Very few people in India seem to be prepared to play ball with Mr Prabhakaran and treat the Tiger with sensitivity. Subramanium Swamy sees a Mahabaratha re-enacted in the coming years as India opposes tentative Sri Lankan moves to establish an interim administration in the NorthEast of the country.

So, while Mr Ajith Samaranayake suggests in the Observer that "the Tiger be treated with sensitivity if he is prepared to play ball with us'', his friends call the Tigers a "bunch of criminals'' (Gunadasa Amarasekera in the Island). Those then are the ground realities of the political outing of Mr Prabhakaran. Most would have liked to treat Prabhakaran with sensitivity, had it not been for this one little lingering problem. The bloke next door in the safari suit has been directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, the most number of killings one man has been directly responsible for in the present time, according to the London Times special millennium issue on the subject of death. Sounds trite isn't it?

Despite the amount of puppy fat that Mr Prabhakaran now possesses on his chin, it is difficult therefore to put him in pampers. The Indians for instance are used to reading the Jain Commission report. There were talks of interim administrations then as well. Unlike today, the LTTE wanted two of its nominees, and there were even two TULF nominees in the interim administration proposed for the NorthEast at that time.

But the LTTE bombed the interim administration and the subsequent elections too. That was one of those memorable times Mr Prabhakaran was willing to play ball with us. If it weren't for all our past sins, a subject to which we can return to in a minute, Mr Prabhakran's critics - committed critics - as one political writer did deign to concede last week, could demand a degree of sensitivity as well. These critics feel now that Mr Prabhakran is setting out to achieve politically, what he could not achieve by means of a protracted military campaign.

But, the political makeover is a direct result of the LTTE's decimation of the entire gamut of the Tamil political leadership, for which of course Mr Prabhakaran should never be demonized please, lest we offend the pious arahats in the ashrams of Lake House. Even so, the LTTE has recently made it known that no member of the docile and domesticated TNA would be accommodated in the NorthEast interim administration.

The Sinhala intelligentsia feel the Mafioso is now at the gates, but the Sinhala intelligentsia is not to be treated with any sensitivity for entertaining any of these sentiments. One reason is that the Sinhala intelligentsia does not carry anything that even resembles a gun. In order to be treated with sensitivity, one must necessarily carry the gun. One must necessarily have wiped out all political opponents. One must necessarily be the merchant of death.

Mr Bradman Weerakoon addresses the Norway Sri Lanka society over the week, and says that there is no alternative to an interim administration because this country cannot be at war due to a failing economy. It is the concessionary principle and contains some merit in terms of sheer compelling argument. There is no alternative, so the North and East needs to be parceled out to the Tigers, say the proponents of this line. If the Tigers have got there by systematically eliminating all shades of opposition, there is not much that can be done except to stomach it and see what happens.

At least this approach does not call for the sensitivity test. Nor does it say that Prabhakaran has given up without a whimper the A9 highway for which he fought so valiantly, and that therefore we should ensure that he is not driven back into his old habitat, now that he has come into the open and is breaking bread with us. The armed forces have given up the whole territory outside of the Wanni, but that does not count for anything, and Sri Lankan forces anyway are the wretched of the earth whose guns we can take from them anytime we want?

In the end, the proposed interim council will grant us the peace of the vast moral abstraction. What the Sri Lankan polity is told to do is accept the abstraction of negotiating with the LTTE which is the "sole representative of the Tamil people'' which is now willing to play ball with us, for which, make no mistake, we should copiously thank our karma. We are supposed to accept the abstraction that it is somehow we who created Mr Prabhakaran, when others such as Thiruchlvam Sabaratnam etc., were perfectly willing to play ball with the Sri Lankan state without swatting a fly in return. We didn't create the TELO, the EROS, the PLOTE, which were perfectly willing to lay down arms and play ball - in spite of the terrible crimes that have been carried out by successive Sinhala governments against the Tamil people. But, WE created Prabhakaran.

Neither does this peace of the vast moral abstraction take into account anything that happens even remotely in the concrete. While the peace is on, LTTE makes six arms shipments from Rangong in Thailand, TIME magazine documents it, and an LTTE arms shipment is intercepted this week in Trincomalee, and all this is not material in the gigantic abstraction that is being presented to us, because arms shipments during a ceasefire is not part of the abstract and abstruse concept of making peace with a man who we after all were responsible for. Make no mistake - WE are responsible for those arms shipments from Thailand.

What needs to be demystified is not Prabhakran. Somehow these peace abstractions do not ring true anymore, and to this extent there is less to demystify about the peace process as each day passes. There can't be much that is left to be said when Hakeem, Thondaman, Sambandan and all of them go like the Magi, to pay obeisance in the North to our creation, who wiped out the entire Tamil leadership that came his way. Things become very painfully obvious from there on.

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