COLOMBO: The Sri Lankan government on Saturday rued the way the then President J R Jayewardene had handled the arrest of the slain Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, who was caught, following a shoot out with his rival, Umamaheswaran, in Pondy Bazaar, Chennai, in 1982.
The Mahinda Rajapaksa government believes that if only Jayewardene’s government had not lectured the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on how ‘big brother’ India should treat its small neighbours and undiplomatically demanded the deportation of Prabhakaran and Umamaheswaran, putting a prize on their heads, New Delhi and Chennai would have tackled the issue quietly, and seen to it that the armed struggle for an independent Tamil Eelam was nipped in the bud.
This diplomatic faux pas was mentioned by the present Sri Lankan Secretary of Defence, Gotabaya Rajapaksa to the state-owned Sinhalese daily Dinamina.
Gotabaya claimed that it was India’s National Security Advisor, M K Narayanan, had told him that if the 1982 arrest incident had been handled differently Sri Lanka’s history would have been much different.
Prabhakaran and Umamaheswaran were not very important in the politics of Sri Lanka in 1982. However, both of them had criminal records.
The threat of deporting them had created a political storm in Tamil Nadu, thanks to the attitude of the then Lankan government, with all political parties in Tamil Nadu, coming to the forefront to prevent such a move.
Prabhakaran’s freedom had become a matter of ethnic pride among the Tamils back in Sri Lanka. Prabhakaran’s father, Thiruvengadam Velupillai, arranged for S C Chandrahasan, a leading lawyer and son of “Eelam’s Gandhi” S J V Chelanayakam, to Chennai to meet DMK leader M Karunanidhi and urge him to fight for the release of the duo.
Karunanidhi promptly appealed to his ally, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, to intervene and ask the then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M G Ramachandran to release Prabhakaran and Umamaheswaran.
To dramatise the situation further, LTTE leaders Kittu and Pulendran threatened to jump from the top of the LIC Building. It is said that two officials from the Research and Analysis Wing met Prabhakaran and Umameheswaran in jail, and expressed India’s sympathy for the Eelam Tamil cause, after they were granted bail.
