible for the assassination”. Presuming for a moment that what the newspapers reported is correct, it is a sad reflection of the way the Indian state functions that even 17 years after the assassination of a former prime minister, the establishment cannot provide answers to his family. Is it the responsibility of the family to inform the nation or is it the nation’s job to tell the family the identity of the conspirators responsible for this macabre act of terrorism? His argument amounts to turning criminal jurisprudence on its head. The proper investigation of all crimes is the responsibility of the state, not of the next of kin.

... contd.