The story of Sri Lanka’s Tamils is a lesson for India

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Editor's note: “The people of north India should see us as victims,” R.P. Ravichandran, one of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins set free by the Supreme Court, said last week. Few things are fouler than picking piously on those who have done grievous wrong and have had everything taken from them. Ravichandran and his co-convicts are responsible for their murderous choices. This fact exists alongside another: they are also casualties of a convergence of circumstance and history. Only those bereft of intelligence, imagination and compassion would struggle to recognize the equal validity of these two conflicting truths. There is nothing to envy about Rajiv Gandhi’s killers. The ideal that animated them—the Tamil Eelam—was pulverized during their long decades in prison. Its end was indescribably savage, and the trauma of those final weeks—when Sri Lankan Tamils were massacred and molested and herded into the world’s largest refugee camp that doubled as a torture hangar—will forever haunt the survivors. New Delhi did not just countenance Colombo’s conduct. It extended its cooperation. The notion that Gandhi’s assassination went unrevenged is a myth meant to burnish India’s benign …