Eating The Cake And The Cherry YSR has shot back to power, thanks to strategic moves and a massive PR exercise, says AJIT SAHI
SHORTLY AFTER the second and final round of balloting for the Lok Sabha elections in his state ended on April 23, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy travelled to New Delhi and met Congress president Sonia Gandhi. “32,” he told her, according to a senior party leader. That was the number of Lok Sabha seats he promised the party would win in his state. And then, he proceeded to the cool environs of Shimla for a short but much needed break from politics. As it turned out last week, Reddy’s Congress won 33 of the state’s 42 constituencies — four more than in 2004 — giving Andhra Pradesh the distinction of sending the largest number of Congress MPs from any state to the 15th Lok Sabha. YSR, as he is widely known, also won 158 of the Assembly’s 294 seats, becoming the first Congress CM in three decades to get a successive second term. Incidentally, he is also the state’s only CM to ever complete a full five-year term. What makes the win unique is that YSR, who will be 60 years old in July, successfully sidestepped a massive campaign alleging corruption, launched by his key rival, former Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and its four-party alliance. The TDPled ‘Grand Alliance’ had even presented President Pratibha Patil with documents to back claims that the chief minister and his son, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy — who, too, has been elected an MP — were involved in illegal land and corporate deals, including the Satyam scandal. But the voters didn’t buy that. “Everyone accepts that corruption is natural,” says political commentator K Sree Lakshmamma in the central town of Guntur. “People voted for YSR’s development work of the last five years, ignoring the charges of corruption.” “YSR was focussed on bringing in development right from the start,” adds Amar Devulapalli, chairman of the Press Academy of Andhra Pradesh in Hyderabad. “Two crore people have benefited from his schemes; the voters didn’t want to disturb his government.” Much of YSR’s famous victory is attributed to his all-round personality, that of a crafty politician, who deeply values and rewards loyalty, and a no-nonsense administrator. YSR began on a high after becoming CM in 2004, crushing Naxal insurgents that had been entrenched in Andhra Pradesh for decades and had killed thousands of police and paramilitary, after talks with them broke down. A medical doctor who once treated the poor for free, YSR’s welfare sops included selling rice at Rs 2 per kg, ensuring free medical treatment to BPL (below poverty line) families at ‘corporate’ hospitals, supplying free electricity to farmers, a pension scheme for widows, waiver of farm loans, and a highly subsidised housing scheme named after former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. YSR also announced a four percent reservation for backward Muslims.
WHEN FILM star Chiranjeevi launched the Praja Rajya party (PRP) last August, triggering speculation that he could challenge YSR, the chief minister immediately began a comprehensive PR campaign publicising his various welfare steps, the most notable being the massive irrigation projects worth over Rs 1 lakh crore to provide water to some ten million acres of agricultural land. In fact, YSR chose the route of launching welfare schemes — which have totalled 26 — to not only trip up the opposition but also wean away legislators from a rival within the party: state Congress president, D Srinivas, who has lost the Assembly election. Predictably, more than 180 of the Congress candidates that fought the Assembly elections are YSR loyalists. This has ensured that his base within the party remains strong, even after some 14 ministers lost the election, as did the Assembly speaker. After a former ally, the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS), which wants a separate state in the Telangana region of northwest Andhra Pradesh, quit the Congress-led alliance in 2006, YSR launched several welfare schemes in Telangana. “We wanted voters to move away from the TRS,” says a Congress leader close to the chief minister. YSR’s focus on Telangana paid off as the TRS won only 10 of the 46 Assembly seats it contested there. The Congress won 50 seats. In the coastal regions, YSR called off a 1,000-km industrial corridor when protests by villagers, who claimed that they were being forced to part with their land, threatened to balloon into a controversy. This was a smart political move, because many of these villagers belonged to the numerically significant Hindu Kapu caste. Chiranjeevi, who is a Kapu, failed to get the caste to vote en masse for the PRP. Instead, they voted for YSR. YSR’s son Jagan, who also campaigned dedicatedly across the state, launched a huge publicity campaign through his newspaper and TV news channel, both named Sakshi. As the state’s two biggest newspapers — Andhra Jyothi and Eenadu — ran news exposing government corruption, Sakshi took on the opposition and highlighted the government schemes. All throughout, YSR ensured that he kept party bigwigs on his side. He shrewdly obliged three ministers in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s previous government, S Jaipal Reddy, D Purandareswari and Panabaka Lakshmi, by giving them new constituencies from where each of them won. A smart strategist, YSR launched on a month-long election tour covering more than 20 districts in the state, working 18-hour days, until long after his key rivals — Chiranjeevi as well as Telugu film actors Junior NTR and Balakrishna of the TDP — were beginning to wind down. Indeed, YSR’s achievement is being hailed all the more because he humbled two giants — former CM Naidu whose TDP ruled the state for three terms during 1983-2004, and Chiranjeevi, whose PRP was widely expected to mount a massive challenge.
Naidu’s loss is more overwhelming because he stitched up a pre-election alliance with three former Congress allies: the TRS, the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Communist Party of India. That the PRP would undercut the Congress and not the TDP was the biggest miscalculation most people made, including Naidu,” says commentator BV Chalapathi Rao, a politics professor in Sri Venkateswara University in the temple town of Tirupathi. Actually, the TDP and the PRP ended up undercutting each other, thereby benefitting the Congress tremendously. A close look at the numbers reveals that in as many as 25 Lok Sabha seats that the Congress won, the combined votes of the TDP-led four-party alliance and the PRP exceeded the Congress votes. In at least 17 of those seats, the opposition jointly polled more than a lakh votes over the winning Congress candidate. Indeed, although the final Lok Sabha tally read Congress 33 and the TDP-led alliance 8, the vote difference between the two sides was only a fraction over one percent. But a winner-takes-all system that doesn’t care how the vote is split ensured that the Congress ‘swept’ the state and YSR emerged a hero. WRITER’S EMAIL | ||||
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 21, Dated May 30, 2009 |
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Eating The Cake And The Cherry
The Hour Of The Untamed Cosmopolitan
The Hour Of The Untamed Cosmopolitan Bred on radical diversity and an epic culture, the voter makes a reckoning of Narendra Modi, Prakash Karat, Mayawati and the politics of excess ASHIS NANDY, Social Scientist AFTER ALMOST two decades, in many ways, the election of 2009 was a normal election. No overriding consideration drove the voting across the country. Diverse configurations in diverse places determined the fate of different candidates and parties. Different regions had different logic even within a given state. Still, underlying the diversity there were some common themes.  First, I think people were looking for ways to lower the temperature of politics. High-pitched politics has reigned in our polity for nearly 15 years now. My suspicion is people were a bit tired of this. For example, the past two elections showed that in Uttar Pradesh, only one percent of the electorate was interested in Ram Janmabhoomi. The BJP probably played down the issue this year because their internal assessment showed the same thing. Except in West Bengal, nowhere did the election involve an emotional arousal of the kind we have come to routinely expect. There are reasons for this. In our society, we live with radical diversities — diversity that is not based on tamed forms of difference. The US is a perfect example of tamed diversity. You get every kind of food and dress and cultural activity in America. You think you are very cosmopolitan if you can distinguish Huaiyang food from Schezwan food, or South Korean ballet from Beijing opera, or Ming dynasty china from Han dynasty china in a museum. This is diversity that is permissible, legitimate, tamed. Radical diversity is when you tolerate and live with people who challenge some of the very basic axioms of your political life. Like most of South Asia, Indians have an old capacity to live with such diversity. A powerful example is Sajjad Lone contesting the election this year. Nobody objected that a secessionist wants to take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. Everyone spoke of it glowingly. I consider that a tolerance for radical diversity. In such a society, all excesses are ultimately checkmated. In India, we live in a country where the gods are imperfect and the demons are never fully demonic. I call this an ‘epic culture’ because an epic is not complete without either the gods or the demons. They make the story together. This is a part of our consciousness, and ultimately, I think it influences our public life. People go up to a point with their grievance, then get tired of it. They realise that to go further is a dangerous thing because it destroys the basic algorithm of your life. They say, enough is enough, let us go back to a normal life. This election represents something of that consciousness. We probably need this kind of interregnum in politics. They have a soothing effect on our public life. This is what most Indians feel. The second underlying theme is that people were searching for a sort of minimum decency. Negative campaigns, excessively personal attacks, hostile slogans — all of this seemed to upset the voter. When the BJP and the Left targeted Manmohan Singh, making him the butt of jokes and accusations, Singh became a hero for the very qualities people joked about. His weakness, his absence of a political base, his susceptibility to pressures of the Congress high command — instead of looking like liabilities, these things suddenly began to look like a marker of a genteel type of politics. I think that paid dividends. Contrasted with their shrill opponents, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi’s conduct too paid dividends. (I asked a waiter at the India International Centre in Delhi what he felt about the election results. “It’s been very good,” he said. Was he a Congress supporter, I asked him. “It’s not that, sahib,” he replied. “That Sardarji is a good man. He is educated, he is not a thief, and he is a newcomer to politics. Still, they got after him, calling him weak and scared. Who can enjoy watching that? I am just happy that this election result has shown there is a god watching above.” I quote the waiter verbatim because I think the idea of “a god above” might have been a consideration with many other people as well.) THE THIRD and interlinked theme this election was the voter’s desire to bring down the arrogant. The way Mayawati has lost, in what was once thought an inelastic support base, points to something very significant. Many people did not like the way she threw her weight around; her ostentation; the dozens of statues she is erecting in her likeness, her assumption that even if she did nothing to serve it further, history was waiting for her. Others did not like Narendra Modi. Yet others, Prakash Karat. Arrogance of style. Arrogance of ambition. The arrogance of neglecting the people. All of this was punished by the voter. Narendra Modi has marginalised all possible opposition within the BJP, and sidelined the RSS, Bajrang Dal and VHP. They cannot really muddy things for him easily anymore. He is a man looking for power and he has used and discarded them. He has a solid support base in West Gujarat and among middle-class Gujaratis, so there is no question of him fading away, but this election doubts have been planted about his capacity to emerge as a pan-Indian leader. He was billed as a star campaigner for the BJP, but the Indian voter has sent back a strong message scaling him down.
Controversial leaders rarely make it to the top job in India. Modi is determined not to talk of communities, determined not to apologise or even make a gesture towards the Muslim community to atone for the sins of Gujarat 2002. His refrain is that he is the leader of five-and-a-halfcrore Gujaratis, implying he is also the leader of Muslims. But this election should teach him some lessons in humility and modesty. It should give him some access to the language of politics in India. He will learn his lesson. Indian politics has taught humility to lots of people from Indira Gandhi to Mayawati. It will teach humility to Narendra Modi also. Unfortunately, there is a big similarity between Prakash Karat and Narendra Modi — however unpleasant that thought might be. They are both men who do not understand the wisdom of accommodation and cannot stomach the dilution of ideology. Like Modi and Mayawati, this election has scaled down the arrogance of Prakash Karat, but the debacle of the Left Front points to a deeper malaise. IN BENGAL, the party had been in power too long. In a society like ours, when any political party is on an ascendant, all gangs, thugs and extortionists gravitate towards that party. In UP, this mafia element was first attached to the Congress; then it moved to the BJP; then the SP; then the BSP, mirroring their rising political graphs. In Bengal, 32 years into power, all anti-social elements had become entrenched within the CPM. The party’s coercive might was enormous. In village after village, people from other parties were prevented from campaigning. That arrogance and control has not loosened very much, but it has started to crack. In the long run, I think Prakash Karat has done a lot of good to Bengal. These three decades of continuous rule had rotted the system to the core. If you miss power once in a while — however bad the Opposition may be — it keeps people and parties on their toes. (For instance, I believe it is good the BJP got a shot at winning power at the Centre one time. Not only did it limber up the Congress, it also allowed the BJP to get a sense that it can come to power if it gets its formulas right. This is very important to keep the rabid fringe like VHP, Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena in check. When you have legitimate power, you don’t have to use street power. You rein them in because it’s counter-productive and you want respectability.) But criminality and arrogance is not the only reason for the Left Front’s rout in Bengal and Kerala. The trouble is, their kind of Leninism has not survived anywhere in the world except in Cuba, Bengal and Kerala. Chandan Mitra would add tartly, “And the People’s Republic of Jawaharlal Nehru University.” This ideology has such an Edwardian ring to it, I am surprised it even captivated so many in India. The point is, this sense of a vanguard of the proletariat, this whole position is protected by middle-class activists. This is why despite 32 years in power, the truth is that the kind of revolutionary changes in social structures that have swept across India have not even touched West Bengal. Everything there is still controlled by the upper castes, and in some senses, it is the most casteist society in India. West Bengal is one state in India, for instance, where you cannot even dream of having a dalit chief minister. In contrast, in south India, the whole thing has opened up. So much new energy has been released. But has Bengal produced an AR Rahman? Or his guru, Illayaraja? Genius flowering from the bottom of society. Such release of energy from the non-brahminic castes has absolutely no parallel in Bengal.
There is little hope that the churn of this defeat will bring in any fresh thought into Marxism in Bengal. It cannot, because this is the last remnant of a colonial culture. That is why our Marxists are locked into their textbooks. That is why they haven’t picked up anything from Latin American Marxism or European Marxism, that is why there has been no new indigenous innovation. In such an intellectual world, rethinking comes through only two things: death and retirement. Once people start retiring and dying, a new generation will come in. Then it will be easy. They will just not bother with what has gone before. Ideas like this die out of neglect and carelessness, not through dramatic confrontation. The other important trend this election has thrown up, is the return of support to larger national level parties. One could read this as the start of a significant course correction. With the extreme proliferation of smaller parties and interest groups, perhaps the fragmentation of electoral power has stopped yielding dividends. Voters have realised it is best to allow larger parties to come to power at the Centre. The interesting thing is, though the pitch has been scaled down, one cannot read this election result as a post-Mandal era of politics. Many of the Congress’ traditional vote banks — the dalits and Muslims in UP, for instance — had moved away from the Congress to more ‘specialist parties’: the dalits moved to the BSP, the Muslims to Mulayam Singh. In Bihar, they moved towards Lalu. The attraction of these parties was that, being smaller, they were much more captive to the demands of their vote base. In a large, national party like the Congress, others’ demands checkmated your demands. Ironically, the movement back towards the Congress is a sign that the specialist parties like SP and BSP have become too big and bloated with ambition, and so less responsive to their vote banks. In effect, the Congress is now the new small party trying to build a new support base. People feel it might be more responsive to their needs. There are other reasons why it would be premature to read this election as a post-Mandal era. In India, except in very small, modern, urban pockets, the unit of mobility is not the individual; the unit of mobility is caste. The lowest common denominator for any party decision on their choice of candidates is caste — all other considerations of aptitude and intention come after that. In fact, we cannot reach a post- Mandal era of politics yet because entering politics from the periphery is still a very crucial instrument in Indian politics.
Some of the parties lay less emphasis on it because their constituencies have arrived in the mainstream. The Marathas, Patels, Vokkaligas, Lingayats, Jats. Yadavs too talk less about it because they have just arrived. Perhaps, with Nitish Kumar, Kurmis too will feel more secure. But there are still hundreds of communities who are not well represented. Now that the big communities have organised themselves and reaped the benefits, the smaller ones want a slice of the pie. Just as the Kammas emerged in the 1970s and 1980s through NTR, the Kapus have emerged this election through Chiranjeevi. These are much smaller communities. Earlier, they would have voted under larger umbrellas. Now they think they can carve out a smaller, more targeted domain or space in the political arena. Recently, the Gujjars began to lobby violently for Scheduled Tribe status — as if a mere Parliamentary decree can turn a group into a tribe. This sort of misuse, battles for quotas, unreasonable demands for affirmative action, and other forms of vote bank wheeling-dealing will continue to happen. But in the long run, all of this will be good for India. As representations in the system give different communities larger space, everybody’s stake in the democratic system will increase. In the long run, there will be so many crosscutting configurations, the problem will take care of itself. There is a big difference between caste groups angling for 35 or 40 Lok Sabha seats like Mulayam or Lalu, and a caste group contesting for eight or ten. Chiranjeevi, for instance, just has four or five seats. The scale is going down because we have already accommodated a lot of people. The next generation will not face this. They will inherit a much more inclusive world. FINALLY, a last word on arrogance. The Left parties may have been defeated this election, but the leftist impulse is intact in our society. In fact, it is an imperative. It would be a big mistake if the UPA saw this victory as a mandate for unbridled liberalisation. Some care for the bottom of the society, some belief that the poor should be a priority focus is vital for this society to survive and retain its idea of itself as a humane society. You cannot pay Rs 12,000 for a meal for two people in a five-star hotel and come out and throw Rs 10 to a boy competing with a dog for the garbage and think you have done your duty. Neither can you wait 200 years for the so-called trickle down effect that never comes. It is no accident that the real factor that won the UPA this election is its NREGA scheme and loan waiver for farmers. Even if 90 percent of this money is pilfered, it permeates into the countryside. Not all of the corruption is in Delhi and Bhubaneswar. A lot of the siphoning happens lower down the chain. Even those who rob, must spend. This boosts the local economy. This pays electoral dividends. India’s poor always vote. That is India’s best checkmate for arrogance. | |||
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 21, Dated May 30, 2009 |
Friday, May 15, 2009
The Man Who Destroyed Eelam
The Man Who Destroyed Eelam Prabakaran had everything. Territory. A committed rank and file. Lethal weaponry. International support and friends in the West. SHYAM TEKWANI tracks the alarming rise and astonishing fall of a man caught between escape and death  MORE VIVIDLY THAN anything that came afterwards in the Sri Lanka war, I remember his first handshake. The hand was soft, the grip delicate and limp. On that occasion in Madras, as he contentedly claimed credit for assassinating the Tamil Mayor of Jaffna and later, the slaughter of 13 Sri Lankan soldiers that ignited the conflict following the anti-Tamil riots of 1983, Velupillai Prabakaran’s dainty handshake seemed in harmony with his soft voice. A few more meetings and a couple of years later in 1987 — after successfully evading a media ban to reach the frontlines in Jaffna — I found myself reporting in the company of Prabakaran’s ragtag troops in their war against the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). In the bougainvillea-lined mud tracks, while attempting to photograph his boys gunning down the Indian soldiers in an ambush, I was transfixed by the memory of that handshake as I watched the blood seep from an ill-fated jawan’s head and mingle with the Jaffna dirt. The other memory is his startled expression when I congratulated him on his newborn towards the end of a long discourse on Eelam. Soon after his fleeting pause, it became clear that he had lost interest in going on and on with his vision of Eelam. He was less voluble, withdrawn and then abruptly left the room. It was left to the master’s voice, Anton Balasingham, to cautiously quiz me on how and what I knew of the addition to his leader’s family. These two memories define, at any rate for me through all my experiences over the last 25 years in Sri Lanka, the man who has finally destroyed the dream he almost made true. Both the memories give a certain insight into the mind of the man. First, deceive all into believing the contrary about your capabilities — deception is the core of all his strategy. Second, never trust your own shadow — paranoia dictates his behaviour. These traits contributed to the amazing rise — and eventually the astonishing fall — of the leader of the most ruthless terrorist organisation in the world. To suggest that Prabakaran worked to a master plan in building and shaping his image of invincibility and developing the organisation from a ragtag bunch of boys into the outfit that inspired awe and envy would be to bestow upon him the title of a genius — which he is not. From the beginning, he adopted a twofold strategy — consisting on the one hand of an ‘international political campaign’ by galvanising the diaspora and international opinion in his favour and on the other by bleeding the economy and weakening the state through acts of terror. His success in sustaining the conflict for over a quarter century came from a combination of his own cunning and the lack of purpose, unity and determination in his enemies.
THE PROPAGANDA CARPET BOMB If propaganda wins wars, then the IPKF, which saved Sri Lanka from becoming another Lebanon, fell victim to a weapon far more effective than the deadliest conventional weapon in Prabakaran’s jungle arsenal — his propaganda tool, the media. Central to Prabakaran’s guerilla strategy — over two decades before Rumsfeld made his observation — was a powerful communications network and a sympathetic media. Hence, his exclusive interviews to handpicked influential publications while he was enjoying the hospitality of the Indian government in Madras during the mid-80s, when I first got to shake his hand. From the outset, it was not difficult to win the support of the media, particularly in the West. Prabakaran played his underdog cards adroitly with the help of his advisor Anton Balasingham and his Australianborn wife, Adele and the LTTE’s media headquarters in London. In November 1986, on the eve of the SAARC summit in Bangalore, the police under instructions from the Chief Minister MG Ramachandran, raided and seized arms and sophisticated communications gear from the assorted Eelam groups operating out of Tamil Nadu. Prabakaran went on a much publicised fast-untodeath in Madras quoting Mahatma Gandhi, whom he said he was emulating in peaceful protest for the return of the equipment. He demanded the immediate return of – not his rocket launchers, SAM missiles and AK-47s — but his lifeline to the world, his wireless sets. By this time, he had the media eating out of his hands and the romanticisation of Prabakaran - already in motion — now entered the process of deification. Everything was returned to him in good order along with a glass of fruit juice that he sipped to declare his victory.
Less than a year later, I walked into a scoop in the Jaffna peninsula. IPKF Mi-24 helicopter gunships were on the attack in Chavakachcheri, an LTTE stronghold. People around me were killed, most of them civilians. And my cameras were the only media instruments witnessing the deaths. A week later, when I surfaced in Colombo and rushed to the phone in my hotel room to break the exclusive story, I was dismayed to find that the attack was already the big story in the media. Prabakaran had already beaten me to it — even though there was no electricity to light up his bases in the jungles. Even as the body count in the damaged market area was in progress, his ‘boys’ had radioed their souped-up version of the ‘bombing’ from their jungle hideouts to their ‘media’ headquarters in London from where a telex was sent out to every major international publication. Photographs of death and destruction from an assault during Operation Liberation (or Vadamarachchi Operation) by Sri Lankan gunships six months earlier were circulated as evidence of the Chavakachcheri attack. The LTTE’s powerful communications network transmitted daily situation reports (sitreps) from Jaffna to its media headquarters in a Western capital where the sitreps were distributed as press releases though telex machines (later with the introduction of fax machines and the internet, it was able to readjust its media budget) to media and governments in Western capitals. Printed material was was a prime means of LTTE propaganda till the early 1990s, when the group went to great expense to publish multilingual and expensively produced four-colour booklets and pamphlets with profuse illustrations. These publications were distributed to the local and international media and select government organisations. The LTTE’s high degree of familiarity with modern telecommunications enabled it to occupy a very definitive niche in the international public eye, in spite of the fact that it is party to a conflict in a small south Asian nation, largely ignored by the West, and the fact that its acts of violence have impacted only Sri Lanka and occasionally India. The reason counter-terrorism practitioners began to focus their attention, after 9/11, to Sri Lanka is Prabakaran’s global reach. His group is an integral part of the international terror network. Tactical and technical contagion is a fact of terrorist tactics. From hostage-taking, to hijacking to car-bombs, new methods have been quickly absorbed and copied among terrorist groups worldwide. Witness the Taliban’s use of civilians as human shields during the Pakistani-led assault in Buner district last week. Years before the world heard of Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda, Prabakaran was pioneering a new method of guerrilla warfare — the suicide bomber. Innovations in the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and the rampant use of child soldiers and new media technologies — were quickly copied as regular methods of warfare following the invasion of Iraq in 2002. Prabakaran has successfully operated in volatile environments where his ability to change has been the group’s linchpin not only of effectiveness, but also of survival. While Prabakaran has had ample motivations for change — technological developments, counterterrorism measures, and shifts in people’s reactions to terror attacks — the change has not occurred automatically.
AS ADAPTIVE AS A CHAMELEON IN HIS OWN IMAGE
Calendars, posters, CDs, DVDs, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations — he had them all out years before the world had heard of the al Qaeda propaganda machinery. And while the word ‘web’, at any rate for most of us in south Asia in 1993, triggered images of the common house spider, the LTTE had its first website running on the server of a university in the United States. This conveniently coincided with an increasingly unfriendly media following the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. A computer academy funded and run by professionals from among the diaspora in the Vanni region ensured that the ‘brains trust’ of the LTTE kept abreast with the latest know-how. A wing of the group (Internet Black Tigers) is credited with the first ever cyber attack (1997) known to the world when it downed the networks of Sri Lankan embassies across the world for a fortnight. In the same year, it was able to hack into a university in the United Kingdom, steal legitimate email IDs and solicit funds for a fictitious hospital in Colombo. And as recently as last week, a group calling itself Kalai Amman Electronic Warfare Unit hacked into the Sri Lanka Army website and defaced its home page. Social network sites were quickly adopted and a search on YouTube yields several hundred videos of the group. During one of our initial photo sessions (in the early 1980s), Prabakaran was awkward, uncertain of what was expected of him and very receptive to being directed. When it was suggested he change into combat fatigues, he went one further and emerged from the room with his pistol fully loaded. Within seconds, framed by his bodyguards and a huge cut out of a Tiger, with a huge portrait of Lenin in the background, he was in his elements and an hour later eagerly asked for copies of his performance. Several photo sessions later and in Jaffna while fighting for his supremacy against the IPKF, he reveled in playing the role of actor and director with consummate ease. He would tease a twinkle into his eyes with as much ease as a flash of fury. There was bluster in his voice, preparedness in dealing with questions and animation in his conversations but his grip had lost none of its daintiness. He would play to the gallery with sardonic witticisms, refrain from any response in English, ponder a bit to deliver a quotable quote and strike the pose that struck him as just right for the occasion. In one of his hideouts during the IPKF operations, he called for his leopard cub and while bantering with his friend and deputy, Yogaratnam Yogi, posed gleefully for the camera stroking his pet — much like a prosperous zamindar back from a hunt. It was essential to his strategy to get the message across that he had a committed following — and that this commitment came from man, woman and child. The cyanide pill was the emblem of commitment — which he generously arranged for me to photograph as his boys gamely posed with them around their necks. (It is another story that while every instance of a cadre biting into the vial during the course of assorted battles captured headlines, there was barely any mention of the many more who threw the vial away for safety). While Prabakaran majestically posed for the camera with his ‘cubs’ (as he called the children he recruited), there were a few restrictions: He did not like being photographed while satiating his enormous appetite for food. No photographs of his female cadres and none of his dead and dying. These sanctions were lifted after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Prabakaran quickly developed a media unit – photographers and videographers – which documented every battle and assassination that the group conducted. This served two purposes — as a teaching aid, it came closest to the real thing next to classroom simulations. Besides, it provided archival material for the history books that would be written once Eelam became a reality. This obsession for a visual record proved disastrous for the LTTE — it led the investigators of Rajiv Gandhi’s murder right to its doorstep.
Visiting the group’s training camps in the peninsula after Rajiv Gandhi’s murder, the first thing I noticed were the baby-faced boys, some not even in their teens. Their field training began with an oath on their leader: “To achieve Tamil Eelam, my life and soul, all this, I sacrifice. We’ll be very faithful and trustworthy to our elder brother, Mr Prabakaran, the leader of our revolutionary organisation. I now begin my training. The thirst of Tigers is Tamil Eelam.” This was also repeated at the end of the day when their flag was lowered down the mast. Their history lessons were an endless litany of hatred against the enemy — only comprising rapists, butchers and racists — and the glories of ancient Tamil kingdoms and kings. Classic indoctrination. The classroom instructions centred around battlefield strategies (on a blackboard with a piece of chalk and some war movies), case studies (reconstructed with videos and photographs) from their previous battles and assassinations and finally a film from an extraordinary video collection of B-grade Hollywood action movies. Rambo was the popular choice. In the prevailing environment of anxiety and hopelessness, Prabakaran was crafty enough to whip up hatred and give a machine gun to his potential recruits among the boys and girls. The romance of the gun, for a teenager fed on a limitless diet of action movies, hatred for the identified enemy, a sense of purpose and an assurance of immortality, is an aphrodisiac far more potent than the promise of seventy-two virgins in paradise.
The thrill of adventure for a 12-year old Rambo-in-the-making is a mesmerising experience. It invests in him power he could never dream of. The only occasion when I accepted their offer of testing a Kalashnikov was instructive. I fired into the horizon across the sea. As we sauntered away feeling like real men after a few rounds, I suddenly froze in horror. I became aware of my posture and swagger, feeling invincible and indestructible — and realized that, despite the stiffness in my shoulder caused by the weapon’s recoil — my arms and legs moved exactly like Rambo, like in the movie I had watched with them in their classroom. If I, a 30-something man of the world, could feel this magical glow of indestructibility shield me from death, it was not difficult to imagine the effect on a 12-year old who knows no other life than the one under Prabakaran’s incantations. The added incentive was that as a cadre, bed and board were provided for on a priority basis in any hamlet that one walked into, brandishing the gun. If this was not motivation enough, there was then the promise of immortality. Poems and shrines were built in the memory of those who submitted their lives for the cause. BEHIND THE LINES But you never met the same lot ever again. They were either killed before your next trip or rotated to another location. It was rare to learn anything about them through querying the new batch — since each of them operated under a nom de guerre. One looked for a familiar face on the sea of posters and cutouts of martyrs scattered across the peninsula. Likewise, the innumerable shrines that kept multiplying between visits — shrines in honour of the valorous and where people went to pray with their incense sticks and flowers. There would be an odd sighting or two or a rare letter from some family member sharing their grief of their dead son. Occasionally, a smartly dressed, wellfed stranger would approach you on the street in New York, a wedding in London, a restaurant in Paris or in the shadows of a temple corridor in Thanjavur and identify himself as being a member of the party you accompanied on such and such a trip. Or you would recognise a face in the papers — making the wrong kind of news in a country which had granted him citizenship.
ADELE BALASINGHAM AND THE FREEDOM BIRDS Following the death, by cancer in 2007, of her husband Anton Balasingham, the self-described theoretician, chief negotiator and political advisor to Prabakaran, Adele continues to actively work for her leader quietly and away from the media glare from her base in London. THE DEPUTIES
Mahathaya’s silence was compensated by Yogi‘s loud voice. It was with Yogi that Prabakaran seemed to share an easy relationship. Laughing and joking over a Chinese lunch, the two seemed to be best buddies. Yogi strutted with his convent-educated English — much in the manner of a subordinate who wants to appear as an equal in the presence of people he seeks to impress; Mahathaya was diffident and respectful in the presence of authority, his leader. On the battlefield, as I joined the motley bunch Mahathaya led against the advancing army, I could barely associate him with the deputy who almost scraped in servility in the presence of his boss. Yogi was the well-scrubbed, smooth and oily politician, Mahathaya the dutiful and popular army commander. When Mahathaya marched into Trincomalee at the head of a big army of freshly uniformed cadres along with Yogi to watch the back of the last IPKF soldier disappear from view in March 1990, they took to the podium to thank the big crowds the LTTE had corralled at the town’s stadium. Yogi included the media in his thanksgiving and singled out a couple of us by name as those who had fought as much as they for their struggle. Barely over a year later, with Rajiv murdered and the investigation clearly pointing to the LTTE as his killers, Yogi’s first reaction upon greeting me in Jaffna was a bitter utterance of “yellow journalist” accompanied by a ferocious mouthful of spit at me, while Balasingham and Adele watched in grim silence. World opinion was beginning to weigh heavily against them. Their nerves were clearly on edge. Prabakaran denied any role in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and instead set into motion an elaborate exercise to disprove Dhanu’s (Rajiv Gandhi’s killer) link with the LTTE. Meetings were set up with her ‘parents’, neighbours, and ‘friends’ all over the peninsula. At the end of the long day, after a snack of hot vadas at their thatched roof headquarters near Jaffna town, when my increasing skepticism of their charade began to get the better of their gentle persuasiveness, Balasingham and Yogi pushed back their chairs and declared the meeting over. The parting shot was as astounding as it was petty — pay for the vadas you just ate. When I awoke the next morning, the bicycle I depended on to traverse the peninsula was gone. Their fabled public relations machinery was beginning to crack and yet unknown to the world, trouble was brewing within. A year later, in a move that stunned his followers, Prabakaran struck against Mahathaya who he had anointed as his deputy during the war against the IPKF in 1987. Accusing him of treachery and collaborating with the Indians against him, Prabakaran placed Mahathaya in custody, liquidated most of Mahathaya’s troops and decisively crushed a potential rival to his supremacy as leader. Mahathaya was executed after a prolonged period of torture in December 1994. Yogi, whose loyalty too came under suspicion, was consigned to the doghouse to expect a similar fate. After years in anxious oblivion, he reappeared as head of the LTTE’s History Division on Black Tigers Day, the commemoration of suicide bombers, in July 2006. He spoke on the occasion and asked, “Weren't bombs made to blow up and kill men? So why is there such a cry when only a man becomes a human bomb?” He was subsequently rehabilitated to his current position as military advisor in the Vanni. Balasingham and his wife Adele rose even more higher in their leader’s estimate. The Balasinghams — who posed no threat of any sort to their master — became the face of the organisation across Western capitals and were an essential part of all negotiating teams at various times. THE TAMIL ‘STATE’
It was at this point that he tightened the security around him and set about the task of constructing a state within a state. He reintroduced taxation on his population, decreed the LTTE flag as the Tamil national flag, set up courts, police stations and ‘ministries’ that oversaw agriculture, education, rehabilitation and economic development. But his main preoccupation was in developing a conventional armed force. Military traditions — a formal ranking system, uniforms, gun salutes, parades, ceremonial funerals of flagdraped cadres killed in action — became the norm. Sarongs and flip-flops gave way to smartly pressed uniforms and spit-andpolish boots. Twenty years before he acquired the half-a-dozen ZLIN-143 aircraft to boast of being the only terrorist group in the world to possess an air wing, I was led to the LTTE’s “ordnance factory” in Manipay in 1985 to witness and photograph the aircraft his “aeronautical engineers” were assembling. The fact that it had a 200cc motorcycle engine to power it did not mask his intent to attempt building a conventional Armed Force, with its land, air and sea wings. “Geographically”, he stressed at the very beginning, “the security of Tamil Eelam is interlinked with that of its seas." He then turned against his benefactor, the Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe. Premadasa, who had colluded with him to evict the IPKF and kept him on his toes until Prabakaran had him killed by a suicide bomber three years later in1993. THE DIASPORA
Following the crackdown on the LTTE by Canada and The European Union in 2006, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police released a report on their 4-year investigation (Operation Osaluki) into the Canadian fundraising efforts of the Tamil Tigers. The report revealed that the LTTE subjects Sri Lankan Tamils living in Canada and other Western countries to intimidation, extortion and even violence to ensure a steady flow of funds for its operations. COSTLY MISTAKE Except that Prabakaran’s fool-proof plan did not count on having his photographer killed with the evidence against him intact on his body. The murder of Rajiv Gandhi by the world’s first woman suicide bomber set in motion a process that has finally come to destroy his ambition. India proscribed the group and though it took the United States six years to follow the lead and the 9/11 attacks to give the proscription some teeth, the new security climate induced other passive supporters of the LTTE in Western capitals to ban the outfit in their countries. With international opinion against him, Prabakaran retreated into his hideouts, eased himself out of the media spotlight, only granting even rarer access to international media to lamely deny any hand in his dastardly act. He now began wearing the black thread of his cyanide vial outside his shirt in an ostentatious display of his commitment to the cause. The holster with his pistol now found place outside his camouflage shirt signaling that he was no more ‘Thambi’ (younger brother) or ‘Anna’ (elder brother) to his followers nor merely the National Leader of Tamil Eelam but the Supreme Commander of the LTTE. The recently released photographs from the treasure trove of albums that the Sri Lankan troops found in the fleeing Prabakaran’s house are very instructive. The black string holding the vial of cyanide has disappeared in a number of images where he is with his family. Neither is his son, equally portly, seen to be wearing one even with his combat fatigues. HUMAN SHIELDS The bulk of LTTE’s attacks against the IPKF were initiated around the core strategy of using civilians as shields. The IPKF helicopter gunship attack in Chavakachcheri was one such classic example. The LTTE positioned its gunmen in the most crowded part of the town — the market — to fire provocatively in the directions of the choppers that were flying at a safe distance from ground fire. At the Chavakachcheri morgue where families of victims were hurling anti-Indian abuses at me, a middle-aged woman took me aside. Apologising for the hostility of the mourners, she muttered, “Hitler killed not his own people, but Jews. But Prabakaran is killing Tamil people.” Civilians as human shields clearly appears to be a central part of Prabakaran’s strategy to escape from his present entrapment.
THE DESCENT From being credited as the world’s most successful and ruthless terrorist to losing nearly all of 15,000 sq.kms of territory in two years requires some doing. Both Prabakaran and the government of Sri Lanka have had their turns grabbing and then losing territory. In July 2001, marking the anniversary of Black July of 1983, Prabakaran staged stunning attacks on the Sri Lankan Air Force base and the Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo, wiping out half the country’s civil aviation fleet, in addition to a few military aircraft. With Sri Lanka’s army in a deadlock, the navy restrained and the air fleet neutralized, the success of this attack, once again, placed Prabakaran at the upper end of the plank that Colombo and he had been see-sawing upon for two decades. Barely two months later, the planes that brought the twin towers crashing down in New York on September 9, laid the ground for the emergence of a new world order where the world was divided into the good guys rooting for a global war on terrorism and the bad guys who attacked governments in pursuit of their evil goals. The seed was thus sown for Prabakaran’s decline and the slow destruction of Eelam. He was beginning to get undone by an event thousands of miles away and over which he had no control. It was not that Prabakaran did not attempt to adapt to the new world order. To shift the spotlight away from himself, he declared a ceasefire, came out of hiding, without his moustache and his falling hair dyed brilliantly black, sued for peace under Norwegian facilitation and announced his first press conference in a dozen years. His many websites removed all material that would be deemed offensive (virtual training camps where one could learn to forge a passport or make a bomb, for example) in the new environment, and wore safari suits to mould himself in the image of Nelson Mandela, the statesman he was quoting profusely on his sites and in his conversations. His first and only international press conference (April 2002) at his administrative headquarters in Killinochchi was a disaster. His experience with the media, confined to a few one-on-one interviews with select journalists, had not prepared him for this. He seemed bewildered and clearly out of his depth facing a mixed pack of journalists whose two-day uncomfortable wait was alleviated only by the non-stop screening of LTTE propaganda videos. His image makeover, as a clean-shaven, safari-suited statesman, failed to impress anyone. Announcing his idea of peace involving the Norwegians as peacemakers, he first fumbled and then chose the safer option of avoiding all questions — mostly related to the murder of Rajiv Gandhi and his own demand for a separate state - and passed on the microphone to his interpreter Balasingham. Balasingham declared that his leader was the President and Prime Minister of Tamil Eelam and that he and Mr Prabakaran were the "same'' and that he was the LTTE leader's “voice.” This set the tone for what was to follow. After six rounds of talks for peace between September 2002 to March 2003 across four countries, Prabakaran was back to what he had perfected over the years since the Thimpu talks in 1985 — stonewall, provoke and renege on an agreement and fully lay the blame for the breakdown of talks on the other party.
The from-the-very-beginning futile exercise took its toll on three of the four LTTE delegates. Balasingham, the “chief negotiator” was gravely ill and had to remain in Europe along with Adele for his prolonged treatment. Karuna Amman (Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan), Prabakaran’s commander in the East, was being wooed by peacemakers to part ways with his leader. Meanwhile, the global war on terrorism was increasingly being read as the global war on Islamic terror, which meant the international community was too preoccupied to bother about non- Islamic outfits like the LTTE. The CFA (Ceasefire Agreement) went into cold limbo. Skirmishes broke out and violations of the agreement accumulated. The Scandinavian countries comprising the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission recorded 3,830 violations by the LTTE against 351 by the Government of Sri Lanka between 20 February 2002 and 30 April 2007. In March 2004, Prabakaran tried averting the crisis he saw coming his way by summoning Karuna to Jaffna on an official pretext. Karuna had learnt his lessons from the Mahathaya experience. He ignored the summons and split the seemingly monolithic outfit, taking with him a big chunk of the battle-hardened fighters he had trained. With the East in turmoil, Prabakaran saw his Eelam beginning to shrink. Months later, the tsunami further breached the LTTE’s wall of impregnability, damaging its bases along the northeastern coast. Chandrika Kumaratunga, then heading the government after having survived a suicide bomber attack, quickly learnt from Prabakaran’s successful diplomatic offensives. She dispatched her Tamil Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, to world capitals on a mission to get the international community to act against the LTTE’s interests in their respective countries. Kadirgamar was beginning to notch up diplomatic successes, having got the United Kingdom to proscribe the group in 2001. He was killed by a LTTE sniper in August 2005 just when he seemed on the verge of getting some more countries to proscribe the group. And when the elections came the following year (2005), Prabakaran compounded his earlier mistakes. He ensured — by forbidding Tamils to cast their vote — the victory of somebody who, he believed, was yet another politician even more infirm of purpose than his predecessors and therefore of immense value to his plans, little realising that he would finally be meeting his nemesis in the Rajapakse administration. Peace is inimical to Prabakaran’s existence. The new government started office, as all new governments in Colombo were wont to do, with a call for peace. After one round of ceasefire talks in 2006, Prabakaran was back to business. His woes of the three previous years in his new avatar of ‘statesmanpolitician’ were proving to him that he just was not cut out to be a man of peace. In his 2006 November annual speech, after his attempts to assassinate the Chief of the Army and the Secretary of Defence in Colombo, he rued, “We postponed our plan to advance our freedom struggle twice to give even more chances to the peace efforts, once when the tsunami disaster struck and again when President Rajapakse was elected.” He set out to reassert his authority over the East — and faced an army that was well-armed and well-trained and motivated as never before and one that was working with unprecedented intelligence provided by his breakaway commander, Karuna. Prabakaran lost the East — and from there on, he lorded over an unending series of military defeats. From among the many reasons being attributed to his incredulously rapid downfall, the one that would without any trouble resonate with those who have dealt with Prabakaran would be his sense of supreme self-importance. He is seen as a megalomaniac who hijacked the legitimate grievances of the Tamils to gratify his vision of himself and failed to see that the switch from guerilla band to conventional army would be disastrous.  For the sanguinary among us — the chief reason for his downfall was the failure of his legendary Black Tiger suicide bombers and his celebrated Intelligence chief, Pottu Amman. For someone who pioneered the use — and masterminded remarkable innovations — of suicide bombers, Prabakaran’s Black Tigers seemed to have reached a dead-end. President Chandrika Kumaratunga was the first miracle of the Eelam war — as the first ever survivor of a Black Tiger attack, at an election rally in December 1999. Then came the failures in 2006 that cost him everything — General Sarath Fonseka, Commander of the Sri Lanka Army became the second survivor of a suicide attack in April. Prabakaran’s trusted tool of political persuasion, the Black Tiger, was beginning to let him down. And when Gotabaya Rajapkse, the Secretary of the Defence and the brother of the President escaped a suicide attack in December, it was curtains for Prabakaran. The last two failures led to his destruction. Clearly, Prabakaran was facing a short supply of efficient Black Tigers. He was desperate enough to use recruits whose mental aptitude didn’t match their ferocious commitment. A woman bomber sent to kill the Tamil Cabinet Minister, Douglas Devananda, in his Colombo office in November 2007, triggered her bra bomb when she discovered her target was not available for the day, killing herself and the Minister’s secretary. MEETING HIS MATCH With international assistance — material and moral — for the war on terror pouring in from China, Pakistan and the US, the defence budget was increased dramatically; state of the art equipment procured, and counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency training enhanced. By mid-2006, Canada and the European Union joined the growing list of countries proscribing the LTTE. This clogged Prabakaran’s supply lines and fund collection and contributed to diminishing his ability to fight back the surge of a newly professionalised force. In the Rajapakse brothers, Prabakaran finally met with an enemy as ruthless and unswervingly committed in their goal as he. As he presides over the destruction of his dream, Prabakaran must already be plotting his next move even as he plans his escape from the ever-shrinking space he is left with to hide in. Staying alive, going back to the basics and brushing up on Sun Tzu. His financially formidable supporters among the diaspora will be told that it is only territory that has been lost and as long as they are behind him he will deliver unto them the dream he has been promising them. Until then, Eelam will, like Khalistan, continue to live on in the virtual world. His long-term objective, however, will be to foil every effort made by Colombo to redress Tamil grievances and also ensure that he, and only he, remains the sole leader of the Tamils. No moderate Tamil leader or group will be allowed to take his place. Any attempt to nurture a new leadership will be foiled by assassinations and acts of terror — just as he had, in the mid-80s, done the biggest disservice to the Tamil cause by systematically wiping out the leaders of the other militant Tamil groups that existed and decimating their organisations in a move to emerge as the sole representative of the Tamil cause. Elections will be prevented by violence. Prabakaran will patiently wait for complacency on Colombo’s part and any ensuing security lapses to stage devastating acts of terror. In essence, he will start all over again and could potentially claw his way back if allowed to. The key to ensuring that Prabakaran goes down the same road and fades away as Idi Amin did lies in the sincerity, determination and tenacity of the Rajapakse government (and every other that follows it). Rolling back every discriminatory law and practice against the Tamils and guaranteeing them equal rights and opportunities would need to be its first priority. Ignoring the Tamil diaspora, however much it may rankle, would not be beneficial for Colombo. Colombo only has to remember that the rise and dominance of Prabakaran was largely dependent on Colombo’s policies and attitudes.
As an immediate goal, Prabakaran will be counting on the few Black Tigers lurking in Colombo to blow up at least one of the troika. This would give him a respite, however brief, and save him from biting into the vial he sometimes carries around his neck. And should he be forced to feed on the cyanide, it would mean the absolute destruction of his fantasy and the organisation he has so brutally cultivated around himself. His death would splinter the group, leaving his surviving lieutenants scrambling for the throne and the vast financial empire Prabakaran has industriously built across three score countries. His son and heir apparent, Charles Anthony, is not considered a serious contender for the top job. In this hour of unprecedented defeat, the bluster and the belief in his personal immortalitywill not have dimmed. IwonderifPrabakaran’shandshakehaschanged. For an answer to that, over to the friendly Arakan rebel inMyanmar or the sympathetic politician in Europe, whose extendedhandwelcomesPrabakaranashore as he searches for a sanctuary. In all likelihood, Prabakaran — with all his chips down—would impress his saviour with a firm, masculine shake of the hand. The author is a former photo-journalist, currently teaching media and international relations at NTU, Singapore WRITER’S EMAIL | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 20, Dated May 23, 2009 |
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