Riding the tiger

Varatharaja Perumal, Perumal, anti LTTE, EPRLF

Uma  Vishnu (Indian Express)

"13 EPRLF men killed in Madras"

Varatharaja Perumal stared at the newspaper headline, horrified. A couple of hours ago, he had arrived from Mauritius on an early morning flight with his wife and three children. At the Bombay airport, he had frantically searched for his leader K. Padmanabha and his partymen. Members of Perumal anti-LTTE group, the Eelam People Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), were supposed to have met at the airport and now, they were all gone shot dead by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) while they were meeting at a flat in Kodambakkam, Madras, the previous day. What next? Should he take the next flight to Madras? What about Gowry and the children? Will the LTTE get him next?

Two hours later, Perumal and family were on another flight this time to Lakshadweep. After a month in the islands, it was time to move again, to Chanderi, a town in Madhya Pradesh. Two years in Chanderi and the family had to shift to Ajmer and then, to where they are now, an undisclosed location in North India.

For 19 years, Perumal played this dangerous game of hide-and-seek with the LTTE, a game that ended last month with Lankan troops crushing the LTTE and killing its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Perumal is the little-known third dimension in the Sri Lankan conflict that is often seen as a simplified Tamil versus Sinhalese conflict. The LTTE, which claimed to represent the Tamils, often gunned for Tamil leaders who charted their own political course. Perumal, former chief minister of the Tamil-dominated provinces in the north and once a key Tamil voice, was one such anti-LTTE, pro-Tamil Lankan leader.

I am relieved. But so are the Tamils in Lanka and elsewhere. Such was the fear of Prabhakaran. He motivated his cadres to swallow cyanide pills when they were cornered. But he was such a coward in death he was trying to flee when he was killed,� says Perumal, now 56. A map of Sri Lanka hangs on his wall, along with oil paintings by his artist-lawyer daughter.

The story of Perumal flight is the story of Sri Lanka, a country that has been in constant denial about its reality, a nation whose history and geography had ensured that its two communities the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority would live in close proximity, yet fight one of the bloodiest civil wars in Asia.

When Perumal fled Sri Lanka the second time in less than a decade in 1990, he left behind a country in chaos. After years of discriminative policies by pro-Sinhalese governments, Eelam (a separate nation) had become a war cry for most Tamils. The LTTE had by then anointed itself as the sole representative of the Tamil cause and ruthlessly mowed down anyone it thought was a traitor to that cause, even if they were Tamil groups like the EPRLF who were open to the idea of being part of the political process.

By 1987, India under Rajiv Gandhi had plunged into what would later turn out to be a foreign policy cesspool. As part of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, which called for devolution of powers to the Tamil provinces in the north and east, Rajiv Gandhi sent the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to Lanka. While other Tamil groups aligned with the IPKF and supported the Accord, the LTTE kept out and instead, launched devastating attacks on the IPKF, the EPRLF and other Tamil groups like TELO and PLOTE. In the provincial elections of 1988, the EPRLF was returned as the largest party and Perumal was made Chief Minister of the North East Provincial Council (formed by uniting the North and East provinces, with Trincomalee as capital). The same year, Ranasinghe Premadasa of the rightwing UNP was elected President. He was sharply critical of the Indo-Lanka Accord and promised to send the IPKF home. He began peace talks with the LTTE and promised them de facto control of the Tamil provinces. Perumal accused Premadasa of obstructing devolution and starving his Council of resources. Finally, as the IPKF began to depart, the LTTE stepped up attacks against other Tamil groups. On March 1, 1990, Perumal moved a controversial resolution declaring a separate Eelam but as the LTTE moved in to take control of Jaffna, Perumal and family fled to Mauritius in a RAW aircraft. After three and a half months in Mauritius, the VP Singh government brought Perumal to India. The night he boarded an Air India flight to Bombay, the LTTE killed his EPRLF colleagues. Perumal had to run again.

The river Betwa, a tributary of the Yamuna, and the surrounding hills have kept Chanderi company through mythology, some recent history and its present-day anonymity. In the Mahabharata, this was said to be the capital of King Shishupala but now, this town spins a different yarn the beautiful Chanderi silks.

In August 1990, three children sat wide-eyed, their noses stuck against the pane of the jeep they were in, looking out at their unfolding lives as they drove into Chanderi. This was where Eelavani, Raghavardhini and Neelambari and their parents Perumal and Gowry would spend the next two years. We were put up in a run-down hunting lodge owned by the Scindias in a secluded part of the town. The only people my daughters saw were the police guards and a few government officers, the police inspector and the tehsildar of that area, says Perumal.

And a swarm of insects. I had never seen such strange ones in my life. At night, they would be all over the place,� laughs Gowry, radiant in a Sri Lankan batik skirt with animal prints made with tiger skin, the Tamil Tigers,�she jokes. At 48, this daughter of a clerk in Jaffna has been through a lifetime of tumult starting from those heady days in Lanka when Gowry would run to the school gates after classes to distribute anti-government pamphlets that a young, revolutionary Perumal gave her. She would later fall in love with  Varada and stand by him through everything a turbulent political career, accusations, death threats, and picking up her three kids and fleeing when told to. Even if it was to Chanderi, a place she had never heard of till she set foot there.

For two years, the Perumals lived a life of anonymity in Chanderi. The children played with the tehsildar children and learnt some funny English� from a tutor who came home. The LTTE seemed as far away from them as Colombo was from Chanderi or at least, Perumal and Gowry told themselves that. I was confident of my security and the Indian intelligence. I knew they wouldn’t come close,� says Perumal.

But they couldn’t shut the fear out completely. A year after they had moved in, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu in May 1991, by the LTTE men who had killed EPRLF leader Padmanabha and his men in Madras.

Two years later, the Perumals had to move again, this time to Ajmer in Rajasthan, a place that was to be their home for the next 12 years. Here, the children went to school with bodyguards, Gowry picked up some more Hindi and Perumal stayed in touch with his network of EPRLF supporters scattered across the globe and at their base in Kodambakkam, Chennai.

Meanwhile, the politics of Lanka kept churning. In 1993, President Premadasa brief honeymoon with the LTTE ended and he was killed by a suicide bomber. In 1994, the People Alliance, under Chandrika Kumaratunge, came to power. The new President was friendly towards the EPRLF and Perumal saw another opportunity to test the political waters back home. All through this, the LTTE walked in and out of peace talks, carrying out spectacular bombings, including that of the country holiest Buddhist shrine, the Temple of the Tooth, in Kandy.

In January 1999, Perumal went back to Colombo, hoping to engage Kumaratunge on the issue of devolution, leaving Gowry and the children behind in Ajmer. But when the UNP came back to power in the parliamentary elections, Perumal found the LTTE getting stronger and his sphere shrinking. In 2004, he came back to Ajmer.

The same year, the family had to move out of Ajmer to their present location. Four years later, as they were preparing for their daughter Eelavani’s wedding in Ajmer, the LTTE came back to haunt them. In January 2008, a few months before the wedding, the Tamil Nadu police arrested Nathan alias Suruli, an LTTE intelligence wing member who had been operating as a taxi driver in Madipakkam, Chennai, for about a year. And then, the story unravelled. According to the police, Nathan had befriended Perumal’s relatives in Chennai and offered to drive them up to Ajmer. During questioning, Nathan apparently admitted he had been operating on instructions from senior LTTE intelligence wing leader Sanjeevi Master and that he had planned to kidnap Perumal.

That was the first time I was scared, says Gowry. Anyway, I am happy nothing happened. Eelavani is married to a Rajasthani and gave birth to a son last month, Raghavardhini is a pilot and Neelambari has graduated in law from DU. India has been good for us.�

India and the Perumals

The first time Perumal came to India was in 1977 to see if he could set up a base in Tamil Nadu. Nothing came of the visit but Perumal caught up with some of his favourite MGR movies and went back an inspired 24-year-old.

Perumal came to India again in 1983, this time as a political refugee after the Batticoloa jail break, when 41 Tamil political inmates had jumped jail. Gowry joined him a month later, taking the same sea route from Palali, a town in the northern Lankan city of Jaffna, to Vedaranyam in Tamil Nadu. The sea was rough. I was with my mother and two children on that little boat, says Gowry.

That was the first time the Perumals had fled their home in Lanka and it has been 26 years since. Would they want to go back now that Prabhakaran is dead? I will certainly go back. But I am not exactly looking for a political role. I don’t want people to say, he was away during the country’s worst times and now that things are looking up, he has come back. I will be glad if the government can make some use of my experience to correct the flaws in the 13th Amendment and work for devolution of powers to the Tamils within the framework of the Lankan Constitution, says Perumal.

If he does go back, Perumal may be able to cycle to Jaffna University like he used to once.