Sunday Times 2
Mahattaya connection
View(s):Pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, the LTTE number two, Mahattaya, held extensive peace talks in Colombo.
The Tiger insurgents even signalled they were committed to finding a political solution to the ethnic impasse by forming an LTTE political wing, the People’s Front of Liberation Tigers (PFLT) or Makkal Munnani, which Mahattaya was appointed to head.
Prabhakaran, the man who believed violence was the answer to all his problems, justified the move to mend fences with Sri Lanka’s UNP by spinning the fiction that after India’s betrayal, they would get a ‘better deal’ from Premadasa and thus save the Tamil people.
Raw agent Mahattaya who was tortured to death is seen with Prabhakaran
In reality, all he wanted was to use Premadasa who shared Prabhakaran’s virulent antipathy against ‘foreign troops’—read India—to run the IPKF out of the country. The first benefits accrued pretty quickly—armed with the weapons supplied by Premadasa and the information on Indian troop movements shared by Sri Lankan intelligence, the Tigers effected huge losses in men and material on the Indian Army in the Wanni region.
‘We knew VP was in touch with Premadasa, and that Premadasa had operatives of the Sri Lanka Army spying on our ops and passing the information on to the LTTE. I don’t know whether NIB [the Sri Lanka intelligence unit, National Intelligence Bureau] was conducting it. In any case they were tapping my phone whenever I went to Colombo. So I knew that they knew,’ Col Hariharan says.
While the distrust between India and Prabhakaran persisted, a report that appeared in The Hindu on 24 July 1989, about two years after the IPKF’s arrival on Lankan shores, headlined ‘Prabhakaran Reported Killed in a Shootout’ was the proverbial red rag to the LTTE bull.
Once again, as with all secret ops, and unbeknownst to the army, MI or any other agency for that matter, an elaborate strategy by RAW to remove Prabhakaran and replace him with Mahattaya had been put in motion by 1989.
The story, planted in the highly respected Indian newspaper, was meant to unnerve the Tamil community and throw the LTTE off balance. What it actually did was to confirm all of Prabhakaran’s worst fears. It exposed RAW’s hand. It tipped Prabhakaran off on what awaited him, and it made him all the more relentless in his determination to get the IPKF off the island and wreak vengeance on the highest echelons of the Indian government for attempting to eliminate him.
It almost certainly planted the first seed of suspicion in his mind about his deputy, Mahattaya, as he wondered whether he was now in RAW’s pay. The report said Mahattaya had killed Prabhakaran in a shootout, and proclaimed himself the leader of the Tigers in a widely circulated video.The report said the shoot-out happened as a result of the two men’s differences over making a deal with President Premadasa. ‘In the last ten days, top political leaders of the Eelam movement have been eliminated violently . . .’ the report said, including ‘the outstanding moderate political figure, the veteran A. Amirthalingam, his colleague V. Yogeswaran (TULF), and the leader of PLOTE Uma Maheswaran who earlier lost to Prabhakaran in the violent struggle for supremacy in the militant movement.’
It went on to describe how people had gathered to pay homage to posters of Prabhakaran in the village of Ananthaperiyakulam, 20 kilometres from Vavuniya. The report stated that the shoot-out, which claimed the life of Prabhakaran’s lieutenant Kittu, took place in the Vavuniya jungles from where Prabhakaran was driven out before being shot dead.
But, with Kittu and Maheswaran clearly very much alive, it tipped off the Tiger supremo on what RAW had planned for him. He knew he was the target, that this was a bid to take over the Tigers and place them under a new head, his deputy, Mahattaya. Four years later, Mahattaya, along with over 250 men who were loyal to him, would pay the price for RAW’s monumental bungling.