The Rout of Prabhakaran (Also includes Inside An Elusive Mind book)

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This is a brutally frank post-mortem of the nihilist politics that led to the bloody and brutal end of the LTTE's founder, Velupillai Prabhakaran, in May 2009, bringing a quarter century of armed conflict to a close.

For too long, the miseries of Sri Lanka's Tamil minority have been blamed on the Sinhalese, successive governments in Colombo, the Indian State, even the International community, and sections of Tamils within the island nation.

This book, based on extensive research and interviews, clears away many cobwebs of a troubled history.

It concludes that while the reluctance of the Sri Lankan State to come to terms with Tamil political aspirations played its part, at Prabhakaran's door lies much of the blame for dragging the Tamil community through three decades of a horrific war for the pipedream that was Eelam, a war that yielded no solutions, and which ended with his own death alongside the carnage of Tamil civilians and the demise of the LTTE.

M.R. Narayan Swamy, one of India's best-recognised writers on Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict, has been a journalist for more than four decades. He has visited Sri Lanka numerous times to cover the Tamil separatist campaign, often spending months on the island.

This book-his fourth on the subject is the outcome of countless interactions with Tamil guerrillas, military generals, diplomats, policymakers, and others in the Sri Lankan government and beyond.

Even after the LTTE was crushed in 2009, he continues to write about the conflict's dark shadows that still haunt Sri Lanka.

Narayan Swamy lives in New Delhi.

Thus work is a post-mortem of Velupillai Prabhakaran, an epoch-making phenomenon who first shook and then tormented Sri Lanka for well over a quarter century Hopefully, given my age, this will be my last major work on the island nation's ethnic conflict that ended on a sickeningly bloody note in May 2009

When I began taking interest in and writing on the armed campaign for an independent State called Tamil Eelam, Prabhakaran had already graduated from the university of violence with an admirable scorecard. For one who fled his home in the early 1970s when police personnel came knocking at his family home in Jaffina, the man invested a dedicated decade in Tamil nationalist politics with occasional bouts of violence that slowly upped his revolutionary profile.

However, despite killing the Tamil mayor of Jaffna in 1975 and starting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) the next year, Prabhakaran remained a largely unknown figure although he was a key member of what was then a nascent, even if murky and fragmented, society of young men who mostly led an underground existence. The struggle for Tamil independence from Sri Lanka remained foggy and did not appear particularly headed anywhere. So much so that when Prabhakaran got caught, for the first and last time by authorities anywhere, after a shootout with a compatriot in May 1982 in Madras, as the Tamil Nadu capital was then known, one Indian publication wrongly labelled him a bicycle thief!

Within a year, the world had changed for Prabhakaran so irrevocably that it was soon assumed he, a school dropout, was now scripting history in Sri Lanka. The July 1983 massacre of 13 Sri Lankan soldiers who were all Sinhalese, the majority community led by Prabhakaran, and the anti-Tamil orgy it triggered, permanently altered the destiny of the country that had until then been known mainly for its famed tea and as a tropical tourist paradise. As Tamil militancy began to gallop, Prabhakaran quickly made the neighbouring Indian state of Tamil Nadu his new home and oversaw a steady and rapid growth of his LTTE.

Within four years, the man had evolved so much in stature and confidence that he took on the military might of India, which had deployed troops in Sri Lanka's north and east under a pact with Colombo in a bid to end Tamil separatism. Once the Indian troops quit the island in 1990, thanks to a cocktail of circumstances, Prabhakaran looked very, very tall-one who was the virtual king of all that he surveyed in much of Sri Lanka's war zone. By any stretch of imagination, it was a remarkable and jaw-dropping feat, one which ignited jealousy and hatred-laced disbelief as well as applause and admiration in perhaps equal measure.

It was during this period that Prabhakaran began to change for the worse. But very few people, including in the Tamil community both in Sri Lanka and India, gauged the long-term ramifications of this worrying development. If you take away the trappings of Tamil nationalism and a few historical figures mainly from Indu whom he admired, Prabhakaran was really not a student of politics. Politics, for him, was the gun. ""Will my gun remain silent if this were to happen?"" he famously quipped when a few Sri Lankan Tamil visitors called on him in Madras in the mid-1980s and expressed fear that the Goliath called India might decide to squeeze his armed struggle.

The gun, thus, became an answer to overcome each and every obstacle in the chessboard of Tamil Eelam. And sunce all is considered fair in love and war, the blood-soaked blemishes in Prabhakaran's life post 1983 were overlooked by most people. True, voices of dissent and even disgust had begun to emerge but much of it was ignored and cast aside by the sheer attraction of what looked like a winning game played adroitly by the insurgent leader and his LTTE.

The cold-blooded and absolutely deplorable massacre of Sinhalese Buddhists in the holy city of Anuradhapura was one of the first major crimes Prabhakaran committed. It was quickly followed by the fascistic annihilation of rival Tamil militant groups in Sri Lanka's north and east so that Prabhakaran would alone be the sole arbiter of Tamil destiny, the only community leader the world would have to deal with. It did not matter that the Sinhalese pilgrims in Anuradhapura were a religious lot and as innocent as the ordinary Tamils who were set upon by Sinhalese mobs in Colombo in 1983. And it also did not matter that an overwhelming majority of Tamil militants whose mass murders he ordered were as committed to the cause of Tamil Eelam as he was In a new Tamil galaxy where he was pitched as the ever-illuminating and life-giving Sun God, Prabhakaran alone mattered. His word was the law He was always right and could not be challenged by anyone. If you bowed to him and agreed with whatever he said and did, you could fight for Tamil Eelam, as a cog in a large wheel, if you disagreed, you had to either quit the LTTE or the world. Since Prabhakaran styled himself as the accuser as well as the judge, the dissenters were dubbed ""traitors"" and punished the way Joseph Stalin, the former Soviet leader, dealt with his enemies, real and perceived. Many faded away, moving to unknown areas to survive. No wonder that British political philosopher David Selbourne, who at one time appeared sympathetic to the Tamil cause, publicly accused, by the early 1990s, Prabhakaran of being a ""tin-pot dictator"".

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