Sri Lanka: the New Country

For Avram, with love

CONTENTS

PREFACE

First as a cub reporter for Germany’s largest radio and television network, then as South Asia correspondent for Der Spiegel for fourteen years and finally for various other European and Indian media concerns since I quit that German publication, I have covered South Asian current affairs day after day, for more than two-and-a-half decades.

All journalists who report on a large region begin to focus on one country or issue, either because the medium they work for is most interested in one particular story or because they develop a personal fascination and insatiable curiosity for it.

In my case, it was both. Of all the conflicts and subjects I had covered, Sri Lanka emerged as that one story.

Though I started writing for the German magazine and focusing even more on Sri Lanka in 1998, my earlier jobs under veterans in the international media had already sown the seeds of interest. But it was when I began to head the South Asia bureau of the Hamburg-based publication that my real and long engagement with Sri Lanka began.

Since Sri Lanka was in the throes of an almost thirty-year-long civil war, one of the bloodiest in the world and the one that ended only in 2009, the conflict between the armed LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), who were fighting for a separate state for the country’s minority Tamils in the north and east of the country, and the Sri Lankan government was, of course, both my primary focus as well as that of the publication.

For two decades of the war, I reported out of Sri Lanka over and over again. I travelled in the war zone, fearing—as a single parent— landmines and sniper attacks, meeting presidents and prime ministers, Tamil and Sinhalese human rights groups, Tamil politicians, Norwegian peace envoy Erik Solheim, his successor Jon Hanssen-Bauer, Scandinavian war monitors, expatriate aid workers with the Red Cross, various bodies of the United Nations, Buddhist monks, Tamil and Sinhalese chauvinists, Muslim liberals, and Burgher intellectuals among others.

From LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran down, I met scores of Tamil rebels both of the LTTE and other groups. The erstwhile ones who had thrown in the towel and joined mainstream politics, like Douglas Devananda and the more newly defected commanders like the LTTE’s Vinayagamurthy Muralitharan aka Colonel Karuna.

I had travelled through and reported non-stop for TV and print on the frightening vistas of the first forty-eight hours of the tsunami, which, after a brief ‘fragile peace’ and lull in fighting, had devastated the country yet again, bringing fresh sorrows in its demonic wake.

Just a year later and on the evening that Lakshman Kadirgamar— by far the most erudite foreign minister the country has ever had— was assassinated by the LTTE right beside his swimming pool in the heart of Colombo, I realized with a sense of gloom back in New Delhi that my chat with him the week before, and not far from the same spot in his house, had been his last with any journalist.

‘It will take just one more killing spree by the LTTE,’ he had warned, even as the ceasefire and the ‘fragile peace’ were just about holding. ‘And it’s back to war.’

His dire prognosis came true and the civil war entered its worst and final phase thereafter.

Finally, I also met and was in touch with sources in Oslo about the fate of the last of the LTTE leaders towards the end of the bloody war in May 2009: ‘LTTE peace secretariat’ chief Puleedevan, its ‘police’ chief Nadesan, and the ideological founder and tyrant who headed the organization—Velupillai Prabhakaran himself.

I had met all these Tigers in their de facto capital, Killinochchi, even earlier, i.e., during the brief ‘fragile peace’ seven years before they were killed, allegedly by the army, and some, even as they surrendered with white flags after three-way negotiations between Colombo, Oslo and the LTTE.

All reporters make similar experiences. So, who am I and what are my credentials to write a book on Sri Lanka?

I am neither an Indian Tamilian, nor do I have any Sinhalese relatives or genes. I am an Indian of Andhra genetics that go back to forefathers who had lived in the long-gone ‘Madras Presidency’. But for that, I am a naturalized north Indian.

My primary language is English, German is my second best language. Hindi is the only Indian language I can speak, read and write—fluently, I like to claim. I can produce smatterings of excruciatingly bad Tamil and passable Telugu and—enough French to save my life.

My father, a military doctor, had spent most of his time in army hospitals on India’s northern fronts. I grew up entirely in New Delhi, interspersed with study and work in Europe and the United States.

And yet, there is an invisible thread that connects me to Chennai, the city of my birth, the only brief time—a week or so—I ever ‘lived’ in southern India (when my mother took the traditional route of going home to her parents’ place to deliver a baby).

For some years, Chennai remained the venue for the annual summer school vacation, to catch up with other cousins congregated from different parts of the country at our grandparents’ sprawling home in Mambalam.

And given that Chennai was my only contact point with southern India, on the odd occasion I feel south Indian, it is usually more Tamilian than Andhra. (It may have been even more intense had the Tamil Iyengar-Iyer army family I eventually married into been less anglicized themselves).

Even if I am in Chennai only for a day, the redolence of jasmine and afternoon coffee beans being ground in small shops on Ranganathan Street, the melody of Nadaswaram, the performances at the Krishna Gana Sabha and the ripe smell of jackfruit and killi manga still evoke great nostalgia.

Those early years are one of two links that got me especially interested in the Sri Lankan conflict between the Tamil minority and the Sinhalese majority.

The other is Sundaramma, my grandmother, long deceased.

When my grandfather, a chemical engineer, was sent to Paranthan in northern Sri Lanka (close to Elephant Pass) in the late 1950s to help set up a factory, she had accompanied him.

They spent three years there, during which my linguist grandmother who was excellent in Tamil—which she wrote and read avidly—effortlessly added fluent Sinhala to her repertoire.

In the afternoons of my summer vacation, the caustic old lady who frightened everyone except me, would enthrall me with stories of ‘Ceylon’.

According to her, the tea, biscuits, furniture, coconuts, people, ice cream, temples—everything was ‘better in Ceylon’. Peculiarly, I thought in my later years, she never made mention of Tamil Ceylon or Sinhalese Ceylon. It was always one unified country she spoke of, one far superior to her/our native India.

Of course, I am not the first foreigner to be deeply interested in Sri Lanka. Given the island nation’s surplus of natural resources, its habitable climate, the innate gentleness and hospitality of its people and its limitless beauty, Sri Lanka had always been coveted by more aliens than perhaps any other country in the world.

The earliest colonizers had been from today’s Odisha and Bengal (then the Kalinga empire) in India, supposedly on the very day Buddha attained Nirvana.

But Buddhism officially arrived later: with Indian emperor Ashoka’s son Mahinda, who brought along a sapling of the sacred Bo or Bodhi tree to sow, along with Buddhism, in erstwhile Ceylon, 1,300 years before the first European set foot on the island.

Islam arrived next, followed by a third wave of Indians—this time from the Tamil kingdoms of southern India, who brought Hinduism to Sri Lanka, where it proliferated in the north and east.

But unlike in India, Hinduism did not overwhelm Buddhism, which remains, to date, the majority religion of Sri Lanka.

Finally, Western colonial rulers—the Portuguese, the Dutch, briefly the French—and the British, saw the arrival of Christianity on the island.

The country that continues to be an all-crucial link—located as it is at the crossroads of shipping lanes between the West, Middle East, the Indian peninsula and the Far East, a key area of geostrategic relevance in the Indian Ocean and a favoured destination for foreigners seeking sun and surf—expectedly remains a focal point not only for the United Nations, international NGOs and aid organizations but also the international media.

Since the Sri Lankan civil war ended in May 2009 and as through its three bloody decades (I will use three decades in this book, for though the actual war from the first bullet fired to the last may have lasted twenty-six years, the seeds of conflict, as both Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils themselves accept, were sown much earlier), participation by the international community in Sri Lanka’s essentially internal affairs remains sustained and intensive. There is continuing commentary and critique on and of Sri Lanka, which has not let up even after the end of the civil war in 2009.

But there is an element of rhetoric to these international deliberations, one mostly devoid of intuition of the enormous complexities of Sri Lanka (not comparable, like in much of Asia, to Western parameters) that worryingly courses through and dominates this discourse.

Global opinion continues to be moulded primarily by the ‘human rights’ philosophies that form the bedrock of the constitutions of Western democracies which call the shots at international world bodies today.

Aiding and abetting that tone are international ‘human rights groups’.

And some, not all, sections of the approximately 9,50,000-strong Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora.

Given legendary Tamil brilliance and enterprise, thousands of overseas Tamil refugees fleeing the civil war rose rapidly to become influential businessmen and even policymakers in the countries that gave them refuge. (It is important to note that many ‘economic refugees’ from other parts of Sri Lanka unaffected by the war too fled overseas, using the conflict as a smokescreen and a passport to asylum in an affluent country.)

The countries of their choice such as the UK, Canada and some in Scandinavia and the EU lead global condemnation of Sri Lanka at every available international forum today. (Many others, like the

United States of America and Australia have, in the interim, adopted more pragmatic attitudes towards the South Asian island state.)

It is of growing concern that several hundreds of the Tamil diaspora continue to demand and attempt to finance separatism in Sri Lanka even four years after the war. This despite the fact that millions of fatigued Sri Lankan Tamils who did not flee, like the diaspora itself, but stayed back and bore the brunt of the terrible war, want no more talk of separatism.

They want a political solution—autonomy, devolution, whatever.

But within a united Sri Lanka.

What news reporters see and experience on the ground often differs from what editors at the headquarters of their publications expect or want them to produce. My twenty-five years of working for the international media in that capacity have also taught me that this phenomenon is not restricted to the Asian media alone.

Copy filed by overseas correspondents is not only sub-edited, but often rewritten, changing both shape and content. Few editorial desks are entirely uncoloured and unmanipulated. Why? Is it because the political opinions and personal beliefs of the editors are at variance with those of their reporters? Yes, financiers, funders and proprietors of media concerns too have their own ‘world view’ on what the Brave New World ought to look like (usually in someone else’s country). But is it fair to foist it on readers by manipulating an honest report, just because it tells a different story?

Often, editors explain this tendency away by saying, rather loftily and superfluously, that ‘readers want to know the truth’.

But it is that definition of ‘truth’ that raises the question: which, or whose truth?

Do readers want truth through a particular prism, one, like a favourite brand of sunglasses, of the media’s choosing and liking? Or that dictated by their country’s foreign policy and ‘geostrategic’ consideration?

Or a telling-like-it-is of the realities seen and experienced by the reporter on the ground, never mind how unexpected and unlike through their own bioscope?

At the time and on the firmament of foreign correspondents covering South Asia with their base usually in Delhi, I was the only Indian/South Asian to occupy such an important position in the spectrum of the international media. Most of my colleagues worked under foreigners, to whom they reported and who wrote the stories that were filed to their desks overseas. In my case, I had reporters and stringers under me who helped immensely with research and administration. I travelled, interviewed, provided the analysis and wrote the stories.

Not surprisingly, my vision, my interpretation and my narration of what is essentially my home region—South Asia—is bound to be different from those of my foreign colleagues.

And yet, the first ten years with the German magazine were my happiest professional years because I was lucky to work under editors who neither possessed nor desired any made-in-Germany prisms. There were no editorial changes to ‘sex up’ my copy, no attempt to bully me to produce something more in keeping with their opinion on a country they knew little about. When I got hate mail both from Sinhalese and Tamil chauvinists, they stood by me. (When I got ‘love’ mail, I never heard of it. At least from them. But that’s editors for you.)

As we go to print in early 2015, international reportage on Sri Lanka courses along the same vein. Narrative continues to be dominated by ‘human rights abuses’ and ‘genocide’ allegedly committed by the government and army of Sri Lanka.¹ There is hardly a mention of, or an attempt to bring to the book, the remnants of the LTTE, especially its financiers most of whom are scattered all over the world. Simultaneously, armed conflict that Western nations are embroiled in, be it in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq, is measured by a different yardstick.

The United States’ war in Afghanistan and its drone attacks in Pakistan are a ‘war against terror’. The West’s ongoing action in Syria/Iraq against Islamic State militants are by a ‘Coalition of the Willing’ (which evokes angelic choirboys, not mighty, deadly armies). Both are aimed at uprooting ‘terrorists’ on alien soil. But the Sri Lankan army’s offensive against the separatist LTTE on its own soil is usually described as one against ‘underground rebels’, or, depending on the publication, even as ‘freedom fighters’.

The Daily Mail, UK, refers to the US soldier who killed ‘terrorist leader’ Osama Bin Laden as an ‘esteemed’ Navy Seal (Daily Mail, UK, 15 September 2014). The same paper, reporting the killing of LTTE chief Prabhakaran during the final stages of the Sri Lankan civil war, referred to him as the ‘Tamil Tiger leader’ (Daily Mail, UK, 20 May 2009).

Now consider this: According to the Argentina-based Non-Proliferation for Global Security (NPS) Foundation and many other international bodies, the al-Qaida has, so far, been responsible for thirty-one attacks that took more than 4,400 lives.

The most conservative estimates place the number of lives lost during the three-decade-long Sri Lankan civil war between 1,00,000 and 1,20,000. Even if one assumes absurdly (given that thousands of civilians were killed in LTTE suicide and bomb attacks²) that 75 per cent of the deaths in the civil war were caused by the Sri Lankan army itself, the figure leaves 30,000 deaths still unaccounted for.

And if you take suicide bombings by the LTTE alone, Malik Ahmed Jalal in the Harvard Law School’s National Security Journal points out that the LTTE executed a total of 315 suicide bombings, more than the Hezbollah and Hamas put together.³

It is my puzzlement over this kind of subtle editorial imbalance that stimulated the desire in me to write this book.

A brief illness prevented me from returning to Sri Lanka for some years after the end of war. But return I did, several times over.

I found what I went looking for and never really feared I would not: a new country, like any other, with hopes, dreams, elation at things achieved, frustration at those yet to be, heated public debate, raucous elections, squabbles, humour, political battles, some very dismal new developments, a new president and PM (see Chapter: A Final Word and Updates) and dizzying, fast development.

What I discovered in place of the devastation, destruction, blood and misery that I had witnessed and experienced over the past decades is what is at the core of Sri Lanka: The New Country.

I may smugly claim greater intuitive understanding, both cultural and emotional, of Sri Lankans and their problems with each other as compared to Western journalists. But I am, of course, a foreigner in Sri Lanka myself. Consequently, this book is not meant as ‘advice’ on what Sri Lankans ought to make of their own country either. I am a reporter. This book is merely a compilation of what I do best: reportage, but in book form.

Consequently, Sri Lanka: The New Country essentially showcases conversations with Sri Lankans.

There are chats with ordinary Tamils and Sinhalese, presidents, princes, ‘secular clergymen’ and politicians.

And since not many attempts have been made to speak to the Sri Lankan army which continues to be depicted as a kind of a nameless, faceless bully force, hungry for power over and colonization of north and east Sri Lanka, there are debates with the brass of the army who commanded the last phase of war too.

There is a reason for my keenness to include the army’s voice.

I grew up in military cantonments across India. To all South Asians, the implication will be instantly identifiable.

In all South Asian countries, given the ineptitude of local administrations across the subcontinent, the armed forces (most of whom undergo part of their training in India under the world’s third-largest fighting force) are frequently called upon to play civilian roles.

These armies consist not of terrifying ‘terminators’ but educated officers and ordinary men and women from modest backgrounds, all of whom pitch in with discipline and efficiency to repair a bridge, evacuate villagers from flooded villages, set up emergency medical facilities, even maintain law and order.

Given the multitude of objections against the army’s presence in the north and east Sri Lanka, it was this avatar that I was curious to see and experience the Sri Lankan army in.

Sri Lanka: The New Country is no attempt to deflect attention from the charges made in films aired on Britain’s Channel 4 alleging the rape and brutal murder of a woman LTTE cadre or the point-blank killing of Balachandran, the eleven-year-old son of Prabhakaran, all by Sri Lankan troops, either.

The world has seen and read about all those well-publicized tragedies, I don’t need to add to the plethora of claims and counterclaims the Internet and media are awash with.

This book is aimed at affording readers interested in Sri Lanka an opportunity to hear the other side: Sri Lanka’s army generals, its president, its new chief minister of the Northern Province and most importantly, ordinary Sinhalese and Tamil citizens rebuilding their lives.

Initially, I had a loftier goal and set off with it in my hand baggage.

I wanted to steer clear of Sri Lankan politics altogether and produce a kind of guide for the ‘thinking traveller’, who, while lying on a hammock in idyllic Bentota in south-western Sri Lanka, may idly wonder what the parts of the country that were off-bounds for three decades look like today, and whether he/she should venture there.

But as I travelled through the north and east (which were ravaged not only by the war but also by the tsunami), I immediately understood why my HarperCollins publisher-editor had maintained a respectful silence as I described my grand plan, but with a gently cocked left eyebrow.

Politics and the Sri Lankan war, even four years after the end of it, course through all public discourse.

Whether you speak of the resurgence of the sales of ‘katta’, Jaffna’s tasty dried fish or its bumper harvest of beetroot, whether you visit eco-friendly resorts on its stunning east coast, or learn about the restoration of mangroves in Batticaloa’s languid lagoon: the long civil war—understandably and naturally—weaves its way through all narrative.

After all, many thirty-year-old southern Sri Lankans who are peaking in their careers today, knew nothing other than a country in the throes of civil war while their northern counterparts are just emerging from the same, to catch up and make something of themselves within a shorter span of time.

Finally, a disclaimer. My travel expenses to and within Sri Lanka for researching this book were all borne by me.

Other than a breakfast or a coffee offered by a military commander and one overnight stay in an army guest house in Mullaithivu as there were no hotels there yet, I have not been offered, neither have I accepted a single freebie to research and write this book or indeed, on any other occasion when I was there as a journalist. Each and every hotel—whether run by the military or not—was paid for in full by me, each and every litre of petrol and wine, each and every kilo of katta, came out of my pocket.

Sri Lanka: The New Country is a narrative by Sri Lankans in, and on, the north and east of their country. By Sri Lankans, whichever language they speak and who, despite all we write and say, should and will do as they please with their own country.

It is a collection of stories about the most wonderful people in South Asia, together emerging—rubbing their eyes, frequently treading on each other’s toes—from the darkness of a long, murderous and frightening tunnel, into the dappled sunshine, sudden showers and dazzling greenery that their bounteous land is legendary for.

Sri Lanka: The New Country will, I hope, inspire readers to get to know north and east Sri Lanka with leisure, equanimity and an open mind.

Padma Rao Sundarji

New Delhi, January 2015

CHAPTER ONE

THE PAST, THE ‘FRAGILE PEACE’ AND THE TIGER IN HIS LAIR

An appreciation of Sri Lanka as a ‘new country’ would not be possible without revisiting the old. So, in some chapters, I will take a few quick and superficial steps backwards, primarily for readers who may know little about the more recent political history of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon.

In this chapter, since it is the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict that dominated and determined my own decades in Sri Lanka, I will venture only as far back to illustrate the emergence of chauvinism on both sides and the formation of the dreaded militant outfit, the LTTE.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, the British gained control of Ceylon from the Dutch, who handed over first a part and then the entire Ceylon territory held by them to the British.

As they did in other countries, the British brought indentured workers from south India to work on coffee, tea and rubber plantations in the highlands of central and southern Ceylon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It is important to distinguish between this group of Tamils, who, till date, are known as the ‘up-country’ or Indian Origin Tamils (IOTs) and the so-called ‘Sri Lankan Tamils’ of the northern and eastern parts of the country.

The Tamils of the north and east, are, to date and for administrative purposes (whether a good or flawed practice is not for me to decide), known as Sri Lankan Tamils and draw their origin from the Pallavas, Pandyas and Cholas who ruled Ceylon, but also from the Jaffna kingdom of the Aryacacravartis, which is said to have been founded by a ruler from the Kalinga kingdom in ancient India more than 700 years before the arrival of the British.

It is important also to note that the IOTs, who still live and work mostly in the tea estates of southern and central Sri Lanka, never formed part of the separatism movement in the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka, nor did they sympathize or identify with it in any way.

Until the early twentieth century, there was reportedly no ethnic animosity of the kind more modern times have seen between various religious and ethnic groups in Ceylon.

Few in Sri Lanka will deny and most South Asians—the neighbouring countries India, Pakistan and (formerly East Pakistan) Bangladesh—will intuitively identify with the often heard theory that the earliest seeds of ethnic conflict were sown, whether unwittingly or not, by the erstwhile British colonial rulers.

A perusal of British history in its colonies around the world shows that desperate times always evoked desperate measures. Whenever countries united and demanded independence, London did its best to divide and fragment that unity. That was the case in India, as it was in Ceylon.

From 1911 onwards, the British made a series of political moves that firmly laid the ground for animosity between the majority Buddhist Sinhalese and the minority (mostly Hindu)Tamils. But from the very beginning and till date, the mutual mistrust between the two communities has been shaped more by ethnic than religious chauvinism.

Since most of the superior missionary educational institutions had been set up in Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka, the British began increasingly to employ the educated Tamils of the north in the coveted Ceylon Civil Service, even though they constituted only 15 per cent of the country’s population.

From 1944 onwards and with the departure of the British in sight, Sinhalese chauvinism gained strength.

The demand for Sinhala to replace English even in Tamil-speaking areas of the north and the east grew. These areas began to receive an influx of Sinhalese settlers.

Finally, after Ceylon and other countries like India gained independence from British rule by the late 1940s, mutual hatred had already struck root.

The earliest riots between Sinhalese and Tamils broke out in 1958. (It was around this time that my grandparents, see Preface and Chapter 15, were in northern Sri Lanka).

Unrest spread like a bushfire across the country. Hundreds of Tamils were attacked and massacred by majority Sinhalese radical mobs all over Ceylon.

The LTTE chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was later to declare that the 1958 riots, which he had experienced as a boy, were the turning point for him.

No deaths were reported from the Jaffna peninsula itself. But moderate Sinhalese settled there were, in turn, attacked by Tamils, and the Buddhist Naga Vihara temple on the island of Nagadeepa off Jaffna was destroyed by Tamil mobs.

Until then, Tamils had employed peaceful sit-ins against growing Sinhalese intolerance. But by now, it was obvious that they had decided that an eye for an eye was the only option to protect themselves.

After the riots of 1958, Tamil political groups put forward a demand for autonomy, both for the north and the north-east of the country.

Around sixteen years later, by 1974, most groups had unified under what was then called the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). That was the first time there was talk of a separate state, to be called ‘Tamil Eelam’.

The TULF tried hard to seek a peaceful political solution.

But hot-headed and restless youth began to form small, random clusters; some took to arms. The result was that two years later, their common goal lay fragmented.

Then, there were frequent disagreements and fractiousness between the various armed groups themselves.

Prabhakaran was one such youth, who in 1972 formed a group called the New Tamil Tigers.

By 1975, he had killed a man: the moderate Tamil mayor of Jaffna, whom he shot at point-blank range.

In 1976 and after fierce disagreements with other factions, Prabhakaran founded the LTTE, which he headed right up to his death in 2009.

Provincial elections in 1977 were won by the TULF. But riots broke out again. More than 300 Tamils were killed.

Simultaneously, the LTTE went from strength to strength and emerged as the one group with the strongest separatist ambitions.

The point of no return came in July 1983, when the LTTE attacked Sri Lankan troops in Jaffna.

In what came to be known as ‘Black July’, on 23 July 1983, there was a bloody backlash against innocent Tamils all over the country, beginning 358 km to the south-west in the capital Colombo. Thousands of Tamils had their houses burned down and were rendered homeless.

Black July remains a day of commemoration to date for the chauvinistic elements within the Tamil diaspora, who still nurture separatist ambitions outside Sri Lanka (and whose host countries, despite proscribing the LTTE in more recent years, still allow their Sri Lankan Tamil citizens to carry the LTTE flag to commemorate the day). It is also marked by Sinhalese Sri Lankans as a day of respect for the thousands of troops lost in the long civil war.

This was the beginning of the three-decade-long civil war, as we in more modern times know it, in Sri Lanka. A bitter separatist war that was aided and abetted by some—though not all of the increasingly affluent Tamil diaspora around the world—through money and weapons transfers.

For several years, the LTTE and other groups were also helped and supported by the Government of India and its intelligence unit Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), which armed, trained and financed six Tamil militant organizations, including the LTTE.

India’s involvement was ostensibly in support—and at the behest—of sentiments in Tamil Nadu (read: political support from Tamil Nadu politicians) of course.

(Though their last-known direct links with Sri Lankan Tamils were as old as the Pallavas, and later the Cholas, two ancient south Indian kingdoms that had invaded and conquered Ceylon, Tamil Nadu politicians—with few exceptions—still treat the Sri Lankan domestic issue as their own, much to the growing discomfort and, indeed, embarrassment of most Sri Lankan Tamils themselves.)

Velupillai Prabhakaran, founder and chief of the LTTE, was legendary in India already in the 1980s. As a reporter then, I had caught glimpses of him at the Ashoka Hotel, where the bureau chiefs I had worked under had gone to meet him.

He was a smiling, shy, affable and handsome man, who was in Delhi as a state guest of the Government of India, which, in bumbling socialist-democratic fashion and given its own closeness to the former USSR, viewed the support to the Tamil ‘freedom fighters’, whom it armed, trained and assisted, as a bonus to ‘pay back’ Sri Lanka for its growing ties with the United States.

But New Delhi’s commitment to the LTTE changed track after an agreement (the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord of 1987) with Colombo.

It sent its troops to ‘keep peace’ in north Sri Lanka, but ended up getting bitterly and hopelessly embroiled in the war against the LTTE. The Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) returned with blood on its nose, not as much due to the incapability of the Indian Army as due to the lack of direction from its political leadership in New Delhi.

Four years later, Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, the co-author of the accord, was brutally assassinated by a suicide bomber of the LTTE on Indian soil. It was revenge for what the LTTE perceived as India’s ‘betrayal’.

Since then, though governments in New Delhi continue to have their arms twisted over relations with Colombo by politicians in Tamil Nadu, there is a perceptible distancing from Sinhalese-Tamil issues on the part of Central governments of all political hues