Books | Scorched Earth

‘Martyrdom is not just an individual’s courage, but also the celebration of the larger kinship’s participation, their collective will. If the individual has a rethink, it cannot happen. It would be extremely shameful, and it won’t then be limited to him. His own mother will tear out her own breasts out of shame,’ said Gurukkal.

The LTTE was drawing from this old culture of celebrating suicide deaths. Starting in 1989, the group and its broad set of sympathisers around the world began to organise the Maaveerar Naal on 27 November, Lt Shankar’s death anniversary. Every educational institution in Tamil areas, every village and even the Tamil diaspora participated in this celebration of their fallen heroes. At the culmination of a week-long event, Pirabakaran would deliver a speech, which began precisely at 6.05 p.m., the time when Lt Shankar died.

Tamil Christians also participated in the LTTE’s celebration of martyrs, according to many analysts of the period. Starting in the early 1980s, Christian Tamil youth joined the LTTE in large numbers. US-based academic S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole, who has been at the receiving end of the Tigers’ ire, pointed out in a research paper in 1996 that Catholic priests in Tamil areas would urge the congregation from the pulpit to give a son to the LTTE, like God gave his only son Jesus to the world. As the Tigers’ influence began to rise in the northeast, so did the influence of pro-LTTE priests within the church. A fair number of Catholic Church and Church of south India priests in the northeast of the country were active propagandists for the LTTE, Hoole and others have pointed out.

Besides commemorative events and memorials, the Tigers regularly published glossy books with photographs of their martyrs. According to pro-LTTE writer Sachi Sri Kantha, in 2003, a memorial souvenir titled Sooriya Puthalvargal was published, its ninety-six pages detailing in Tamil the bravery of 240 Black Tigers, including some who were yet to carry out suicide attacks. ‘These were the contemporary practitioners of altruistic suicidal act in the battleground of Ceylon, perfected by Guru Drona in the Battle of Kurushetra nearly 5,000 years ago,’ Kantha wrote in June 2004. ‘All were superheroes of a higher order for Tamils like me. They belong to my extended family, and they are the real things, unlike the glib Hollywood generated entertainment icons like Rambo and Terminator.’

‘The most difficult part of my entire command was managing the withdrawal of the IPKF. At one stage, we had 70,000 troops. We slowly brought them down to 50, 40, and then to 30,000. When you are on a narrow bridge head, with the LTTE all around, and you are getting no military assistance from the Sri Lankan army, and the LTTE free at that stage, the prime concern for me was the lives of my soldiers,’ Lt Gen. A.S