BOOK REVIEW Inquest of a defeat The Tiger Vanquished by M R Narayan Swamy
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
The unexpected destruction in May 2009 of one of the world's most fearsome
guerrilla movements, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), has altered
Sri Lanka's fate completely. Explanations for this separatist rebel group's
momentous demise have thus far remained limited to bits-and-pieces opinion
articles and half-baked books.
The field was wide open for the world's most renowned authority on Sri Lankan
Tamil militancy, senior Indian journalist M R Narayan Swamy, to plug the gaps
in understanding the fall of an organization whose birth and maturity he
chronicled in two earlier
bestselling books, Tigers of Lanka (1994) and Inside an Elusive Mind
(2003).
The Tiger Vanquished comes as a fitting finale of a trilogy that can be
rated as the finest collective reference guide to the devastating
three-decade-long war in Sri Lanka's north and east.
This concluding volume contains a long introduction and contextualized articles
Swamy wrote from 2003, when the LTTE shunned the international peace process,
to 2009, when its supremo, Velupillai Prabhakaran, perished with his
organizational top brass in a savage Sri Lankan military assault. The thread
running through the book is an examination of the immediate and ultimate causes
for the once invulnerable LTTE's destruction.
When Mahinda Rajapaksa, a one-time human-rights activist and Sinhalese Buddhist
hardliner, became Sri Lanka's head of state in 2005, Prabhakaran was
"arrogantly confident of success" (p xviii) in his lifelong ambition of carving
out an independent homeland for the island's Tamils. He picked Sarath Fonseka,
the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) chief, as the latest target of his elite corps of
suicide bombers, the Black Tigers. Prabhakaran's strategic goal was to derail
the state's war machine that was taking shape amidst a crumbling ceasefire.
The sensational attempt failed and Fonseka miraculously survived. This and
other provocative tit-for-tat actions by the LTTE and the SLA in the eastern
province formally triggered the fourth phase of the protracted Eelam war.
Swamy argues that the LTTE's unsuccessful bid to assassinate the younger
brother of President Rajapaksa in December 2006 was "the most decisive turning
point in the war" (p xxi), as it steeled the resolve of Sri Lankan state elites
to pursue nothing short of total annihilation of the painful thorn in their
flesh. Rajapaksa went for Prabhakaran's jugular while the latter calculated
that the regime would capitulate to his audacious strikes.
By early 2009, after suffering severe setbacks at the hands of the SLA and
getting cornered in the forested northern district of Mullaitheevu, Prabhakaran
hoped for Indian and Western intervention for an 11th hour ceasefire. It was to
no avail, and he was killed in battle in May "in the same callous and brutal
manner he had so often used to send so many thousands to their death". (p xxiv)
Swamy elaborates through fresh revelations that the Congress Party-led
coalition government in India played a crucial role in the LTTE's rout. The
preceding regime in New Delhi under the Bharatiya Janata Party had covertly
orchestrated the Norway-sponsored ceasefire agreement between Colombo and the
LTTE in 2002. But the Indian establishment under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
and Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, a woman widowed by Prabhakaran, progressively
tilted towards the Sri Lankan government in the war's endgame.
India's Intelligence Bureau (IB) cracked down hard on LTTE's networks in the
southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and kept a gimlet eye on developments in
Sri Lanka during the final years of the war. Swamy divulges that the IB was the
first to uncover the truth about a mysterious accident off Sri Lanka's coast in
2007, when Soosai, the LTTE's naval chief, barely escaped death.
The chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Karunanidhi, widely regarded as an LTTE
backer, actually did nothing to prevent the Tigers from breathing their last
breath. While serving Karunanidhi's government, the Tamil Nadu police's "Q
Branch" crippled LTTE insurgents on Indian soil with seizures and arrests.
Indian interdictions were critical at the finish because "the Tigers'
dependence on Tamil Nadu had soared parallel to their mounting difficulties in
Western countries". (p 87)
Swamy does not dispute rumors that India harbored the leader of the breakaway
faction of the LTTE, Karuna Amman, who weakened Prabhakaran's de facto state
like none other. Recalling LTTE propagandists' accusations in 2004 that India
covertly aided the renegade Karuna, the author mentions that this former
bodyguard turned bete noire of Prabhakaran "quietly spent time in India when
Sri Lanka became too dangerous for him". (p xlii).
Swamy spotted the irony as early as 2007 that Rajapaksa was not returning
India's favors by implementing verbal assurances of a power devolution package
for Sri Lanka's minority Tamils. Now that the war is over, New Delhi finds
itself with even less leverage to ensure that Colombo grants political autonomy
to the discriminated people of the north and east.
Swamy could have raised a number of moot questions in this regard: What did
India gain geostrategically from propelling the LTTE's defeat? Is Sri Lanka any
less susceptible to China's influence because India was instrumental in wiping
out the LTTE? Is Rajapaksa's illiberal reign a sign of progress or regression?
Will India benefit from an imposed victor's peace on Tamils in Sri Lanka?
In one reproduced column from 2008, Swamy writes matter-of-factly that
"everyone agrees India matters the most in Sri Lanka". (p 133) A good year
after the war, with Indian military and diplomatic aid no longer absolutely
imperative for Sri Lanka, serious doubts arose about such convictions. A line
of inquiry that Swamy ignores, but one which is nonetheless tangential to the
LTTE's fall, is whether India allowed itself to be taken for a ride by the
deceptive and ethnic chauvinist Sri Lankan government?
A cardinal error Prabhakaran committed after Karuna's desertion was to wage a
virtual war on Tamil civilians to enforce loyalty and extract the last ounces
out of a war-weary populace. Horrific conscription and re-conscription drives,
mass intimidation and the use of civilians as human shields robbed the LTTE of
its oxygen - public sympathy.
When the end came, few beleaguered Tamils in the battle zones willingly
cooperated with their so-called "liberators". Alienation and "silent anger in
the Tamil community" (p lxi) orphaned the rebels who once rode on relatively
high social legitimacy. Swamy does not downplay the horrific abuses committed
by Sri Lankan security forces as the war culminated, but the LTTE's impunity
was strategically costlier.
The secretive and paranoid Prabhakaran's decision in 2003 to replace the
legendary Scarlet Pimpernel, Kumaran Pathmanathan (aka "KP"), as international
arms procurement chief with another confidante, V Manivannan, alias "Castro",
was one of the most consequential blunders that contributed to the LTTE's
undoing. Swamy narrates how Prabhakaran resurrected KP when the war was almost
lost and no late miracle could save a "sinking ship called the LTTE". (p l)
The author lists Prabhakaran's hubris, "false sense of superiority" (p lvii)
and misreading of India and the West after September 11, 2001, as other fatal
mistakes that brought down his empire in a gory climax. Had the Tiger boss
correctly read New Delhi's preference for democracy, pluralism and human rights
in the north and east, and liberalized his totalitarian rule, his dream of
achieving freedom for Sri Lankan Tamils may not have been comprehensively
extinguished.
Swamy observes, contrary to received wisdom, that Prabhakaran "often acted
irrationally" and "at times took decisions that made no sense". (p 44) When the
ceasefire of 2002 offered a golden opportunity to seal a permanent settlement
with the LTTE in the driver's seat, Prabhakaran "slipped on the political art
of compromise and accommodation badly". (p 181) His decree to Tamil voters to
boycott the November 2005 presidential elections spiked the prospects of the
liberal Sinhalese candidate Ranil Wickremasinghe and ironically paved the path
to victory for Rajapaksa, who went on to be Prabhakaran's nemesis.
Swamy reasserts the view that Prabhakaran's biggest indiscretion was ordering
the assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. The Tiger
commander-in-chief also erred in military tactics by not scattering LTTE's
forces and senior echelons once the SLA embarked on a no-holds-barred offensive
in late 2008. The famed guerrilla forgot the fundamentals of unconventional war
when the curtains were closing.
The author lays part of the blame for LTTE's collapse on its diehard donors and
acolytes among the Tamil diaspora residing in the West. These non-resident Sri
Lankan Tamils failed to articulate in favor of a negotiated end to the conflict
when the timing was apt. Their "illusions" (p lxxiii) and "persistent
aggression" (p 185) wasted the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Tamil
civilians facing bullets and fear in the north and east.
Swamy cites a disillusioned young female escapee from LTTE's ranks lamenting in
retrospect that, "after so much destruction, the Tamils are nowhere". (p
lxxvii) He quotes a former Prabhakaran associate in despair that Sri Lankan
Tamils are "today not in zero but in minus". (p 151)
Prabhakaran's penchant for "unlimited violence" and "supreme destruction" (p
174) come in for consistent criticism throughout Swamy's book, reconfirming
that the militant mode of emancipation is often a folly of epic proportions.
Via a wealth of previously unknown empirical details, The Tiger Vanquished
sends a profound message that choice of means is the most meaningful factor in
political struggles.
The Tiger Vanquished. LTTE's Story by M R Narayan Swamy. SAGE
Publications, New Delhi, 2010. ISBN: 978-81-321-0459-9. Price: US$8, 276 pages.
Sreeram Chaulia is associate professor of world politics at the OP Jindal
Global University in Sonipat, India.
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When Mahinda Rajapaksa, a one-time human-rights activist and Sinhalese Buddhist
hardliner, became Sri Lanka's head of state in 2005, Prabhakaran was
"arrogantly confident of success" (p xviii) in his lifelong ambition of carving
out an independent homeland for the island's Tamils. He picked Sarath Fonseka,
the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) chief, as the latest target of his elite corps of
suicide bombers, the Black Tigers. Prabhakaran's strategic goal was to derail
the state's war machine that was taking shape amidst a crumbling ceasefire.
