Byline: Gopu Mohan

He helped track down some of the suspects in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination. He is not an abolitionist: he wants the death penalty for those who wage war against the nation. And he does believe that those in custody for the assassination are guilty.

And yet, two decades on, former CBI inspector J Mohanraj wants the three on death row to be freed.

Formerly in the Tamil Nadu police, Mohanraj was drafted into the CBI weeks after Rajiv Gandhi was killed in the bomb attack in Sriperumbuthur in May 1991. He was a patriot to the point of being a nationalist, young and angry. "As the son of an honest politician who had been thrown into prison during the emergency, I was no admirer of Indira Gandhi or her son. But this was not politics; it was a war on our nation. We were all furious," he said from his home in Chennai.

"We were very angry at the LTTE, Tamil chauvinists and all others who we suspected had a role in the conspiracy. We did not want to show them any mercy. You must understand our mindset; we were...