Prabhakaran’s militarist strategy led to doom, says revealing book | M.R. Narayan Swamy

The seeds for a miserable end to Velupillai Prabhakaran’s Tamil Eelam dream were laid by the man himself — a long, long, long time ago.

This is the conclusion one draws after reading a brutally honest and at times painful sketch of the early years of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by one of Prabhakaran’s earliest associates, Ganeshan Iyer.

The Tamil work, Porattahil Enadhu Pathivugal, was first published abroad in 2011, two years after Prabhakaran was slain. It was republished by London’s Art of Socio Publication in 2024. I laid my hands on it only last week! The book is hardly known in India.

Iyer, like many young Tamils in Sri Lanka’s northeast, was attracted to militant politics in the 1970s in response to an increasingly aggressive Buddhist-Sinhalese state.

For good measure, he took an immediate liking to a young, energetic and secretive Prabhakaran, who is described as a “hero” more than once due to his dare-devilry, including the 1975 killing of Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duriappah, an audacious murder which shook the Sri Lankan state.

Iyer remained steadfastly loyal to Prabhakaran as the latter, known as Karikalan after a bomb exploded prematurely and burnt one of his legs, set up a fledgling Tamil New Tigers (TNT) and later renamed it the LTTE.

It is this proximity which gives Iyer’s account of Prabhakaran’s early years, otherwise wrapped in layers of secrecy, an authentic touch because the author was a witness to many events which others only heard about.

In Iyer’s view, Prabhakaran was fiercely committed to the cause of Tamil Eelam; anything and everything he did was done with an eye on the ultimate goal. Over the years, Prabhakaran became convinced that Tamil Eelam – an independent state for Tamils in Sri Lanka’s northeast – could be achieved.

There was only one hitch: Prabhakaran was equally sure that only violence and military actions would subdue Colombo and fetch Eelam. Mass politics and mass organisations were not for him.

He was also an extremely strict disciplinarian. Any violation of the rules he laid down to build the LTTE could not be violated. No questions must be posed to the leader. Indiscipline and loyalty would invite death. Among others, Prabhakaran adored Hitler for his military discipline, not Nazi philosophy.

All this was not visible when Iyer and Prabhakaran met for the first time amid a vicious police crackdown that followed the Duriappah 1975 murder.

It was one of the most trying times for Prabhakaran. He was on the run, hiding for a while at Kankesanthurai, along Jaffna’s northern coast. He had no money to buy food. The police netted anyone remotely linked to Tamil militants.

The long years Prabhakaran and others spent in hiding to escape getting arrested – and frequently escaping by the sea to Tamil Nadu — comes out most convincingly in the book. Iyer and Prabhakaran became so close that the latter took no major decision without consulting the author.

Iyer details the first of training camps and farms which Prabhakaran opened in the forested regions in Sri Lanka’s north.

According to Iyer, Prabhakaran had no minor vices. At age 20, females did not attract him, he did not smoke, he shunned liquor, he kept away from movies (unless they related to war), and fiction was not for him. But he read books and magazines on war and weapons. “He had one perennial thought: Tamil Eelam.”
One of the most explosive chapters is about the April 1978 killings of Tamil police officer Bastiampillai and three of his colleagues at a LTTE farm. Iyer describes in chilling detail how the officer, notorious for the way he dealt with Tamil militants, surprised the Tigers (Prabhakaran was away then in Jaffna), but he and his team ended up getting murdered. Bastiampillai’s revolver later went into the possession of Prabhakaran; the officer’s automatic rifle which the Tigers seized became the first such weapon in the LTTE armoury. I have never read anywhere, even in LTTE literature, anything so detailed about the Bastiampillai incident which numbed Colombo.

Iyer unveils the slow and steady growth of the Tigers, Prabhakaran friend-turned-foe Uma Maheswaran’s entry into the LTTE and his later split, the robberies which enriched the Tigers, and the meticulous way Prabhakaran and his associates went about killing policemen and alleged police spies. He reveals that Prabhakaran almost got killed in January 1978 in Colombo during an attempt to assassinate a Tamil MP who had defected to the treasury benches. Imagine, if Prabhakaran had died that day?!

It is after years of association with Prabhakaran that doubts arose in Iyer’s mind about the path embraced by the Tigers. It bothered him and others that Prabhakaran had elevated killings to the level of political philosophy. Iyer was one of those who became unhappy that Prabhakaran murdered fellow (Tamil) travellers, equally idealistic, over minor differences or suspected disloyalty. For a long time, Iyer, like Prabhakaran, kept away from political and Left literature; once he delved into them, the seriousness of the situation dawned on him.

Iyer slowly became convinced that if the LTTE did not eschew this path of committing murders at the drop of a hat, it would lead to a terrible disaster. That, unfortunately, is what happened.

We know that from individual killings the Tigers went on for the mass extermination of perceived Tamil foes. Prabhakaran built a state where only blind loyalty could fetch you citizenship of the de facto Tamil Eelam. The LTTE did not have a military wing, it was the military. Any slightest deviation or remotest suspicion led to torture and execution. Many within the LTTE too became victims of this worldview. In the end, Prabhakaran and the LTTE disappeared from the scene, leaving behind a Tamil people who never asked for the brutal and unforgiving war they lived through.

Iyer realised that unlike liberation groups around the world whose fighters lived among the people, the Tigers survived in hiding away from the Tamil masses. The Tigers were not the classical fishes in water even if they perceived themselves to be so. For every murder of a dissenter which Prabhakaran justified, questions began to be raised.

Ultimately, Iyer and some others broke away from Prabhakaran. It was not an easy decision. Years of bonding were involved. There are attempts to unite again but these did not succeed; one reason being Prabhakaran’s adamant refusal to shun the belief that only military means would fetch Tamil Eelam. Others refused to accept this; some first disagreed with Prabhakaran but moved back to his company after a while.
This is a fascinating, moving and gripping book which anyone interested in the Tamil Eelam story and Sri Lanka must read. I hope it is translated into English.