The Pirabhakaran Phenomenon
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Russell
Baker on Historians
It
is not an exaggeration to claim that Pirabhakaran has been responsible
for making Sri Lanka, a paradise for low grade historians - both native
and non-native types. When it comes to the quality of contemporary
historians, many would agree with the observations of reputed humorist
Russell Baker. In a delightful syndicated commentary with the title
‘Overflowing History’, written in 1994, Baker characterized the
scene in America where historian glut was making a mince-meat of past
evaluations. Since
it has relevance to the contemporary South Asian history in wider
context and also as a link to Pirabhakaran’s revulsion of Sinhalese
parliamentary leadership, I provide excerpts from this Baker’s
commentary first. Overflowing
History
“History is
constantly being revised these days. It’s because there is a glut of
historians. Revising history is the only way to keep them busy. The
historian glut results from the government’s Vietnam War policy of
granting draft deferments for staying in college. Young men who would
happily have left the campus and gone into honest work were naturally
tempted to stay on, and on, and on. This required them
to study something. They studied history. What do you study, after all,
when you face a long sentence to college, but lack a head for science or
mathematics, go to sleep the instant somebody says ‘economics’,
aren’t built for professional sports, were never any good at Latin or
French, and find out they aren’t giving doctorates for daydreaming?
You study history… Somebody has to
pay for the mess history has made of life. Why not take it out on the
historians who wrote it, show they were all wrong about practically
everything and, if they hadn’t been, the world wouldn’t be in the
mess it’s in today. Ordinarily a
country manages to get by with 10 or 12 historians per generation. With
the historian explosion created by Vietnam, however, thousands were
suddenly coming down the pipeline. How could they be kept busy?
Newspaper editors could print only a limited number of letters about
Benedict Arnold and Mary, Queen of Scots. With the Vietnam
War over, students no longer needed to study history; college therefore
no longer needed history professors in boxcar lots. The obvious solution
for excess historians: revising the history they had been taught. Now
they are going at it with gusto. No reputation is safe anymore. Not even
Adolf Hitler’s. Scarcely a day passes now without some reviser of the
past announcing that Hitler wasn’t such a bad chap after all. That he
probably didn’t even know people were being exterminated, poor
misunderstood guy. Mussolini’s
reputation is bound to be revised upward now that the revival of fascist
politics in Italy invites the attention of historians desperate for
something to revise. Thomas Jefferson has been revised so far down that
I recently read a newspaper columnist – a newspaper columnist! –
asserting her own moral superiority to him. Even the once-sainted
Abraham Lincoln can no longer be spoken of admiringly without issuance
of the prefatory apology…” [Asahi Evening News, Tokyo, April
20, 1994] When
one substitutes the Vietnam context to the emergence of LTTE in Russell
Baker’s text and shift the focus to South Asia, one can see how the
historian avalanche in India and Sri Lanka is playing havoc since
mid-1980s. Colombo, Kandy, Chennai and New Delhi have generated
sweat-shop ‘Centers’ where professional and amateur historian
wannabes have been burning midnight-oil to gobble, digest, and
regurgitate censored and semi-censored news as well as gossips emanating
from the Intelligence operatives to predict the behavior of
Pirabhakaran’s mind and mood. History
writing is tough, even for professionals who receive years of training
under the guidance of academic peers. But in contemporary Sri Lanka and
India, Pirabhakaran’s actions had turned quite a number of
semi-literate professionals and professional cross-dressers into
‘authentic’ or near-authentic historians. Third degree
mathematicians, a la Hooles
and Sritharans, have become fourth grade historians. Slimy journalists, a
la Rams and Jayatillekas, have turned into slick historians.
Gossip-raking diplomats, a la
Dixits and Godages, have found a route to historians’ lounge by
garbing themselves as seers who can read Pirabhakaran’s mind. Sinhala
Maha Sabha and the Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism
In
this chapter, I wish to focus on an aspect which has been shunned by
many of these professional cross-dressers. This is relating to
Pirabhakaran’s task in tackling the viles of brown-skinned Buddhist
Aryan violence in Sri Lanka. Prior to this, I provide a simple example
on the pitfalls of history writing, pertaining to Sri Lanka. The
precursor of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was the Sinhala Maha
Sabha founded by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, whom I identified as the first
generation of Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryan advocates in the previous
chapter. When did Bandaranaike found this Sabha? In the 1930s? Six of
the sources I checked, authored by professional historians, provide four
answers. K.M. de Silva [A History of Sri Lanka, 1981, p.445] and
A. Jeyaratnam Wilson [The Break-Up of Sri Lanka, 1988, p.56]
mention the year 1937. S.J. Tambiah [Buddhism Betrayed?, 1992,
p.13] records the year 1935. Calvin Woodward [The Growth of a Party
System in Ceylon, 1969, p.34] and Richard Nyrop et al. [Area
Handbook for Ceylon, 1971, p.504] list the year 1934. Most recently,
S.W.R.de A. Samarasinghe and Vidyamali Samarasinghe [Historical
Dictionary of Sri Lanka, 1998, p.120] point the year 1932. If
professional historians disagree on such an open and vital event
relating to the colonial history of Ceylon which set fire to the ethnic
harmony in the succeeding seven decades, one wonders how much reliance
one can have on the writings about Pirabhakaran and LTTE by professional
cross-dressers, who mix ingredients of hearsay, gossip and innuendo to
their cocktail of commentaries. Here is a recent example of such a tripe
from Dayan Jayatilleka: “Ernest Gold did
the haunting soundtrack for the movie Exodus, starring Paul
Newman and Eva Marie Saint. Prabhakaran loved the book. D.B.S. Jeyaraj
related the tale in his version of the portrait of the separatist leader
as a young man, penned as a birthday tribute in the Sunday Leader.
(What Jeyaraj does not add is something he can check with iyekkam
oldsters such as the Nithyanandans, namely that Mein Kampf was
also on Prabhakaran’s short list of favourite texts). Be that as it
may, the key lies in the latter’s deep identification with the Zionist
experience and achievement.” [The Island newspaper, Colombo,
May 26, 2002] Exodus, Paul Newman, Prabhakaran, iyekkam (i.e., an endearing Tamil
word for the ‘Movement’), Mein Kampf and Zionist experience
– phew! Jayatilleka is a spin-meister who can drop names like bullets
from a machine gun in a few sentences and simultaneously pass innuendo
on Pirabhakaran by noting that Mein Kampf, Hitler’s book, is in
his “short list of favourite texts”. His source of information are
the Nithyanandan couple [wife Nirmala, being the sister of Rajani
Thiranagama], who were once members of LTTE. Jayatilleka does not reveal
under what context Nithyanandans blurted this tidbit on Pirabhakaran. He
also fails to mention whether he cross-checked this tidbit with any
other confidants of Pirabhakaran. Even
if Mein Kampf was in the ‘short list of favourite texts’ of
Pirabhakaran, what harm could it have done? Millions of non-Germans have
read that book in translation to understand Hitler’s mind, as akin to
millions of non-Germans [including Jayatilleka, if I believe so] who
read Das Kapital of Marx in translation. Nirmala Nithyanandan,
who had lived in USA for a while, would probably have learnt that
Senator Alan Cranston took the trouble to translate that book from
German to English, word to word, and he was sued by Hitler for copyright
infringement. Just because Cranston took the trouble to translate Mein
Kampf, should one castigate him as an admirer of Hitler’s
policies? Jayatilleka has become the foremost proponent of fallacious
logic. In addition, it appears that Jayatilleka also has mastered the
deception of what Hitler described in his Mein Kampf as follows: “The masses are
poorly acquainted with abstract ideas, their reactions lie more in the
domain of feelings…Whoever wishes to win over the masses must know the
key to open the door to their hearts…The masses’ receptive powers
are very restricted and their understanding feeble…Effective
propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities expressed in a few
stereotyped formulas.” [cited in, Nigel Rodgers -Hitler: A
Beginner’s Guide, London, 2001, p.18] This
is because the same passage of Jayatilleka on Exodus,
Pirabhakaran and Mein Kampf quoted above, has appeared verbatim,
in his previous commentary, ‘The Time of the Tiger: Reflections’ [The
Weekend Express, Colombo, Dec.11-12, 1999]. Like Hitler contributing
his cerebral vomit frequently to Volkischer Beobachter
[People’s Observer] – the Nazi mouthpiece of the early 1920s,
Jayatilleka also spews his venom in the Island newspaper – the
mouthpiece of Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism in Sri Lanka.
The
founder and foremost practitioners of Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism While
Jayatilleka continuously smears Pirabhakaran as a practitioner of Aryan
Nazi methods, it is of interest to revisit, who had admired Hitler’s
message and practised it with vengeance against Tamils in Sri Lanka. Anagarika
Dharmapala (1864-1933), the pre-eminent Buddhist reformer, is one of the
now-revered names of colonial Ceylon. He was a generation ahead of
S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and he died in the year of Hitler’s ascent to
power. Gananath Obeyesekere, anthropology professor at Princeton
University, had identified Dharmapala as the founder of Buddhist
Aryanism in the island, in his essay entitled ‘Buddhism and
Conscience’. Wrote Obeyesekere, in the penultimate paragraph of this
essay: “Through
his familiarity with Bengali intellectuals, Dharmapala also used the
term Aryan, not in its traditional meaning of ‘noble’ but in its
racist sense. It is Dharmapala who identified non-Sinhala civilian
populations for verbal attack: the Muslims, Borah merchants, and
especially Tamils, whom he referred to as hadi demalu (filthy
Tamils). The Tamil issue was just beginning to be a serious social and
political problem owing to the introduction by the British of South
Indian Tamil labor into the plantations and the creation in the central
highlands of a new Tamil community hemmed in by Sinhala populations.”
[Daedalus, summer 1991; v.120, no.3; pp.219-238] Then
in the concluding paragraph consisting of two sentences, Obeyesekere
summed up as follows: “Dharmapala
himself never encouraged violence against minority ethnic groups, but he
framed the ethnic issue in terms of a modern Buddhist nationalism and
paved the way for the emergence of a specific modern Sinhala Buddhist
national consciousness laying bare for many – especially for those who
live in modern overcrowded cities – the dark underside of Buddhism
without the mitigating humanism of the Buddhist conscience. Without that
conscience and humanism, Buddhism must become a religion that has
betrayed the heritage of its founder.” [ibid] While
Anagarika Dharmapala preached the Aryan doctrine and foul-mouthed other
ethnic groups, his nominal adherents like Bandaranaike and A.E.
Goonesinghe gained inspiration from Hitler’s oral pyrotechnics
and goon squads respectively. The second generation of
Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism [Jayewardene, Premadasa and his fellow
rivals Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake of the 1980s]
adopted lock stock and barrel the Nazi treatment methods on Eelam
Tamils. While
Jayatilleka continues to sling mud on Pirabhakaran, his father Mervyn de
Silva, blessed with little more wisdom, had occasionally allowed records
of Nazi-type harassments meted out to Eelam Tamils in the 1980s to
appear in his journal. Here is a vivid example, penned by S. Velupillai
from Vadamaradchy region. Excerpts: “…Operation
Liberation commenced on May 26 [1987], ended on May 31, and resulted
in over 1,000 deaths and 2,000 arrests in Vadamaradchy on its liberation
from the LTTE. On the last day of the offensive I was arrested from one
of the 16 temples specified as havens by the Forces in a notice dropped
from the air across Vadamaradchy. We, the captives, were chained and
shipped to a makeshift detention camp in Galle, though our destination,
according to our papers, was to be the notorious Boosa Detention Camp.
Later, we came to know that Boosa was already full. We
were confined to a warehouse turned into a detention camp, adjacent to
the port of Galle, about 200 metres long, and 20 metres wide. There were
6 latrines, outside the camp. At a time 6 detainees would be led out at
gun point to spend 6 minutes in the latrines. Most of us had no option
other than defecating and urinating into a gutter deep inside the camp.
The gutter overflowed. We wallowed in our own faeces and urine that
flowed from the gutter, under our feet, towards the centre of the camp
which teemed with worms and flies, vomit and spittle. There were no
baths. None of us had bathed or changed for days. Both the camp and the
inmates stank. The
camp was packed to capacity. The detainees were split into over 50
groups, with 50 in each, each headed by one of its members. I headed
group 52. A barbed-wire fence divided the head and the body of the
camp….” [Lanka Guardian, Colombo, Oct.1, 1993; p.20] Considering
my personal experience with submissions to the Lanka Guardian
journal, I cannot verify how much of Velupillai’s original
descriptions of 1987 experience would have been edited for legal as well
as cosmetic reasons. But, it is not an exaggeration to state that the
sufferings of Eelam Tamils in the torture camps of Sri Lanka in 1990s,
have been on par with the Nazi treatment meted to the hapless Jews and
Gypsies in the first half of 1940s. As confirmation, I provide the
following excerpts from a report by Peel, Mahtani, Hinshelwood and
Forrest, published in the Lancet medical journal in 2000. “We
reviewed records of all Sri Lankan men who had been referred to the
Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture between January
1997 and December 1998……Medico-legal reports were written by 17
doctors that supported the allegations of torture in Sri Lanka made by
184 Tamil men who had been referred during this period….74 (40%) were
aged between 25 and 30 at the time of the analysis, so they would have
been several years younger when they were detained and tortured by the
Sri Lankan authorities, principally the army. 25(13%) were younger than
25 when they were first seen at the Medical Foundation, 71 (38%) were
aged 30-40 years, and 14 (6%) were older than 40…. Of
the 184 men, 38 (21%) said they had been sexually abused during their
detention. Three (7%) of
the 38 said they had been given electric shocks to their genitals, 26
(68%) had been assaulted on their genitals, and four (9%) had sticks
pushed through the anus, usually with chillies rubbed on the stick
first. One said he had been forced to masturbate soldiers orally, and
one had been forced with his friends to rape each other in front of
soldiers for their ‘entertainment’. Of
the men who said they had been sexually abused, 11 reported being raped
as part of that sexual abuse; this represents 5% of the total number of
men on whom reports were written. The men who had been raped were much
younger, on average, than the men who said they had not been raped. This
suggests that the soldiers choose the younger and more vulnerable men to
rape. Of
the 38 men who had been sexually abused, only four (10%) had scarring of
the genitals, and none of them were found to have significant scarring
around the anus. Since there are very rarely any physical signs caused
by acute sexual assault of men, it is not surprising that there were so
few men with physical signs of their sexual abuse. The injuries were:
thickening and tenderness of final 1-2 cm on urethra of a man who
described a soldier pushing an object inside his penis; a scar on the
base of shaft of penis of a man who said that soldiers had repeatedly
slapped a heavy desk drawer shut on it; an irregularly defined defect in
the foreskin of a man who said that soldiers had tied some string around
his penis and pulled, tearing off a piece of his foreskin; and a
cigarette burn on the scrotum of a man who said that soliders had
stubbed cigarettes out on his genitals….” [Lancet, June 10,
2000; vol.355, pp.2069-2070] In
his classic work Roots, Alex Haley agonised about how his slave
ancestor would have felt when given the option of castration and leg
amputation, his ancestor chose to lose his legs so that at least he
could pass his genes to his progeny. The above-cited descriptions of
Peel and colleagues on the torture and victimisation suffered,
especially in the genital region, by Eelam Tamil detainees at the hands
of Sri Lankan army suggest that practising adherents of Hitler’s
genocide techniques are not absent among the Brown-skinned Buddhist
Aryan enthusiasts serving the Sri Lankan army. Few
months after the appearance of this shocking report in the Lancet,
Sri Lanka had its general election on October 10, 2000. This election
witnessed the third generation of brown-skinned Buddhist Aryan racists
coming to the stage, under the label Sihala Urumaya [Sinhala
Heritage]. This party’s national organizer Champika Ranawaka became a
member of parliament, after a tussle for nomination among the party
members. G.Senaratne and Deepal Jayasekera, contributing a commentary to
the World Socialist Web Site, had noted the mind-set of Ranawaka as
follows: “The
Ranawaka faction, backed by the Buddhist clergy, represents a more
overtly fascistic layer, comprising gangster elements drawn from
students, younger small-scale businessmen in Colombo and Buddhist monks,
and a handful of army men. Ranawaka commented during the election that
the movement would treat Tamils in the way that Hitler treated the
Jewish masses. The comment is not a mistaken slip of the tongue. One of
the underlying themes of Sinhala chauvinism is the superiority of the
Aryan Sinhalese over the southern Indian Dravidians or Tamils. In the
1930s, leading figures in the Sinhala Buddhist movement were open
admirers of the Aryan supremacist philosophy of the German Nazis and
their policies. Ranawaka was a JVP student leader in the late 1980s when
the JVP carried out murderous attacks on the working class and its
organisations. He has repeatedly called for the formation of what
amounts to fascist shock troops….” [World Socialist Web Site, News
& Analysis; December 4, 2000] ‘Out-Gestapoing’
the original Gestapo in Book Burning Geheime
Staatspolizei
(Secret State Police) or Gestapo in abbreviation, was the notorious Nazi
contribution established by Hermann Goring from a section of the
Prussian police force. In the first half of 1980s, the Sri Lankan
version of Gestapo goon squads created history in book burning to a
degree which quantitatively exceeded the vandalism which occurred under
Nazi Germany in the 1930s. This aspect of recent history has been
glossed over by authentic historians like K.M.de Silva and pretending
historians like Rajan Hoole, as indicated below: “These
Councils [i.e. District Development Councils] were ill-fated from the
start, when the Council elections in July 1981 resulted in such untoward
incidents as the burning of the Jaffna Public Library by government
forces.” [Book: The Broken Palmyra by R.Hoole et al., 1990,
p.27] “…To
meet the threat posed by this mounting violence the police force was
strengthened by a large contingent of policemen and police reservists
sent from Colombo. These reinforcements checked the violence
temporarily, but became themselves the target of violence. On th eve of
the [District Development Council] elections, a terrorist group shot and
killed some policemen who were on election duty. This incident provoked
just the response the perpetrators of this violent act had anticipated
and desired: the unfocused anger of the police and one of the worst
incidents of police reprisals in the encounter between them and the
young political activists in Jaffna. The violence was inflicted on
property more than persons, culminating in a mindless act of barbarism,
the burning of the Jaffna Municipal Library.” [Book: J.R.Jayewardene
of Sri Lanka, vol.2, by K.M.de Silva and Howard Wriggins, 1994,
p.445] While
de Silva and Wriggins correctly describe this shocking event as
‘mindless act of barbarism’, they – as well as the authors of Broken
Palmyra previously - conveniently smoothened the vandalism by not
even quantitating the loss of historical documents and books. de Silva
and Wriggins also present an unconvincing opinion that the June 1, 1981
book burning of Jaffna Municipal Library was an unfortunate one-time
retaliation event. This opinion is inaccurate since book burning was a
continuing event in the 1980s, as indicated below. Where was
Pirabhakaran when the Jaffna Municipal Library burnt? According to
Narayan Swamy, “One
of the hundreds who saw the monument of Tamil glory burn down with its
invaluable collections was Prabhakaran. But Prabhakaran’s main worry
was then to escape [to India]” [Book: Tigers of Lanka, 1996,
2nd edition, p.73] Even
Narayan Swamy had failed to mention the number of volumes which was
engulfed in fire. The then head of state, J.R. Jayewardene was
interviewed by the Indian journalist S. Venkat Narayan a couple of
months later, and was asked about the Jaffna book burning. His
responses, as typical of the foxy politician, were nothing but
dismissive and condescending to the sentiments of book lovers. To quote, “Question:
In Jaffna people are very upset. The policemen set fire to the 50 year
old library and burnt 97,000 valuable books. They also set fire to a
TULF MP’s house. Answer:
That’s because they think he is in touch with the terrorists. Question:
It seems they were trying to catch him so they could kill him. Answer:
Terrorists do that too.” [India Today, Sept.1-15, 1981,
pp.18-19] Michael
Kauman from the New York Times who visited Jaffna around the same
time also published a report on Sept.11, 1981, informing the readers
“Mr.Yogeswaran’s [the TULF MP unnamed in Venkat Narayan’s
interview] anger was very personal. Three months ago his house was
burned by what many Jaffna people say were Sinhalese policemen. On the
same night, the large library with its collection of 97,000 books and
Tamil manuscripts was burned and destroyed.” Kaufman’s report
appeared under the caption, ‘Harassed Sri Lanka Minority Hears call to
Arms’. Quantity-wise, 97, 000 books and manuscripts were more than
four fold higher than the infamous May 10, 1933 book burning event first
held under the Nazi regime. According to Rodgers, “On
10 May 1933 the first book burning took place, when, in scenes that
looked spontaneous but were actually highly organized, students,
academics and others took books from libraries, bookshops and schools
and burnt them in squares throughout Germany, incinerating about 20,000
volumes.” [Book: Hitler-A Beginner’s Guide, 2001, p.49] It
need to be reiterated that the June 1, 1981 book burning of Jaffna
Municipal Library was not an isolated event, as opined by the
biographers of J.R.Jayewardene. The books located in Pirabhakaran’s
birth zone were specially targeted and suffered similar fate in 1984.
The library of Hartley College-Point Pedro, containing 6,690 books were
burnt by the armed force personnel who occupied the buildings closer to
the school. Furthermore, in August of that year, the local library of
Valvettithurai was set ablaze by the armed troops, as informed by
S.P.Raju, a former school teacher and a secretary of the Valvettithurai
Citizen’s Council, to Sanjoy Hazarika, the reporter for New York
Times (Aug.22, 1984, p.A4). Apart
from books available in institutions of learning and public service,
even private book collections of Tamil individuals were not spared by
the goon squads of Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism. To my personal
knowledge, in Colombo itself, the then TULF (Colombo branch) leader
M.K.Eeelaventhan’s book collection and TULF President
M.Sivasithamparam’ book collection were specifically targeted and
destroyed in the 1977 and 1983 ethnic riots respectively. In an unsigned
feature in 1990, the Asiaweek magazine captured the agony of an
Eelam Tamil bibliophile as follows: “
‘My 30-year library’, sobbed Villararajah Thiagalingam, his shaking
finger pointing at the ashes of what once was his study at 261 Dyke St.
in Trincomalee late last week. ‘All my books and 30 years of
research’. In nearby streets in the Northeastern Sri Lankan port town,
police kicked doors and fired indiscriminately at the few Tamil houses
and shops that remained standing. On the outskirts of town sounds of
government shelling added to the tension. ‘We were hiding in the shed
and we could hear them shouting’, said Thiagalingam, referring to the
Sinhalese mob that had burned his house. ‘They were carrying knives
and swords’….” [Asiaweek, Hongkong, June 29, 1990, p.24] It
should be stressed that Thiagalingam is just one of thousands of Eelam
Tamils who lost their personal collections of books to mob vandalism fed
on Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism. In sum, despite all the
image-tarnishing tactics employed by Pirabhakaran critics like
Jayatilleka and abetted by amnesic professional cross-dressers, if
Hitler’s brand of genocide has ardent adherents in Sri Lanka, they can
be traced along generations linking Anagarika Dharmapala, Bandaranaike
family (husband-wife-daughter), Jayewardene, Premadasa, Athulathmudali,
Dissanayake and Ranawaka. Pirabhakaran’s ascent was the ultimate Tamil
reaction to such Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism. This has been
reiterated by none other than Mervyn de Silva in 1991, as follows: “The
two-party game which helped to aggravate the Tamil problem (some
analysts say the problem was in fact a by-product of that two-party
contest for power and the opportunism it promoted.) still goes on. But
the constitutional changes that Mr.J.R.Jayewardene introduced in order
to centralise power in an executive presidency at the expense of
parliament, the extension of the UNP-dominated parliament’s 6 year
term to 12 years, the deep divisions in the Opposition, the dramatic
decline of the ‘Old Left’, the chaos and bitter squabbles in the
SLFP after Mrs.Bandaranaike was deprived of her civic rights, have all
taken quite a toll. While these developments were altering, often
imperceptibly, the traditional structure of politics in Sri Lanka, two
other parallel processes were under way. The Tamil agitation moved out
of parliament, the traditional Tamil leadership was soon marginalised
with whatever token gains they had made through parliament becoming more
and more meaningless. In that area, the DDC [District Development
Council] polls in Jaffna [held in 1981] and the manner in which these
were conducted, together with the campaign of terror unleashed by UNP
‘goon squads’, stand out as the turning point…” [Lanka
Guardian, Colombo, Sept.1, 1991; pp.3-4] Mervyn
de Silva has a pleasing style of describing the paradigmatic shifts in
few sentences, devoid of verbosity. Though he did not mention the name
Pirabhakaran in this passage, it was obvious to everyone that
Pirabhakaran was the individual who moved the Tamil agitation out of
parliament. Why? Though the TULF, then prime representatives of Tamils,
were Gandhians in practice – their strategies were hardly producing
any dividends for the Tamils in terms of preventing the state-aided
colonisation occurring in the Eastern province, while at the same time
the forces of Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism were harassing the younger
generation in multiple fronts. Nehru
on Gandhi’s greatest message Between
pages 51 and 66, the October 1963 issue of the Playboy magazine
carried a historically interesting feature. It was an interview with
Jawaharlal Nehru, with the subtitle: ‘a candid conversation with the
architect of modern India’. Unlike other interviews which had appeared
in the Playboy magazine, the interviewer’s name was peculiarly
missing. I wish to quote few passages from this interview for its
relevance in multiple contexts, including that of Pirabhakaran’s
contribution to Eelam Tamil liberation campaign. Playboy: “…What in Gandhi’s thinking most impressed you – and your
countrymen? Nehru: “Mahatma Gandhi, in a sense, burst upon the Indian scene…And there
was magic about the message he gave. It was very simple. His analysis of
the situation in India was essentially that we were suffering terribly
from fear, so he just went about telling us. ‘Don’t be afraid. Why
are you afraid? What can happen to you?’ Of course, when he talked in
these terms he was thinking of our political fears. If we did something
that the British Government did not like, well, we’d be punished,
We’d be sent to prison, We might be shot. And so a general sense of
fear pervaded the land. It would take hold of the poorest peasant, the
lowliest of all our people, whose produce or nearly all of it went to
his landlord and who hardly had enough food to eat. This poor man was
kicked and cuffed by everybody – by his landlord, by his landlord’s
agent, by the police, by the moneylender. Playboy: “Why was Gandhi so dramatically effective in dispelling this sense of
fear? Nehru: “Whether there was something in the atmosphere or some magic in
Gandhi’s voice, I do not know. Anyhow, this very simple lesson –
‘Don’t be afraid’ – caught on and we realized, with a tremendous
lifting of hearts, that there was nothing to fear. Even the poor peasant
straightened his back a little and began to look people in the face and
there was a ray of hope in his sunken eyes….We were poor stuff. Again
and again, he gave us the strength and the vision to achieve our goal.
For 30 years or more, we took shelter under his shadow and under his
guidance. Playboy: “A profoundly important pat of his teaching was, of course, the
commitment to nonviolence. Do you consider nonviolence to be an
effective tool of international diplomacy today? Nehru: “The efficacy of nonviolence is not entirely convincing. None of us
would dare, in the present state of the world, to do away with the
instruments of organized violence…” In
these three answers of Nehru, Pirabhakaran’s route to the liberation
campaign come into focus. By the end of 1963, following 16 years at the
helm and absorbing a defeat in battle front against China in 1962, even
Nehru – Gandhi’s closest associate - had become convinced that the
efficacy of nonviolence as a vehicle is very much limited in the
ever-changing world. The strategy of TULF leadership, parrot-mouthing
the nonviolence vehicle for liberation of homeland in the late 1970s was
a non-starter. Either they were ignorant of realities of the Asian
mileau or they were fearful of voter rejection for their bombast. By any
stretch of imagination one cannot argue that Amirthalingam or
Sivasithamparam were ignorant of the limitations of nonviolence. Thus,
it could only be inferred that they were clueless on how to tackle the
Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism within the boundaries of parliamentary
politics. The genius of Pirabhakaran was in countering the threat posed
by the adversaries of Eelam Tamils by authentic militancy. There is a post-script to this Playboy interview given by Nehru, which deserves mention. A few months after the publication of this interview, there appeared an editorial confession in the Playboy magazine (a rare occurrence by Playboy’s standard), that the purported interviewer, who had not been identified by name, did not exclusively interview the then India’s prime minister for the magazine. Rather, the interviewer had done a ‘cut and paste’ job of answers from previously available Nehru material and submitted it to the Playboy. Nehru died in May 1964. That the published views belonged to Nehru were not in question. But that they were not exclusively offered to the Playboy showed that even four decades ago, fakery by Indian journalists was a sport adeptly played on the gullibles. That even an American icon like Hugh Hefner was fooled by the journalist version of Indian rope-trick produced amusement to some observers. The fact that quite a number of Eelam Tamil politicians and public, other than Pirabhakaran, were made gullible by many Indian journalists in the pre-1987 period is also difficult to digest even now. [Continued] |
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