Rajpal's Column

28th May 2000

Undisputed mind - game in the Sri Lankan crisis

By Rajpal Abeynayake

V. Prabhakaran — They who belong in this category think he is a total psychopath, and are prone to think that he is totally and irredeemably sub human; the point is that this breed articulates that concept with conviction. They will cite examples, and say that Prabhakaran was responsible for many campaigns that were Hitlerite and totally psycho-aggressive.

V. Prabhakaran — This groups thinks of Prabhakaran rhetorically, as an anarchist, but are not willing to go into the detail because even before Prabhakaran had done any sort of real or uncommon killing, they had already decided that he is a madman.

V. Prabhakaran - They think that he is an incarnation of Vishnu, and that he is the person that gave Tamil Nadu and India

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These people feel that Prabhakaran's real success is that he put Sri Lanka on the map. The vicarious Eelam that Prabhakaran spawned in the Diaspora, they feel, is quite enough, and even TIME magazine of this week quotes a person who says 'Prabhakaran put Sri Lanka on the map.' But, people who subscribe to this view are not necessarily diasporic. Most are rooted firmly in this part of the world.

V. Prabhakaran — These people feel that Prabhakaran is the best thing that happened to the Sinhala nation for a long time. Among the persons who have articulated this particular theory is Gunadasa Amarasekera, who has pointed out in an article in the Island, that Prabhakaran brought out the best in the Sinhala spirit, and the Sinhala nation, which would have otherwise sold itself down the drain to other interests who would have 'cut our throats with the bathing cloth.'

V. Prabhakaran — These people feel that Prabhakaran

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says Time magazine.

But, this category does do not all belong to an overarching category. They can be broken down to several sub-genres or categories but that's eventually academic.

V. Prabhakaran —

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V. Prabhakaran — People who fall into this category of Prabhakaran watchers/analysts are people of the opposition. No matter to which party they belong, these people feel that Prabhakaran is, though a disaster and bad portend for the Sinhalese,

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for the simple reason that the top national priority is to eliminate the LTTE.' Other strategic moves that are beneficial to governments in power are carried out by most governments

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V. Prabhakaran — These are the category that believe

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They predict that there will be no LTTE for instance, if Prabhakaran is 'bumped - off' and advocate that this should be done by employing mercenaries for example. But there are divisions or branches within this school of thought itself. One is that Prabhakaran is the psychopathic cult leader, the V. Prabhakaran in the manner of Shoko Ashahra of Ayum Shinkariyo of the Japanese Sarin - gas cult fame. Or in the manner of the cult guru who led the Jonestown mass suicides.

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these days — because he is an example of a man with determination, which is a concept that does not necessarily even have to be tied to what he hopes to achieve.

V. Prabhakaran — Then there is Prabhakaran according to the diasporic Tamil estimation. Again, there are two or three strands of diasporic perspectives of Prabhakaran. One strand is of diasporic Tamils who think that Prabhakaran is a rank embarrassment. You can count about .2 per cent of the entire community of diasporic Tamils who belong to this category. There are others more scholarly and of a more thoroughgoing intellectual bent, who see Prabhakaran as merely the who, out there is Sri Lanka,

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that is fought from a more organic and clearly less aseptic intellectual environment than the sterile stretches of the peninsula or the Vanni.

V. Prabhakaran — 'to the most uninvolved, such as foreigners foreign journalists Indians etc., he is a ruthless person who is fighting for a cause or a ruthless person who is quite mad. Most Indians for instance think the latter — but then, no Indians are uninvolved.

Is Prabhakaran then, real? Not in this scheme of things. But, he is all too tangible, which is what's largely unfathomable to any of these minds in the categories referred to above.

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