'This was a decision taken and executed by Prabhakaran and his intelligence chief Pottu Amman. Both were convinced that the assassination would not be linked to them.'
Sixteen years after his death, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran's life has been a mystery.
He spared none of his enemies' lives if they crossed him. Dedicated teams of Tamil Tigers and suicide squads went to any extent to eliminate its opponents.
An LTTE suicide bomber murdered Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991.
In his final days the portly terrorist was cornered by the Sri Lankan army and his death on May 18, 2009 marked the dream of a Tamil Eelam, a separate homeland for Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Journalist M R Narayan Swamy's fascinating book The Rout of Prabhakaran delves into the life of the most feared man in South Asia.
"It is easy to glorify Prabhakaran as long as you have not been a victim. If you ask Tamil parents whose children, mainly from poor families, were forced to enlist in the LTTE and wage war, they are not going to praise Prabhakaran," Narayan Swamy tells Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com.
The last book on Prabhakaran you wrote was in 2010, The Tiger Vanquished. What made you revisit Prabhakaran with this new book?
The Tiger Vanquished came out a year after the LTTE was crushed. At that time, it was a timely overview of why the struggle met such a fiery end.
In any case, that book was a collection of news stories and analyses I had done over time on Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict.
Fifteen years down the line, by when a lot of bitter truths about the LTTE has become public, I felt it was time to revisit the story, dwelling on the why the Tigers went down after promising for a quarter century to create an independent Tamil State.
The latest book is a post-mortem of Prabhakaran and his politics.
It is difficult to define Prabhakaran's life -- for some he was a freedom fighter liberating the Tamils and for many he was a terrorist. Where do you place him?
Prabhakaran certainly had a cause when he plunged into Tamil militancy in the 1970s, a dream shared by many Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Unfortunately, as it often happens in history, he squandered it all by turning his weapons against the very people he claimed to represent and killing Tamils who too believed in the Tamil Eelam cause but who did not agree with him.
It is easy to glorify Prabhakaran as long as you have not been a victim. If you ask Tamil parents whose children, mainly from poor families, were forced to enlist in the LTTE and wage war, they are not going to praise Prabhakaran.
Ditto for the Tamils, moderates and militants, who were hunted down and killed at various stages by the Tigers.
Prabhakaran believed in violence as so do many revolutionaries/terrorists depending how you perceive them like Hamas' Yahya Sinwar. Why do they think that the end goal can only be achieved through violence and the answer to State oppression is only retaliation by terror?
A very valid question, indeed.
It is a tragedy that people like Prabhakaran and Sinwar felt that violence, and that too brutal violence, was the only way to achieve their goal.
The end result is horrifically tragic -- as we saw in Sri Lanka and now in Gaza.
As some former LTTE fighters say, Prabhakaran had no right to decide unilaterally that Tamils had to fight till the last man and make no compromises.
Did this stand achieve Tamil Eelam?
A former LTTE woman fighter told me that Tamils stood on two legs even after the terrible anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka in 1983. A quarter century and a hundred thousand deaths later, the Tamils were on bended knees.
This is the outcome of the violent politics which Prabhakaran embraced.
Why did Prabhakaran not believe in democracy even when Mahinda Rajapaksa offered that he become the ruler of North and East Sri Lanka on the condition he lay down arms?
Why did he have trust issues with the Sri Lankan establishment?
My reading is that Prabhakaran came to believe in his self-importance and was led to think that no one would ever be able to defeat him militarily.
Otherwise, he would have never allowed a Sinhalese hardliner like Mahinda Rajapaksa to become president of Sri Lanka in 2005 by asking Tamils to boycott the presidential election, leading to the defeat of Ranil Wickremesinghe, who signed a peace pact with him.
Yes, he did not trust the Sri Lankan State -- but the vice versa was true too.
More than that, he thought he was destined to win and Colombo was destined to lose. When you place too much importance on the gun, you lose your political faculty.
Even Oslo's peacemakers could not do anything to influence Prabhakaran?
The Norwegians were very confident earlier that they would be able to bring Prabhakaran around to a negotiated settlement.
In this, they meant well.
But they did not reckon with Prabhakaran's intransigence, which itself arose from his cocky confidence that he was bound to win one day.
Erik Solheim, the Norwegian diplomat who oversaw the peace process, told me that senior LTTE member Anton Balasingham was all for a settlement with the Sri Lankan government but he could not persuade Prabhakaran to think on similar lines.
What amazes me is the kind of loyalty that Prabhakaran commanded. How did he get such trained, loyal, brainwashed youths among the Tamils?
Prabhakaran certainly had a charisma that drew hundreds to his LTTE. Many were willing to die at his command -- and they did.
Most LTTE combatants viewed him as one who won't compromise with Colombo. Little did they realise that this adamant refusal to shake hands with a foe would cost them terribly one day.
But do note that thousands of LTTE fighters surrendered to the military towards the end of the war -- in other words they did not want to follow the Prabhakaran path any more.
And thousands of fighters also gave up the gun over time and moved away from Sri Lanka to start life anew in the West.
In other words, Prabhakaran had very many loyal followers; but there were plenty of dissenters too.
How come no one dared to question him within the LTTE for his violent behaviour?
When you preach and practise violence the way Prabhakaran did, very few will dare to oppose you.
Those who did were cut down.
Some drifted away over time because they could not agree with Prabhakaran any more.
Even Balasingham, supposedly his advisor, bitterly differed with him over some issues, including the decision to kill Rajiv Gandhi.
As some former associates have told me, Prabhakaran did not appreciate dissent. This was clear to everyone. Even if someone raised an issue he did not like, he would steer the discussion to another topic.
How were Prabhakaran's suicide squad recruited? What motivated young teenagers to give their life for their leader and their cause?
As I said, Prabhakaran certainly had charisma. This drew many young Tamils to him.
One reason was the unending war and the belief that Prabhakaran would lead them to victory.
Among the many who joined him, there were those who were willing to die by becoming suicide bombers. It was drilled into their minds that their sacrifices would take the Tamils closer to freedom.
This was akin to how Islamist groups influenced many Muslims to die for a so-called cause. But also remember that thousands of LTTE fighters chose life over death by surrendering to the military.
Why do human emotions fade away from society and deaths do not matter to any side of the party, be it the LTTE or the Sri Lankan government? How did Sri Lankan society evolve in this manner from the 1980s to 2010?
The Sri Lanka story should be studied in some detail by everyone, particularly in South Asia, to appreciate what happens when majoritarianism grips the larger society.
If you keep aside English, Sri Lanka has only two languages; and it has only two major communities, Sinhalese and Tamils (even though Tamil-speaking Muslims consider themselves a different group).
The Sinhalese mindset to impose their language on the Tamils was a disaster. No majority community anywhere should impose its views, religion, language or customs on minorities.
My fear is that many Sri Lankans do not understood this even now although a lot of people on both sides of the ethnic divide now appreciate much of what went wrong in their country.
Do you feel killing Rajiv Gandhi was one of Prabhakaran's biggest mistakes? Did he ever regret the decision?
Without doubt, the killing Rajiv Gandhi was a monumental blunder the LTTE committed.
This was a decision taken and executed by Prabhakaran and his intelligence chief Pottu Amman. Both were convinced that the assassination would not be linked to them.
Before his own death by suicide weeks before the LTTE was crushed, Pottu Amman told his confidants that the LTTE committed three major blunders. One, he said, was the killing of Rajiv Gandhi. The other two were the mass expulsion of Muslims from Jaffna in 1990 and the forced recruitment of children from poor Tamil families for years.
Gandhi's killing irrevocably turned the Indian State against the LTTE. It was an irony but the most powerful person in India when Prabhakaran got killed was Sonia Gandhi, a woman he had made a widow in 1991.
Why did Prabhakaran become delusional towards the end and never believed he was losing the war?
This is the problem when people come to feel that they are chosen prophets and that they alone know what is good for their people.
If he was not under this illusion, he would have made some compromises and reached a settlement with the Sri Lankan State. It would have spared thousands of lives. But he did not do this.
In the end, did he get his Tamil Eelam? Did the LTTE succeed? Are the Tamils in Sri Lanka today better off compared to what they were a quarter century ago? Answers to these questions will reveal the success or otherwise of Prabhakaran's politics.
Is the dream of Tamil Eelam permanently buried? Can Tamil separatism ever rise in Sri Lanka?
Others may have different views. In any case, only perfect astrologers can speak confidently about tomorrow.
My own reading is that the Tamil separatist campaign as we knew it is dead and gone. It cannot be revived.
Pro-LTTE sections living abroad who fancy a revival are living in a fool's paradise.
Many ordinary Tamils in Sri Lanka, including those who were in the LTTE, feel betrayed. Most Tamils do not want to suffer any more in the name of another so-called liberation struggle.
What does young Sri Lankans think today of Tamils in their country? Do they feel violence and Tamil separatism can rise once again?
As times change, priorities change.
Many Sri Lankans understand -- this is my reading, though I may be wrong -- now that good governance is what they need, not chauvinism or majoritarianism.
But a quarter century of a horrific conflict and a longer fractured Tamil-Sinhalese relationship has produced an 'us' and 'them' syndrome in Sri Lanka.
It will not be easy to overcome this tragic divide, not in the short run.
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