When Velupillai Prabhakaran, who is heading the LTTE that has been banned by India and the West as a terrorist outfit and who is wanted for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, gives an audience to noted Tamil film directors K Mahendran and Bharathi Raja, Lanka watchers will have to sit up and take note.
For Prabhakaran was known to be elusive, as any guerilla leader should be, even when he was in Chennai in the late 1980s. In fact, he is not accessible to the people he rules in the small territory comprising Mullaitivu and Killinochi in northern Sri Lanka which are under LTTE control. He did not even address them through LTTE television during the December 2004 tsunami.
When such a person calls the two directors to his hideout for a meeting, it cannot merely be to request them to make an authentic film on the Eelam Tamils struggle. While Mahendran is electrified by Prabhakaran's persona, Bharathi Raja compares him to Bhagat Singh. Prabhakaran takes the compliment in his stride and says Bhagat Singh is his hero too.
The pictures taken by the two with Prabhakaran in jungle fatigue are duly carried in Ananda Vikatan, a Tamil magazine of repute which is one of the most widely read in Tamil Nadu.
This is accompanied by a soft interview with both.
While Mahendran is somewhat circumspect, confining himself to cinema, Bharathi Raja makes the fatuitous contention that an entire community ( namely Eelam Tamils) should not be abandoned to their fate just because of one mistake, that is the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. He says Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who has graciously forgiven the Sikhs who killed her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi by making Dr Manmohan Singh Prime Minister, should be equally magnanimous with the Tigers.
There are two preposterous assumptions here. One, the killing of a former Prime Minister of India, that too in Tamil Nadu soil, is just a mistake. Two, Dr Singh has been made Prime Minister because he is a Sikh. This is chauvinism at its worst. Yet, the magazine lets it go.
Outraged by Bharathi Raja's comments, journalist and writer Vasanthi says in a rejoinder that we should not confuse the Sri Lankan Tamils with the Tigers and that we have not abandoned the refugees. Secondly, India is still for a negotiated settlement of the ethnic issue. This invites a sharp retort from pro-LTTE Tamil film lyricist Thamarai, who claims that she was in war-torn Sri Lanka ten years ago and has seen the army "atrocities". If Prabhakaran's plan is to revive the kinship of the pre-Rajiv Gandhi era, he has to start with succeeded in starting a debate that deals with a highly complex issue on an emotional plane on the basis of linguistic affinity. Thus the massacre of innocent Sinhalese bus passengers in Anuradhapura (never mind the first one in the same place in 1985) is the handiwork of Sri Lankan intelligence to project the Tigers as terrorists, as LTTE's political wing leader Tamilchelvan would want the world to believe. The Sri Lankan army is Sinhala army out to kill innocent Tamils and rape Tamil women, if the coverage of the recent escalation in the conflict in the island by Vikatan and a few Tamil newspapers is anything to go by.
In short, the LTTE propaganda is being swallowed with willing suspension of disbelief. The pro-LTTE propaganda seeks to gain legitimacy by pointing to the bombing of Sencholai orphanage in Mullaitivu by the Sri Lankan air force, in which scores of school children were killed. One account says that when Prabhakaran visited the orphanage and saw the bodies, he was moved to tears.
The propaganda will gain further ground now that the army has been accused of executing 17 Tamils working for an international NGO in embattled Muttur town in eastern Trincomalee district. The massacre of a group of Muslims returning to their homes will add grist to the propaganda mill, though Colombo and the LTTE are blaming each other.
What is lost sight of in this vitiated atmosphere is that the LTTE, which claims to fight for the Tamils, has systematically and ruthlessly eliminated over the years Tamil leaders who crossed its path, and the victims range from veteran TULF parliamentarians A Amirthalingam and intellectual Neelan Tiruchelvan to Loganathan Keteeswaran. No tear is shed for these Tamils in Tamil Nadu.
Why is Prabhakaran out to manipulate the two powerful media--cinema and Tamil weeklies and dailies? The reason is obvious. Having been banned by the US, and more recently by the European Union, Prabhakaran wants India on his side. What better way to pressurise New Delhi than through Tamil Nadu?
At the political level, he has lobbyists like Vaiko, Nedumaran, Thol Tirumavalavan and to an extent K Veeramani and Dr S Ramadosse from Tamil Nadu, besides George Fernandes and to an extent jurist V R Krishna Iyer to speak up for him and his outfit. The lobbyists have succeeded in stalling the Indo-Sri Lanka defence cooperation agreement. The media is being wooed by the LTTE to revive the 1983 spirit when the entire State mourned the massacre of Tamils in one of the worst pogroms in the island.
Ultimately, only two leaders can influence India's Sri Lanka policy-- AIADMK's J Jayalalitha and DMK's M Karunanidhi. While Ms Jayalalitha remains firmly against the LTTE, despite her alliance with Mr Vaiko and Mr Thirumavalavan, Chief Minister M Karunandhi wants to ride two horses. Hence his contradictory statement that the ban on the LTTE is debatable, but no one should undermine India's sovereignty in the name of fighting for the Eelam cause.
Karunanidhi's dilemma is understandable. He is the self-styled leader of Tamils of the world. At the same time, he has to be alive to the sensitivities of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. At least, he has had the courage to say, albeit indirectly, that the atmosphere that prevailed before the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi cannot be revived in Tamil Nadu.
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