Just watching the quieter shades of colour worn by busy detectives and cops, along with less noise emanating from the television screen, has you gripped in The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case. Available to stream on SonyLiv, this is a short drama series based on, as the name goes, the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case in 1991. Looking back, it is clear how the tragedy and the suddenness of the former prime minister’s killing completely rattled Indian politics.

Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination by Nathuram Godse remains the first act of terror in the history of independent India, but Rajiv’s killing was the first time a foreign group assassinated an ex-PM – someone widely believed to be India’s next prime minister – during a fractious election campaign. The woman suicide bomber who killed Rajiv Gandhi was the first of her kind in India, and clues left in the undamaged camera of a cameraperson hired by the LTTE at the site only added to the many intriguing pieces in the tragedy.

Nagesh Kukunoor, the Hyderabad-born filmmaker, has done very well to bring to life the hunt for Rajiv Gandhi’s killers that followed. There is no ‘DNA’ chatter and no swiping brightly lit screens, devices or cellphones to move the plot along. The pace of the investigation is taut but propelled by the physical trailing of suspects done by investigators, chases that had to be conducted in person, and real-life surveillance, not via data plucked from phones or gadgets.

Kukunoor has based his OTT series on material provided by Anirudhya Mitra’s 90 Days, published in 2022. The book has allowed the director to convey the feel of a police procedural. He is no doubt conscious of the overwhelmingly large and devastating implications of the incident, but as he first told his producer Sameer Nair when approached for this project, he “did not want to do politics.” 

Kukunoor has steered clear of getting actors to play the family members of Rajiv Gandhi, who are still very much in the forefront of public life. He has preferred to use real footage from the time, and a single, discrete shot from the back “of whom the viewers presume to be his wife, Sonia Gandhi, being informed of the killing.” This has added to the authenticity of the show and has prevented it from becoming yet another political drama, of which there are many, mostly poor, examples.

The chief of the SIT, Karthikeyan is played brilliantly by Anil Sial, and he has set the standard for his colleagues, carrying the show on his shoulders. His ‘look’ (safari suits, white shirts tucked into plain trousers) is central to the challenge that the film makers experienced in recreating an India that was familiar, yet dramatically different from today. It would have been another thing to do a period drama set in really old times, but to picture 1991 had its own peculiar challenges. 

The early 1990s remain a time not that far back in the past, people who were around then live on in 2025, but everything else in terms of devices, the colours, media, just the pace at which life was lived has changed dramatically. The Hunt meets that challenge with aplomb, actors being very much true to their characters, in an environment with far fewer distractions, but the slowness bringing with it intensity that ensures there is thrill and tension; at no point does being set in 1991 drag the show down.

One point that could have viewers stumped is why a high-profile politician, an ex-prime minister whose mother, when PM, was assassinated just seven years earlier, not have security commensurate with his status and threat perception. What allowed the assassin to so easily access the target in Sriperumbudur?

Journalist Neena Gopal, the last journalist Gandhi would interact with, writes 34 years after Rajiv’s assassination, “On the night of May 21, when we finally set off from the Chennai airport, there must have been at least 50 cars in the cavalcade. But unlike Hyderabad of 1989, there were no Black Cat commandos, no multiple rings of security.” She records that “within ten minutes of the cars taking the turn off to the road to Sriperumbudur, the cavalcade came to a stop and I could see a man popping his head into every car and asking something. He came to the car I was in and asked “Neena Gopal” and I said yes. It was the lone bodyguard Pradeep Gupta, and the summons I had been waiting for” (emphasis mine).

The Verma Commission report into the assassination makes it crystal clear that the absence of security for Rajiv Gandhi had been noted and was certainly something the assassins would have considered as they planned and rehearsed for the act. Page 40 of the report dwells on this in detail and concludes that the Intelligence Bureau (IB) believed the SPG must continue to give him cover even after he ceased to be PM, due to the “continuing undiminished threat to him.” 

A high-power committee constituted by the Union government took the same view on December 4, 1989, but the SPG cover was withdrawn on January 30, 1990, without a fresh assessment. 

P. Chidambaram, then designated to liaise on his security between Gandhi and the Union government, wrote two letters – on February 3 and December 9, 1990 – asking why the security had been withdrawn. Central government correspondence, as per the commission’s report, shows that MK Narayanan, Director IB, and other senior officers recorded their views that Rajiv must continue to get the highest security, but that was not provided. 

If the series ends up tangentially conveying that Gandhi did not want the security, then it has further perpetuated a myth which has acquired legs over time. This crinkle, in an otherwise thorough job by Kukunoor, does jar. 

By choosing a procedural lens and bypassing overt political dramatisation, Kukunoor underscores how consequential lapses in security can echo through history, especially when rooted in avoidable errors and misjudgments. 

The Hunt’s storytelling serves as a sober reflection that the cost of complacency can reverberate for a country long after headlines fade.

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