The Prabhakaran I knew

By R. Bhagwan Singh

(May 19, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) Some 25 years ago, as I sat in my newsroom chatting with Anton Balasingham, who all knew was the political guru of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the conversation turned to the Tiger chief’s recent wedding. It had taken place at a Murugan temple in Tiruporur, just 30 km south of Chennai. The bride Mathivadani had been forcibly ferried across the Palk Strait along with her campus mates by the LTTE to break their fast-to-death protest in Jaffna against the government.

Visiting the girls in hospital, Prabhakaran reportedly look a liking to the tough-talking Mathivadani and decided to marry her. "We are so happy that thambi has decided to marry. That will humanise him," Baalanna (as Balasingham was known among the Tiger cadres and his friends) told me then, referring to the diktat in force till then in the LTTE that prohibited romance and marriage.

Marriage and family, thought Prabhakaran’s colleagues, would soften him a bit as against his addiction to the militant campaign for Eelam, to guns, and to death. Prabhakaran needed some four gms of gold to make a mangalsutra for his bride. "Thambi borrowed that little gold from me, promising to repay me in due course of time, which he did," Prabhakaran’s maternal uncle, who shared the same name as his father Velupillai, told me later.

The old man and his wife were Prabhakaran’s "guardians", providing him with food and shelter when he was on the run from the police as a teenager in Jaffna and his God-fearing father Velupillai, a government employee, strongly disapproved of the boy’s militant campaign to secure Tamil rights. The uncle and aunt were killed about a month ago when a shell fell on their tiled house in Puthukudiyiruppu, the last Tiger town to fall in the Wanni before the LTTE was pushed into the small beachside strip along with many civilians to meet its end.

AIADMK chief minister M.G. Ramachandran had helped Prabhakaran with funds and government support. To recall Balasingham again, a childless MGR considered the young Prabhakaran as a son since he was impressed with his "disciplined" life — no romance, no smoking and no liquor — and during many breakfast meetings he would keenly observe the Tiger chief explaining his latest gun.

When the then state intelligence chief, K. Mohandas, ordered the seizure of the weapons of all militants in the state, Prabhakaran went on a fast-unto-death demanding they be returned and all the arrested cadres released. MGR got the DGP to return to Prabhakaran not only his own guns but also many that were picked up from the other groups.

When I went to interview Prabhakaran at his Indira Nagar place, where he was lying down tired during that protest-fast, he spoke at length about the need for Eelam, arguing there was no alternative since successive Sinhala regimes had failed the Tamils. In a few days he disappeared, quietly taking the boat to Jaffna so that he could function independent of Indian pressure.

New Delhi did not like that one bit, uncomfortable that the Tiger chief had begun looking for other friends to expand his network globally. The two ceased trusting each other since then.

-Sri Lanka Guardian