India's Forgotten Soldiers (IPKF)

[Inqhilab]

Long but informative.

Uncovering The War​

by Shekhar Gupta
Reconstructing the IPKF disaster, piece by poignant piece, brought me face to face with rare courage —and inexcusable complacence.
India's unexpected war in Sri Lanka caught me on the wrong foot by 12,000 km. I was still finishing the last month of my sabbatical year in Washington DC when the fighting broke out. And as I returned home, the media was full of coverage, often loaded, of the IPKF disaster in Sri Lanka's Jaffna peninsula. Loaded because the Bofors scandal, and many other missteps, already had Rajiv Gandhi under widespread attack. Sri Lanka was therefore seen as "babalog" political stupidity, rather than military incompetence. In the process, we were guilty of both insensitivity to Indian soldiers, their courage and sacrifice, and conveniently overlooking the complacence of our higher commanders. Now, this was obviously not a war we were going to ever lose — though my friend Hardeep Puri, who was by then our deputy high commissioner in Colombo under J.N. "Mani" Dixit, tells you, sort of semi-lightheartedly, that there was one evening so tense that it sounded as if Palaly (Jaffna airbase and the IPKF's 54 Infantry Division HQ) was going to fall. Hardeep had just seen the truce agreement he had so painstakingly drafted and signed with Mahattaya (Madras Cafe's Mallaya) fall apart.

It is creditable how much of that initial messiness Shoojit Sircar has got accurately. The fact that early IPKF patrols were routinely ambushed, pinned down and annihilated. How its officers were picked out by snipers. How the LTTE seemed to have inside information on all IPKF moves (more about this a little later). The most creditable footage, however fleeting and sensitively handled, is of the Tigers ransacking Indian soldiers' bodies and picking weapons, souvenirs and trophies from them. Note, particularly, a boyish Sikh soldier sitting, frozen in rigor mortis. That quality of research you didn't expect from a mainstream Indian filmmaker, and we will shortly explain why.

On my return to India, I was deeply saddened — even offended — by the celebratory coverage of the war. Cover pictures of Indian soldiers' bodies, close-ups of Tigers displaying caps, identity cards, boots of dead Indian soldiers. You had never seen an Indian war covered like that, and you haven't since. Of course, I also felt rotten having missed out on the big story which, for the magazine, was covered by my friend and colleague Anita Pratap, who later worked for Time and CNN. She believes that Nargis Fakhri's Jaya was styled after her, and has sent emails to her old friends saying so. The photographer accompanying her, Shyam Tekwani, was my frequent travelling partner in Sri Lanka subsequently, and now teaches at the Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies, Hawaii. I did get into many arguments in our newsroom on how we had covered the story and why it was necessary to now reconstruct what exactly had gone wrong, and the lessons learnt, etc. My reward was being assigned that story now. And in the third week of December, 1987, I landed in Colombo, having been briefed by Gen Sundarji, his DGMO Lt Gen (later army chief) Bipin Chandra Joshi, and his staff.

Since association by events is sometimes the safest way to remember dates, particularly if you do not maintain elaborate notebooks — in my case, in fact, hardly, and notoriously the sketchiest ones, if at all — I can tell you I was on way to Jaffna from Colombo in a rented Mitsubishi Lancer on December 24 and had just crossed Vavuniya when everything came to a standstill. Angry, grieving mobs blocked the streets. MGR had just died — that's how I know the precise date — and a bandh had been declared by Tamils. I couldn't go forward or back, knew no Tamil, had no food or shelter, and you know how early the winter sun sets that far in the east. But I was lucky again, as an IPKF patrol of Maratha Light Infantry Regiment passed by and its leader, then a very young Captain C.K. Menon, offered me shelter in his camp. We connected decades later at the ITC Grand Central Hotel in Mumbai, where he was serving in a senior capacity, having left the army as a colonel (he has moved up the ladder in ITC hotels now). From him and his colleagues that night, in that small camp in the danger zone, I heard my first stories of the ordeal Indian soldiers had just been through. True enough, after absorbing the initial setbacks, they had taken and secured the entire Jaffna peninsula. But the price had been a shocker: 350 killed and 1,100 wounded in this month-long charge. The casualty rate, at 7 per cent of all troops involved, was twice as high as in our wars against Pakistan. One of the five brigades that assaulted Jaffna, the 41st, which was airlifted on October 17 and launched straight on the coastal road axis leading to Jaffna Fort (see sketch), had 272 casualties, or 17 per cent of its strength. The 72nd also suffered heavy casualties, including its deputy brigade commander, Col D.S. Saraon. The heavily armoured BMP Infantry Fighting Vehicle he was riding was blown up by a 200-kg mine. The 13.2-tonne vehicle was tossed more than 30 feet and its doors, each weighing more than 250 kg, were found more than a hundred yards away. Another illustrious battalion, 4/5 Gurkhas, had its commandant and all but one of its majors killed one afternoon. This is not a war anybody had expected and, regrettably, prepared to fight. I wrote a five-page reconstruction and analysis headlined 'In a rush to vanquish' (India Today, January 31, 1988).

T-72 TANKS, Mi-25 helicopter gunships had come without ammunition, infantry had been airlifted from places as far as Gwalior and thrown into battle without even three hours of familiarisation. There is no excuse for this kind of complacence. The IPKF's first casualties were five soldiers from its finest unit, the paracommandos. Waylaid by the LTTE while casually going to collect provisions on October 8, they were burnt in public with tyres thrown around their necks. That disastrous beginning spilled over into the most talked about setback then: the combined, heli-dropped paracommando and infantry raid (October 11) on the Jaffna University campus where Prabhakaran and his top aides were living. It went wrong from the word go. Only two-thirds of the commandos (10 Paracommando) could be landed and the infantry company (13 Sikh Light Infantry), which was to secure the landing ground, the football field from where IPKF helicopters used to routinely pick up LTTE commanders for talks, failed to fetch up, and the special assault forces contingent was reduced to fighting a battle for survival instead. As for Sikh LI, only a platoon could be landed, and in the wrong playground, several lanes of buildings away. The rest of the company could not land as helicopters came under medium machine gun fire. The platoon, led by Major Birendra Singh, a close relation of diplomat-politician K. Natwar Singh, was encircled and wiped out after a valiant fight. Only one of the 30, Sepoy Gora Singh, survived, and was taken prisoner by the LTTE. It is believed Prabhakaran displayed him to his fighters, kicked him in public and said, let him go, so he will tell them not to fight us again. Gora Singh, however, brought back the story of one of the Indian army's most poignant battles ever, where, out of ammunition, the last three survivors even carried out a final, suicidal bayonet charge. The LTTE looted and stripped all the bodies, piled them in the nearby Nagaraja Vihar Temple on public display, and then cremated them by simply throwing a barrel of oil over them. That's why it is so revolting now to see Tamil Nadu politicians feeling so sorry for the Tigers.

And this is why we had said earlier that Madras Cafe's footage of the first battles, along with the young Sikh soldier (remember the Sikh LI platoon) in rigor mortis and the LTTE boys plundering the bodies, was so remarkable. It was the first instance of Indian filmmakers challenging the old Haqeeqat-Hindustan ki Kasam-Border notion of Indian war cinema. I walked around that ground weeks later and still found shreds of the Sikhs' uniforms. In the nearby building, there was more evidence of the sickening plunder of those bodies: pieces of Sikh LI battle fatigues, cross-belts, boots, water bottles, epaulettes, all mixed with .50 mg MMG shells, sometimes ankle-deep. That tells you how much fire that one lost platoon withstood in the course of those valiant 12 hours.

The commandos, separated in the football ground, had done a little better, with six killed and nine wounded. They were finally rescued in an audacious and brilliantly innovative operation by their commanding officer, Lt Col Dalbir Singh, covered by three T-72 tanks of 65 Armoured Regiment. Since by now it was known that the Tigers had mined all approaches, Major Anil Kaul, the tank commander (his father had first raised this regiment), remembered a railway line skirting the campus and decided to drive the tanks on the rail tracks instead, for once surprising the LTTE. But his own tank was hit on the turret by an RPG shell (or an MMG burst) and he lost his eye and hand as he bravely peeped out to navigate. His inspired troops put him on morphine, bashed on, and ensured that heroic rescue of the commandos. The Col Kaul with an eye-patch that you see on your TV channels, usually furious over some military issue or the other, and who once famously demanded that I be hanged upside down from a tree and flogged (after our story on the army movements on the night of January 16, 2012, that spooked Raisina Hill), is the same valiant cavalry man.

Pardon me for leap-frogging the calendar, but Col Kaul's latter day anger apart, in Sri Lanka I got nothing but large-hearted access, affection and hospitality from the Indian army. I did have only one tough scrap, though well meaning. This was at Batticaloa in September 1989, where, after a briefing and lunch with the GOC of 57 Mountain Division there, I was stepping out to go to the city. As Tekwani and I came out of the general's ops room, we found three army trucks and a Jeep, machine guns mounted, tarpaulins ripped and battle-ready Sikh soldiers spilling over from each one. "This is your escort," said the general. We protested that we were safest as journalists, and going out with such a convoy would endanger our lives and the soldiers', as the LTTE may just presume we were some Indian VIPs. The argument became heated. And the irritated general gave up on us, saying, "All right, then you are on your own, and I am taking the chopper to an outpost. Then, if something happens to you in this area, at least I will not be responsible." But that "you are being stupid anyway". He was, of course, speaking from sincere concern. He was a wonderful soldier and his name is Maj Gen Ashok Mehta, who is now one of your more sensible and articulate TV generals. Yet another aside: he subsequently married prominent political journalist Aditi Phadnis. I can make a disclosure now, the original tip-off on Tamil rebel training camps in India, that led to the first story of March 1984, had come from Aditi's mother, Urmila, a highly respected international affairs professor at JNU. Now don't say that reporters' stories are filled with digressions.

Shoojit's film suggests that the LTTE knew all about IPKF moves because some traitor was leaking to them. He is only halfway right. There were no traitors, but the LTTE knew for sure. As the IPKF later discovered, the LTTE's communications, electronics and eavesdropping ability was on par with modern armies. An army College of Combat team later researched the disasters, particularly at Jaffna University, and concluded that the Tigers had intercepted the IPKF wireless on that assault night. Even the range and height settings of their machine guns were perfect when the helicopters arrived.

The five brigades that converged on Jaffna moved at different speeds and suffered a varying, but high, number of casualties. But the brigade that suffered the least, the 18th, also reached Jaffna the fastest. Why, I learnt during those many conversations over long nights spent at the regrouping and recuperating units' field headquarters. Its commander, Brigadier J.S. "Jogi" Dhillon, spoke at length about jiujitsu, of how to turn your enemy's strengths against him. So his troops moved only at night and only through the fields and lagoons, avoiding all roads, thereby skirting minefields and snipers. But most importantly, he showed the courage and military dash to use the most potent weapon in the IPKF's armoury: the deadly Mi-25 helicopter gunships, the only time that weapon has been used in our history. His brigade had to take the Tiger stronghold of Chavakachcheri (where Prabhakaran executed Mahattaya and his 257 soldiers later in December 1994), and heavy casualties were anticipated. He prevailed on the high command to let him use Mi-25s. All they did was fire just 32 rockets at the Chavakachcheri bus station, supposed to be the LTTE nerve centre. He took the town with just three casualties. There was the predictable outcry that many of the 28 Tamils killed by Mi-25 rockets were innocent civilians. But Jogi's point was, so what were they doing there? He quoted the Chetwode Oath to me, which made the safety and well being of his troops next only to his nation's security for an Indian army officer. "As the Americans used to sometimes call Vietnam, Shekhar, this is a dirty little war and people will die," he said, "and because many will die, they better be yours rather than mine." Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket had probably not released in India by then, so I am not sure he borrowed that line from the young marine there, though spoken in a different context.

Dhillon, Brigadiers Manjit Singh (the battered 41st) and B.D. Mishra (72nd) spoke of other experiences and lessons. How the Tigers had rigged Chinese-made sniper chairs on the top of palm trees where sharpshooters waited entire days with rifles equipped with telescopic sights, how they expertly picked out officers from Indian columns: a skill taught to them, sadly, by our own army instructors when we were hand-in-glove with them. Also, their expertise with electronics and explosives and their ability to marry both. At one point, the IPKF was so harassed by IEDs electronically detonated from afar that it cut off power to Jaffna for several days.

On the way back from Jaffna and on subsequent visits to Sri Lanka as well, I was given generous audiences in the newly built chancery, a monument to disastrous CPWD architecture and L-1 construction at such a premium ocean-front spot, by High Commissioner "Mani" Dixit who once had chided me for that 1984 training camps story but was now so genuinely affectionate. The Sri Lankan media mocked him as "viceroy", and Mani smirked as only he could as he cleaned and dusted his pipe and looked out of his window at the two Indian navy frigates routinely anchored close enough for you to see the markings and ensigns. "Sadly, Shekhar, you've proven to be right and we so wrong with the Tigers," he said. "These thugs were never to be trusted and I am sure nobody ever would." Not much later, Premadasa did, and paid with his life. But Mani also said another important thing. He said the IPKF experience had told him India was still not ready to be a big power. "The first evening of fighting, and I knew we were not yet ready for force projection overseas, and willing to pay the price, politically and militarily, for it. We are a long way from being a big power," he said.

Of course, over two decades, we became close friends as our paths crossed in Pakistan (when he was high commissioner there) and later, when he served as foreign secretary, he wrote a regular column for this paper and then returned to South Block as the UPA's first national security advisor. But you could see that he was somehow stressed in that job. The Mani Dixit smirk and twinkle were now missing. At a dinner at my home for Fareed Zakaria on January 2, 2005, I asked Mani why he looked so stressed. Then he spoke that other line which I have borrowed often, in many contexts as a political journalist. "It takes you a lifetime learning the ways of this benighted city," he said, "and by the time you learn them, it is too late in life to be of much use to you." As more guests came in, he said we should meet again at leisure and he would explain.

That was not to be. Dixit had a heart attack later that night and next morning so many of us, friends, fans, admirers and sometimes sparring partners, were at his funeral. Frankly, he would have been a much, much better man to tell you the story of that bloody period in Sri Lanka than any journalist watching from the sidelines, or filmmaker skirting political minefields.

Epilogue: I got some lashing in the Colombo press last week for saying at the India-Sri Lanka Society banquet that the country seemed to be missing the real peace dividend that should have followed the successful completion of a long war. Where is the creative, liberal, civil society renaissance that usually follows such wars? I said the army was still too big and, with 4 per cent of the able-bodied Sinhala male population still in uniform (India has around 0.2 per cent), the political and institutional balance was skewed unhealthily. I also spoke of the need to celebrate diversity and to build stronger institutions as, in a democracy, that was the natural protection against majoritarian excess.

I got calls from Colombo journalists saying I had challenged Sri Lanka's sovereignty and attacked its judiciary, etc. This is utterly fallacious. I believe, on the contrary, that Mahinda Rajapaksa has made a historic contribution to his nation and done a great favour to India and Tamil Nadu by ridding us all of the cruellest, most deceitful, fascist force in our history. He deserves India's gratitude. And the LTTE deserves nobody's sympathy. But Sri Lanka's peace dividend should not be confined to a construction boom.

Uncovering The War - Indian Express

Saddest part President Rajapaksa has built memorial for the IPKF in his new parliament campus, something India haven't done for fear of annoying the Dravid parties.

 

[he-man]

ppl don't read it first,,,its the 3rd article in series

go to post no 3 first

Long but informative.

Uncovering The War​

by Shekhar Gupta
Reconstructing the IPKF disaster, piece by poignant piece, brought me face to face with rare courage —and inexcusable complacence.
India's unexpected war in Sri Lanka caught me on the wrong foot by 12,000 km. I was still finishing the last month of my sabbatical year in Washington DC when the fighting broke out. And as I returned home, the media was full of coverage, often loaded, of the IPKF disaster in Sri Lanka's Jaffna peninsula. Loaded because the Bofors scandal, and many other missteps, already had Rajiv Gandhi under widespread attack. Sri Lanka was therefore seen as "babalog" political stupidity, rather than military incompetence. In the process, we were guilty of both insensitivity to Indian soldiers, their courage and sacrifice, and conveniently overlooking the complacence of our higher commanders. Now, this was obviously not a war we were going to ever lose — though my friend Hardeep Puri, who was by then our deputy high commissioner in Colombo under J.N. "Mani" Dixit, tells you, sort of semi-lightheartedly, that there was one evening so tense that it sounded as if Palaly (Jaffna airbase and the IPKF's 54 Infantry Division HQ) was going to fall. Hardeep had just seen the truce agreement he had so painstakingly drafted and signed with Mahattaya (Madras Cafe's Mallaya) fall apart.

It is creditable how much of that initial messiness Shoojit Sircar has got accurately. The fact that early IPKF patrols were routinely ambushed, pinned down and annihilated. How its officers were picked out by snipers. How the LTTE seemed to have inside information on all IPKF moves (more about this a little later). The most creditable footage, however fleeting and sensitively handled, is of the Tigers ransacking Indian soldiers' bodies and picking weapons, souvenirs and trophies from them. Note, particularly, a boyish Sikh soldier sitting, frozen in rigor mortis. That quality of research you didn't expect from a mainstream Indian filmmaker, and we will shortly explain why.

On my return to India, I was deeply saddened — even offended — by the celebratory coverage of the war. Cover pictures of Indian soldiers' bodies, close-ups of Tigers displaying caps, identity cards, boots of dead Indian soldiers. You had never seen an Indian war covered like that, and you haven't since. Of course, I also felt rotten having missed out on the big story which, for the magazine, was covered by my friend and colleague Anita Pratap, who later worked for Time and CNN. She believes that Nargis Fakhri's Jaya was styled after her, and has sent emails to her old friends saying so. The photographer accompanying her, Shyam Tekwani, was my frequent travelling partner in Sri Lanka subsequently, and now teaches at the Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies, Hawaii. I did get into many arguments in our newsroom on how we had covered the story and why it was necessary to now reconstruct what exactly had gone wrong, and the lessons learnt, etc. My reward was being assigned that story now. And in the third week of December, 1987, I landed in Colombo, having been briefed by Gen Sundarji, his DGMO Lt Gen (later army chief) Bipin Chandra Joshi, and his staff.

Since association by events is sometimes the safest way to remember dates, particularly if you do not maintain elaborate notebooks — in my case, in fact, hardly, and notoriously the sketchiest ones, if at all — I can tell you I was on way to Jaffna from Colombo in a rented Mitsubishi Lancer on December 24 and had just crossed Vavuniya when everything came to a standstill. Angry, grieving mobs blocked the streets. MGR had just died — that's how I know the precise date — and a bandh had been declared by Tamils. I couldn't go forward or back, knew no Tamil, had no food or shelter, and you know how early the winter sun sets that far in the east. But I was lucky again, as an IPKF patrol of Maratha Light Infantry Regiment passed by and its leader, then a very young Captain C.K. Menon, offered me shelter in his camp. We connected decades later at the ITC Grand Central Hotel in Mumbai, where he was serving in a senior capacity, having left the army as a colonel (he has moved up the ladder in ITC hotels now). From him and his colleagues that night, in that small camp in the danger zone, I heard my first stories of the ordeal Indian soldiers had just been through. True enough, after absorbing the initial setbacks, they had taken and secured the entire Jaffna peninsula. But the price had been a shocker: 350 killed and 1,100 wounded in this month-long charge. The casualty rate, at 7 per cent of all troops involved, was twice as high as in our wars against Pakistan. One of the five brigades that assaulted Jaffna, the 41st, which was airlifted on October 17 and launched straight on the coastal road axis leading to Jaffna Fort (see sketch), had 272 casualties, or 17 per cent of its strength. The 72nd also suffered heavy casualties, including its deputy brigade commander, Col D.S. Saraon. The heavily armoured BMP Infantry Fighting Vehicle he was riding was blown up by a 200-kg mine. The 13.2-tonne vehicle was tossed more than 30 feet and its doors, each weighing more than 250 kg, were found more than a hundred yards away. Another illustrious battalion, 4/5 Gurkhas, had its commandant and all but one of its majors killed one afternoon. This is not a war anybody had expected and, regrettably, prepared to fight. I wrote a five-page reconstruction and analysis headlined 'In a rush to vanquish' (India Today, January 31, 1988).

T-72 TANKS, Mi-25 helicopter gunships had come without ammunition, infantry had been airlifted from places as far as Gwalior and thrown into battle without even three hours of familiarisation. There is no excuse for this kind of complacence. The IPKF's first casualties were five soldiers from its finest unit, the paracommandos. Waylaid by the LTTE while casually going to collect provisions on October 8, they were burnt in public with tyres thrown around their necks. That disastrous beginning spilled over into the most talked about setback then: the combined, heli-dropped paracommando and infantry raid (October 11) on the Jaffna University campus where Prabhakaran and his top aides were living. It went wrong from the word go. Only two-thirds of the commandos (10 Paracommando) could be landed and the infantry company (13 Sikh Light Infantry), which was to secure the landing ground, the football field from where IPKF helicopters used to routinely pick up LTTE commanders for talks, failed to fetch up, and the special assault forces contingent was reduced to fighting a battle for survival instead. As for Sikh LI, only a platoon could be landed, and in the wrong playground, several lanes of buildings away. The rest of the company could not land as helicopters came under medium machine gun fire. The platoon, led by Major Birendra Singh, a close relation of diplomat-politician K. Natwar Singh, was encircled and wiped out after a valiant fight. Only one of the 30, Sepoy Gora Singh, survived, and was taken prisoner by the LTTE. It is believed Prabhakaran displayed him to his fighters, kicked him in public and said, let him go, so he will tell them not to fight us again. Gora Singh, however, brought back the story of one of the Indian army's most poignant battles ever, where, out of ammunition, the last three survivors even carried out a final, suicidal bayonet charge. The LTTE looted and stripped all the bodies, piled them in the nearby Nagaraja Vihar Temple on public display, and then cremated them by simply throwing a barrel of oil over them. That's why it is so revolting now to see Tamil Nadu politicians feeling so sorry for the Tigers.

And this is why we had said earlier that Madras Cafe's footage of the first battles, along with the young Sikh soldier (remember the Sikh LI platoon) in rigor mortis and the LTTE boys plundering the bodies, was so remarkable. It was the first instance of Indian filmmakers challenging the old Haqeeqat-Hindustan ki Kasam-Border notion of Indian war cinema. I walked around that ground weeks later and still found shreds of the Sikhs' uniforms. In the nearby building, there was more evidence of the sickening plunder of those bodies: pieces of Sikh LI battle fatigues, cross-belts, boots, water bottles, epaulettes, all mixed with .50 mg MMG shells, sometimes ankle-deep. That tells you how much fire that one lost platoon withstood in the course of those valiant 12 hours.

The commandos, separated in the football ground, had done a little better, with six killed and nine wounded. They were finally rescued in an audacious and brilliantly innovative operation by their commanding officer, Lt Col Dalbir Singh, covered by three T-72 tanks of 65 Armoured Regiment. Since by now it was known that the Tigers had mined all approaches, Major Anil Kaul, the tank commander (his father had first raised this regiment), remembered a railway line skirting the campus and decided to drive the tanks on the rail tracks instead, for once surprising the LTTE. But his own tank was hit on the turret by an RPG shell (or an MMG burst) and he lost his eye and hand as he bravely peeped out to navigate. His inspired troops put him on morphine, bashed on, and ensured that heroic rescue of the commandos. The Col Kaul with an eye-patch that you see on your TV channels, usually furious over some military issue or the other, and who once famously demanded that I be hanged upside down from a tree and flogged (after our story on the army movements on the night of January 16, 2012, that spooked Raisina Hill), is the same valiant cavalry man.

Pardon me for leap-frogging the calendar, but Col Kaul's latter day anger apart, in Sri Lanka I got nothing but large-hearted access, affection and hospitality from the Indian army. I did have only one tough scrap, though well meaning. This was at Batticaloa in September 1989, where, after a briefing and lunch with the GOC of 57 Mountain Division there, I was stepping out to go to the city. As Tekwani and I came out of the general's ops room, we found three army trucks and a Jeep, machine guns mounted, tarpaulins ripped and battle-ready Sikh soldiers spilling over from each one. "This is your escort," said the general. We protested that we were safest as journalists, and going out with such a convoy would endanger our lives and the soldiers', as the LTTE may just presume we were some Indian VIPs. The argument became heated. And the irritated general gave up on us, saying, "All right, then you are on your own, and I am taking the chopper to an outpost. Then, if something happens to you in this area, at least I will not be responsible." But that "you are being stupid anyway". He was, of course, speaking from sincere concern. He was a wonderful soldier and his name is Maj Gen Ashok Mehta, who is now one of your more sensible and articulate TV generals. Yet another aside: he subsequently married prominent political journalist Aditi Phadnis. I can make a disclosure now, the original tip-off on Tamil rebel training camps in India, that led to the first story of March 1984, had come from Aditi's mother, Urmila, a highly respected international affairs professor at JNU. Now don't say that reporters' stories are filled with digressions.

Shoojit's film suggests that the LTTE knew all about IPKF moves because some traitor was leaking to them. He is only halfway right. There were no traitors, but the LTTE knew for sure. As the IPKF later discovered, the LTTE's communications, electronics and eavesdropping ability was on par with modern armies. An army College of Combat team later researched the disasters, particularly at Jaffna University, and concluded that the Tigers had intercepted the IPKF wireless on that assault night. Even the range and height settings of their machine guns were perfect when the helicopters arrived.

The five brigades that converged on Jaffna moved at different speeds and suffered a varying, but high, number of casualties. But the brigade that suffered the least, the 18th, also reached Jaffna the fastest. Why, I learnt during those many conversations over long nights spent at the regrouping and recuperating units' field headquarters. Its commander, Brigadier J.S. "Jogi" Dhillon, spoke at length about jiujitsu, of how to turn your enemy's strengths against him. So his troops moved only at night and only through the fields and lagoons, avoiding all roads, thereby skirting minefields and snipers. But most importantly, he showed the courage and military dash to use the most potent weapon in the IPKF's armoury: the deadly Mi-25 helicopter gunships, the only time that weapon has been used in our history. His brigade had to take the Tiger stronghold of Chavakachcheri (where Prabhakaran executed Mahattaya and his 257 soldiers later in December 1994), and heavy casualties were anticipated. He prevailed on the high command to let him use Mi-25s. All they did was fire just 32 rockets at the Chavakachcheri bus station, supposed to be the LTTE nerve centre. He took the town with just three casualties. There was the predictable outcry that many of the 28 Tamils killed by Mi-25 rockets were innocent civilians. But Jogi's point was, so what were they doing there? He quoted the Chetwode Oath to me, which made the safety and well being of his troops next only to his nation's security for an Indian army officer. "As the Americans used to sometimes call Vietnam, Shekhar, this is a dirty little war and people will die," he said, "and because many will die, they better be yours rather than mine." Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket had probably not released in India by then, so I am not sure he borrowed that line from the young marine there, though spoken in a different context.

Dhillon, Brigadiers Manjit Singh (the battered 41st) and B.D. Mishra (72nd) spoke of other experiences and lessons. How the Tigers had rigged Chinese-made sniper chairs on the top of palm trees where sharpshooters waited entire days with rifles equipped with telescopic sights, how they expertly picked out officers from Indian columns: a skill taught to them, sadly, by our own army instructors when we were hand-in-glove with them. Also, their expertise with electronics and explosives and their ability to marry both. At one point, the IPKF was so harassed by IEDs electronically detonated from afar that it cut off power to Jaffna for several days.

On the way back from Jaffna and on subsequent visits to Sri Lanka as well, I was given generous audiences in the newly built chancery, a monument to disastrous CPWD architecture and L-1 construction at such a premium ocean-front spot, by High Commissioner "Mani" Dixit who once had chided me for that 1984 training camps story but was now so genuinely affectionate. The Sri Lankan media mocked him as "viceroy", and Mani smirked as only he could as he cleaned and dusted his pipe and looked out of his window at the two Indian navy frigates routinely anchored close enough for you to see the markings and ensigns. "Sadly, Shekhar, you've proven to be right and we so wrong with the Tigers," he said. "These thugs were never to be trusted and I am sure nobody ever would." Not much later, Premadasa did, and paid with his life. But Mani also said another important thing. He said the IPKF experience had told him India was still not ready to be a big power. "The first evening of fighting, and I knew we were not yet ready for force projection overseas, and willing to pay the price, politically and militarily, for it. We are a long way from being a big power," he said.

Of course, over two decades, we became close friends as our paths crossed in Pakistan (when he was high commissioner there) and later, when he served as foreign secretary, he wrote a regular column for this paper and then returned to South Block as the UPA's first national security advisor. But you could see that he was somehow stressed in that job. The Mani Dixit smirk and twinkle were now missing. At a dinner at my home for Fareed Zakaria on January 2, 2005, I asked Mani why he looked so stressed. Then he spoke that other line which I have borrowed often, in many contexts as a political journalist. "It takes you a lifetime learning the ways of this benighted city," he said, "and by the time you learn them, it is too late in life to be of much use to you." As more guests came in, he said we should meet again at leisure and he would explain.

That was not to be. Dixit had a heart attack later that night and next morning so many of us, friends, fans, admirers and sometimes sparring partners, were at his funeral. Frankly, he would have been a much, much better man to tell you the story of that bloody period in Sri Lanka than any journalist watching from the sidelines, or filmmaker skirting political minefields.

Epilogue: I got some lashing in the Colombo press last week for saying at the India-Sri Lanka Society banquet that the country seemed to be missing the real peace dividend that should have followed the successful completion of a long war. Where is the creative, liberal, civil society renaissance that usually follows such wars? I said the army was still too big and, with 4 per cent of the able-bodied Sinhala male population still in uniform (India has around 0.2 per cent), the political and institutional balance was skewed unhealthily. I also spoke of the need to celebrate diversity and to build stronger institutions as, in a democracy, that was the natural protection against majoritarian excess.

I got calls from Colombo journalists saying I had challenged Sri Lanka's sovereignty and attacked its judiciary, etc. This is utterly fallacious. I believe, on the contrary, that Mahinda Rajapaksa has made a historic contribution to his nation and done a great favour to India and Tamil Nadu by ridding us all of the cruellest, most deceitful, fascist force in our history. He deserves India's gratitude. And the LTTE deserves nobody's sympathy. But Sri Lanka's peace dividend should not be confined to a construction boom.

Uncovering The War - Indian Express

Saddest part President Rajapaksa has built memorial for the IPKF in his new parliament campus, something India haven't done for fear of annoying the Dravid parties.

man just read in the newspaper.......................5 min back

can u post other 2 stories too........thats is yesterday and day before yesterday too

its a 3 part article actually

This article is a muh-tod javaab for all the ppl sympathetic to the tamil cause,,,,the ltte was the most brutal organisation of its time and it was the best to get rid of these thugs but india did play a double game and paid a heavy price for that

 

[Inqhilab]

Such a long Lankan journey(1st)​

From finding Tamil guerilla camps in 1984 to checking up on lost friends last week in Colombo
This new, occasional series should, in fairness, be a thank-you note to Shoojit Sircar, one of our new breed of young and thinking filmmakers. His latest Madras Café marks a new beginning in Hindi cinema. Unlike Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, it does not claim to be a biopic. And, unlike Milkha, it stays much closer to the real story which, again entirely unlike Milkha Singh's, is one of the saddest in our history: the LTTE-led terror, war with the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in north and eastern Sri Lanka, and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Of course, there is much fictionalisation, some for the convenience of storytelling and some for political caution. But there is enough for somebody who saw these events up close to go back to the story, and then tie up some ends with current research to retell it. That is why, as I said in the beginning, this is not a review of Shoojit's brilliant film, but a thank-you note. Because he has given me that nudge to start putting together a reporter's memoir of sorts. Publishers have often approached me to write one, and I have routinely fobbed them off with a permanent, lazy journalist's excuse: editors write books between jobs. That hasn't come to pass, nor is it likely to anytime soon. So, inspired by Madras Café, I am trying an unconventional approach to that memoir in the form of this series, where I will try and revisit, say, some 20 of the biggest stories of our times that I was eyewitness to. And don't get alarmed. I won't be inflicting this on you in a neverending serial, but only occasionally. Only when one of these stories somehow pops back in the news. Further, while the selfish reason, of course, is to get a headstart on my memoirs, these stories will also, I hope, put what happened in today's context. Like in this case, Lanka's still open wounds and its struggle with healing.

"First Person" in this series comes from the idea that I confine myself to my first-hand experience. And "Second Draft", because the passage of time gives you the benefit of reflection and hindsight to see what you covered in real time in fresh light. These stories were done in different periods between The Indian Express and India Today and I am grateful to the latter for allowing me the use of archival material, including pictures and some graphics.

I was assigned to follow up on Rajiv's assassination within about 10 days, as the first indications of a Sri Lankan connection emerged. I was already an old Sri Lanka hand of sorts, having been both lionised and demonised in that country. But more about that later.

I landed in Colombo in the first week of June, 1991. The first person I called was Lalith Athulathmudali, former defence and internal security minister, once a rising star in Sri Lankan politics, and one of the most brilliant and articulate politicians I have ever met in the subcontinent. By now, however, he was much diminished. Politically, he was marginalised in opposition to President Ranasinghe Premadasa. And physically, he was a wreck. A bomb aimed at President Jayawardene in the Sri Lankan parliament in 1987 had landed in Lalith's lap instead. He was a medical marvel now, living with hundreds of pieces of shrapnel in his body. To describe the Lalith I met in 1991 as a pale shadow of the man I knew from 1985 will be a phenomenal understatement. Politically, physically and even personally, he had no resemblance to the man then seen as Sri Lanka's P. Chidambaram (then a rising star in Rajiv's government, though nine years younger), and not only because they were both Harvard law graduates and handling sensitive internal security portfolios in their respective countries. They were both brilliant, articulate but measured to the extent of sounding cold by the subcontinent's standards. Lalith was also Benazir Bhutto's friend,

and preceded her as president of the Oxford Union.

But this afternoon, there was desolate quiet in his home. There was no offer of a full evening with a meal and cognac. I graphically remember, on the other hand, the surreal presence of a valet in a red muslin sari-like wraparound, a white blouse and petticoat, a few strands of beard —evidently a transvestite — serving us tea. Something was very, very odd with proud old Lalith, the ladies' man.

"So you've come to find out who killed Rajiv? I will tell you," he said, "the same gang that tried to kill me and failed, but will succeed eventually," he said.

"Which gang, Lalith, let's be specific", I asked.

"It is the LTTE, of course," he said, "but it isn't just the LTTE. This b...... is also hand in glove with them," he said. He was referring to his president, Premadasa.

"You have really got shaken up, Lalith," I said. "How can you make such a serious allegation?" I was quite sure that he had gone completely unhinged.

"You know nothing, my friend," he said.

"These b......s killed Vijaya Kumaratunga (Chandrika's matinee idol husband and peace activist, fondly described as the Amitabh Bachchan of Sri Lanka). This b...... killed Ranjan Wijeratne (Lalith's successor in the security ministry), he also got Rajiv killed. I survived once but he will finally get me killed. He will get Gamini Dissanayake (another prominent opposition leader) killed. Then he himself will get killed eventually. And you, my friend, do not ask too many questions here. You know too much. In fact, the sooner you go back, the better," he said.

Then he made another sensational claim. At the peak of IPKF operations in Sri Lanka, he said, Premadasa was supplying arms to the LTTE. And to add a touch of absurd irony, in Tata trucks gifted to the Sri Lanka army by India. He gave me copies of some government documents as evidence and which I could use without attribution. On the record, he had this telling line that we published: "When we get angry with someone, we may slap him. The LTTE will simply kill him."

Events later proved he had not gone unhinged. He was just desperately scared and bitter, but still brilliantly, and tragically, prescient. Everything he predicted came true. In April 1993, a gunman got Lalith. Initially, Premadasa blamed the LTTE, and produced the body of the usual suspect, a young Tamil with a cyanide capsule in his mouth. A commission later indicted Premadasa, and among others, a band of mobsters, three of whom got mysteriously and predictably killed. Just eight days later, Premadasa too was blown up by an LTTE human bomb at a May Day rally. You want to know some gory details? It was in the course of that honeymoon with Prabhakaran that the LTTE got this adolescent Tamil masseur to inveigle his way into Premadasa's household. The president was soon obsessed with him. So much that he took him along on his travels and nobody cared to frisk him. So he came, as was usual for the LTTE, with a bomb belt, and gave Premadasa a final hug of death. The only place where Lalith got his script a little wrong was in the timing of when Gamini, the new claimant to Jayawardene's legacy, would be killed. He was shot and bombed at an election meeting by the LTTE, a year after Premadasa.

And his other, more bizarre claim of Premadasa arming the LTTE? In a long interview with me, published in the May 15, 1995 issue of India Today ('Prabhakaran decided in cold blood to kill Rajiv', goo.gl/HCghFG), the new Sri Lankan president, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, confirmed that fact unequivocally. Even as a wreck, Lalith had been right on everything he said, beginning with his assertion that the LTTE had killed Rajiv. Of course, nobody has as yet found out if there was a Premadasa connection.

The IPKF had been the first to pick up that bizarre nexus between Prabhakaran and Premadasa. Lt Gen Amar Kalkat, the IPKF commander who finally turned the tide in Sri Lanka, had Prabhakaran cornered in his Kilinochchi jungle dugout. I remember exchanging notes with furious IPKF officers then who always suspected that RAW was playing a double game, that it did not want Prabhakaran killed as he was India's leverage with Colombo. The army suspected that RAW tipped Prabhakaran off more than once as they closed in.

In mid-1989, I, along with photographer Shyam Tekwani, travelled through Jaffna, Trincomalee and Batticaloa and spent time with Kalkat (who generously had us flown in his Mi-17 to all his three division headquarters, 54th, 57th and 36th) and this was the common ops room and mess whisper. There was also talk of the LTTE's sudden new firepower and even a bitter, diabolical suspicion sometimes that RAW was behind it. But soon, it became evident that an incredible new alliance between Prabhakaran and Premadasa had come into being against a common enemy, the IPKF. Posters appeared overnight in central Colombo, describing the IPKF as Innocent People Killing Force. And with M. Karunanidhi's DMK a member of V.P. Singh's new coalition in Delhi, the IPKF's mission was now well and truly over, and Prabhakaran had lived to fight and kill another day. In this case, he took revenge on Rajiv for sending the IPKF, and probably "rewarded" Premadasa for being such a loyal ally.

In that endless story of deceit, Shoojit's film gets another sequence right, though the timing is advanced by three and a half years. It is the "RAW-inspired" but failed rebellion of the LTTE number two "Mallaya", who is then betrayed by a compromised RAW officer and executed by Prabhakaran.

This is a real life story. But the man was Mahattaya, a nickname or nom de guerre for Gopalaswamy Mahendrarajah, effectively the LTTE's number two. He played with both RAW and Premadasa, and most likely the latter betrayed him, leaking details of his secret meetings with a senior RAW functionary "Chandra" (Chandrasekharan). Mahattaya was executed along with his 257 loyal soldiers by one firing squad near Chavakachcheri in Jaffna. But this happened on December 28, 1994 and not before Rajiv's assassination in May 1991, as the film claims.

The other thing the film gets right, but mixes up the time frame, is the betrayal by the RAW station chief in Chennai. K.V. Unnikrishnan, a 1962 batch IPS officer, had been caught by IB counter-intelligence in 1987, "compromised" to the CIA. He had apparently done India real damage but had nothing to do with Rajiv's assassination. One of his daughters was a talented shooter and, apparently, the CIA handler cultivated him by routinely gifting him boxes of ammunition, which were then imported and expensive. The next step was a honey trap, using a Pan Am stewardess, and blackmail. A story just like Madras Café's Bala's. Unlike Bala, who shoots himself, Unnikrishnan was in Tihar for a year and then, in one of those eternal mysteries, released. Fired from the IPS, he is now said to live a quiet life in Chennai. And his daughter's talent was for real. She won several shooting medals for India and is an Arjuna awardee.

Back to Lalith now. And different sorts of conversations with him through heady cognac evenings. An early 1984 story ('An ominous presence in Tamil Nadu', India Today, March 31, 1984) had given me notoriety in India and instant fame in Colombo. It had revealed, for the first time, the existence of Sri Lankan Tamil guerrilla training camps in India. South Block was furious. The charge of being anti-national was made by none other than Mrs Gandhi, and in public. Of course, Colombo did its best to "enhance" that charge by putting that story on thousands of pamphlets and distributing them all over the world. My central point was, we were feeding a Frankenstein's monster and it would devour us.

Therefore, when I first landed in Colombo in September 1985, for what was to be my first real foreign dateline, I was received very warmly, even lionised.

I was given the privilege of an invite to the national security minister's (Lalith's) home. He was reputed to be arrogant, dismissive, an anti-Tamil and anti-India hawk. But we became such friends in the first meeting that I got a repeat invite the next evening at his farmhouse, where he introduced me to his wife Srimani. He pointed to a framed picture of theirs with Giani Zail Singh on a visit to Rashtrapati Bhavan and spoke — vainly, as was typical of him — of how Gianiji, taking note of his wife's fair Dutch Burgher complexion, said she looked like a Punjabi. Of course, he later wrote a formal letter to me, complaining that I used his own particularly unflattering pictures with my stories.

The next day, September 11, was a sad one for Indian cricket. I was in the press box as we lost our first Test match ever in Sri Lanka. It was such a big story the next morning that it blanked out on the front pages the anti-Tamil riots which had meanwhile broken out in Trincomalee. The strategic port and resort city was barred to the foreign press.

But since that was the only real story in Sri Lanka then, I still decided to hop on to the train to Trinco. It involved some elaborate lying. I told Lalith, as well as Hardeep and Lakshmi Puri, then senior diplomats at our high commission (Lakshmi now works with UN Women in a key position, Hardeep recently served as our permanent representative to the UN and often writes on these pages) that I was going to Kandy to watch the third Test. Lalith frightened me by saying he may be going there too and would look for me in the press room during lunch.

I proceeded to Trinco nevertheless. The only name I knew there was Commodore Justin Jayasuriya, the Sri Lanka Joint Operations Commander (JOC). I had had reporters' luck finding myself next to him on the Indian Airlines flight from Madras to Colombo. Since he was an NDA alumnus, we found some common acquaintances and he gave me his number in Trinco. He was also generous enough to grant me an audience at his headquarters as I reached his burning city.

But trouble came the next morning. Taking pictures of a Tamil temple being burnt by a Sinhala mob, helped along by the armed police, I, along with a British freelancer and his girlfriend dressed in no more than a bikini with a sarong wrapped like a flimsy fig leaf, was arrested by the same soldiers, who locked us up, threatening to shoot and throw our bodies on the street. I dropped the two names I thought might work. Lalith Athulathmudali and Commodore Jayasuriya. Any reporter with some experience would tell you that one thing that rarely fails with armed forces in the subcontinent is throwing rank at them. But my lie was a bit more elaborate. I said I had to have lunch with Lalith the next day so I must be on that train to Colombo this evening. And that the JOC himself was supposed to ensure I presented myself before his minister in time. After some haggling, I was allowed to call the commodore, who, though confused, asked for me to be released. He also promised to leave word with Lalith's office that I would keep my "date" for "lunch". I was on that train to Colombo, and it turned out to be the last for many years. The next day, the LTTE blew up a bridge and it wasn't rebuilt for a very long time.

The next morning's Colombo daily had me hitting page one, on the very top. "Controversial Indian journalist so-and-so arrested while taking pictures of sensitive military installation but let off with a warning in a gesture of goodwill". Hardeep Puri was the first to call me with a mouthful — though only with kindly concern. I later learnt he too had found out about my arrest and had pulled strings to get me freed.

But it was different later that evening, as I was asked to present myself at Lalith's home again.

"You deceitful liar, I thought you were an honest young bloke," he said, "and you even lied to my commander that you had a lunch date with me. What if I had said no you didn't?"

I really had no answer. So I let him vent.

"And you told me you were to be in Kandy. I actually thought I'd give you lunch so I looked for you there, you liar. Who can ever trust you with stories you publish?"

I reminded him, gently, that his government did. Enough, in fact, to print my story out in its propaganda pamphlets, to my great embarrassment.

Lalith gave me another stern look, but a mock one, then both of us laughed, drank some more cognac and became friends, never mind that he was 20 years my senior.

Postscript: Lalith's wife Srimani took over his party after him but died in 2004 of cancer, at just 58. Over last weekend in Colombo, to speak at the India-Sri Lanka Society's celebration of India's Independence Day, I checked on his daughter Serela and was told she had moved overseas. Commodore Jayasuriya, who saved me much discomfort and probably my life, I was told, rose to number two in the Sri Lankan navy and now lives in London. I did walk around to check out old haunts and spots and remembered the many friends and acquaintances I had lost in that vicious war — 21 out of merely my first, January 1984 notebook with 28 names. But more about the war and death in the next part tomorrow.

Dead men talking(2nd)​

Reporting on Lanka's blood-soaked years, I watched names disappear from my notebook.
This is one box nobody would like to check on his CV. Not even the most battle-hardened hack. But, early in September of 1989, I found myself in the wrongest place at the wrongest time. And witnessed my first, and hopefully only, live (apologies for that horrible malapropism, but we are all brainwashed by news TV now) execution ever. This was in the middle of Galle Road, Colombo's shopping and pleasure strip, studded with clubs and malls.

For just a moment, it had even seemed that the gunshot roar had come as a relief. There was a mild groan, and silence again. And as I reported then, in what you may call the first draft of this story ('Sri Lanka: Falling Apart', India Today, September 30, 1989), when a man is shot in the head with an M-16 rifle at 30 metres, he just drops dead. Soldiers jumped past streams of blood and poked the body with gun barrels. "Anyone who tries to take a picture will join this body in the ambulance," warned the officer. Since all of us had just seen him carry out the execution, nobody would even think about that. This was the Sri Lanka of 1989.

The victim had been clutching a bag. Soldiers suspected it contained a bomb and challenged him. He just sat down in fright as snipers took positions and a crowd of hundreds gathered, as if around a street performer. The man, obviously frozen in terror, just continued sitting quietly. It is a horrible comparison if you saw that film, but years later, as I watched Kevin Spacey, on his knees, his face a portrait of meditative peace, waiting for Brad Pitt to shoot him in David Fincher's disturbing dark thriller, Seven, this execution came back to me. Unlike Spacey's evil John Doe, this was a totally innocent man. It's just that you somehow saw calm, not fear, on his face.

The set-piece in place, and too scared to close-in, in case he was a suicide bomber, a sniper first shot him in the shoulder. He lay writhing in pain, still quiet. "Shoot him, kill him now," shouted the officer. Another sniper shot him in the head. Next to his body, his bag now lay, its contents spilled: fresh vegetables. Five minutes later, the road was open, and life back to normal. For me, it was just an evening walk from crowded Dehiwala to my hotel, Lanka Oberoi (now Cinnamon Grand).

No part of the subcontinent is unfamiliar with mass violence. But you've seen nothing like Sri Lanka in those years. Corpses floated down rivers, hung from trees, smouldered by the roadside, smelling of flesh and rubber. The smell told you the favoured method of execution in Sri Lanka then was not a single M-16 bullet, but "necklacing" — tie the arms, put a tyre round the neck, throw a tin of kerosene and a burning cigarette. On the drive from Katunayake airport to Colombo, as you crossed Kelaniya (also called Kelani Ganga river), where, a little upstream, the 1957 World War II classic The Bridge on the River Kwai was shot, you looked down instinctively for floating bodies. You were rarely "disappointed". The Colombo commuters' and school children's favourite pastime was hanging around the Kelani bridge looking for bodies. In fact, a day before I witnessed that execution, the state-owned Daily News reported that the price of fish was crashing: who would want to buy fish feeding on human bodies?

Mind you, this wasn't the Tamil north and the east. Prabhakaran was not to blame for this, though he was up to his own stuff, on the run from the IPKF, but carrying out the odd deadly ambush and cutting that diabolical deal with Premadasa. This was the turn of the Sinhala mainland to be on fire. The radical left JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna) insurgency raged. Sinhala killed Sinhala. Soldiers killed civilians, guerillas killed soldiers and state-sponsored vigilantes — Green Tigers, Yellow Scorpions, Blue Cobras and so on — killed whoever they wished to. Tens of thousands were killed during those months. Led by Rohana Wijeweera, as charismatic and cruel as Prabhakaran, the JVP paralysed Sri Lankan elites. My old friend and Tamil moderate politician and lawyer, Neelan Tiruchelvam, put it brilliantly, as only he could. "Doctors can't treat, teachers can't teach, lawyers can't defend. The very basis of our lives is under threat." In these five weeks, the toll in just Sinhala areas crossed 5,000. And remember, the total Sinhala population then would not have been more than 1.2 crore. This, when there had been no riots. Just targeted killings.

The JVP brutalised Sri Lankan society even more than the LTTE, because it wrecked their heartland. And then, all of a sudden, in fact just two months after I witnessed that execution, the JVP story was over. Rohan Gunaratna has written wonderfully detailed accounts of this, but basically, in November 1989, Wijeweera and his deputy were captured and killed. But not before they had revealed, under torture, all that they knew. Then, it was just a matter of the forces and the vigilantes picking out the rest within days. And the brutal 2009 assault that finished the LTTE was a similar success, on an enormously larger scale.

On the same tour of duty, the Tamil areas presented a different picture. The IPKF was now quite dominant, and the LTTE in hiding. Between RAW and the Indian army, two anti-LTTE armed groups, EPRLF and ENDLF (Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front and National Democratic Liberation Front) had been set up. Essentially, these were armed mercenaries crueller than the LTTE, but with not a fraction of their discipline. Eventually, the LTTE massacred most of them.

I have in my notebook two remarkable lines from these fighters. A namesake, Sekhar, said, "Life is like a hand grenade. You wait more than a second after pulling the pin and it is all over." Sure enough, this 18-year-old EPRLF fighter said this clutching a grenade in one hand, an AK-56 in the other. And Mangalaraja, 26, of the ENDLF, simply said: "First you fight for revenge. Then you can't do anything else." I also remember Jayantan, 10, and Paradaman, 12, Valvettithurai cousins who expertly dodged IPKF patrols to distribute mostly cyclostyled LTTE leaflets. They happily posed for pictures, bicycle, pamphlets and all, and spoke glowingly of how they waited to turn 15, so "we can use guns, not leaflets". From all accounts, subsequently the LTTE dropped that age restriction as well.

On the Sinhala side, nobody personified that cycle of killing and revenge more than the DIG of police, Premadasa Udugampola, then 46, and widely hailed as Sri Lanka's Dirty Harry. I drove to Kandy, in the mountains, where he was then posted, to see him. His only mission was to finish the JVP. "Why such cruelty," I asked him, surveying his office: several makes of grenade, and dum-dum bullets in the half-open drawer in his desk, the ammunition banned by the Geneva Convention and which he preferred in his favourite 38 Browning, and it would shatter a human body at close range. An Uzi submachine gun lay to his right, a light machine gun next to his chair and, not to take any chances, a commando knife under the pile of his files. "Why so cruel, you ask me?" he said, "how can I forget July 28, 1988?" That is when the JVP ransacked his native home in Galle, slaughtering his 78-year-old mother, brother, sister-in-law and two children. He caught each one of the killers and personally supervised their execution, "slowly, patiently". He made no excuses, no evasions. "They showed me no mercy. I show them no mercy," he said, pouring a refill in my tea cup. Once finished with the JVP, Udugampola joined politics.

But not everybody you came across was a bloodthirsty human bomb of some sort. Sri Lanka had its men of peace. They just lived even less than the mass murderers. One of every visiting journalist's favourite was lawyer and TULF (Tamil United Liberation Front) MP Neelan Tiruchelvam. We loved his home for its warmth, food, drink, insight and quotable quotes. I later served for several years on the board of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, which he and a fellow (Sinhala) intellectual, Kingsley de Silva, ran from Colombo and Kandy. It was on the day of one of those board meetings, on July 29, 1999, long after I had ceased to be an active reporter, that we decided to meet for breakfast, at 10, an hour before the board meeting. I waited for him, pacing up and down the lobby of the Intercontinental (now The Kingsbury) and wondered how Neelan, ever so British, could be so late. Until a bell boy told me he had just heard on radio that he had been assassinated on his way to the hotel. An LTTE human bomb threw himself on the bonnet of his car and pulled the trigger. His cremation that afternoon was one of the most devastating hours of my working life, and brought back many old memories. Until one froze.

At one of those relaxed, open-house dinners at his home, somebody asked him if it was dangerous to be in public life as a moderate in Sri Lanka, particularly if you hailed from Jaffna. Neelan, for ever a proud Jaffna-ite — he would love to take you to a proper Jaffna restaurant at Hotel Renuka — said it wasn't such a problem. And some risk was always to be accepted in public life.

I said, in Sri Lanka, the risk was a bit more than usual. I mentioned my first Sri Lanka notebook of early 1984. It contained the names of 28 persons interviewed. More than half of these had already been assassinated by June 1991.

"Keep that notebook," Neelan said, "and closely watch the survivors."

Then he asked if his name featured there. With that smile that, in the words of his student and now a top scholar, Ruwanthie de Chickera, who spoke at his funeral in July 1999, always suggested he was hiding a secret from you.

Actually, it didn't. But as I remembered that conversation, I also figured that the list of survivors was now down to seven anyway.

Most of these were decent men of peace. There was a scholarly, depressed exile in Madras called V. Yogeswaran, a TULF MP. I met him in January 1984 with his wife Sarojini. "Ceylon, actually, has no future," he said, "at best, it will be the Lebanon of South Asia," words made famous later, as the publication I worked for then used these in its advertisement campaign, "Read today, quoted tomorrow."

Yogeswaran and Sarojini returned to Sri Lanka in 1989 with hope, and joined TULF chief A. Amirthalingam in peacemaking. The LTTE shot them both as they sat sipping tea at home. The third TULF MP, M. Sivasithamparam, survived with a bullet in the chest. Amirthalingam had been killed already. Brave Sarojini persisted, returned to Jaffna, was elected mayor in January 1998, and lived in a house without security. LTTE hitmen walked in one day and shot her. Lakshman Kadirgamar, foreign minister, was killed by an LTTE sniper on August 12, 2005. T. Maheshwaran, UNP MP, was killed in Colombo in 2008. Nadarajah Raviraj, former Jaffna mayor, was shot in Colombo in 2006.

Other names kept disappearing from that notebook too. Sri Sabaratnam, nicknamed Tall Sri for his slim, lanky frame, who headed the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO) and who was my nightmare in Madras for ordering endless cups of coffee in my room at the Taj Connemara and finishing my per diem in a couple of hours, was slaughtered along with his 300 supporters by the LTTE. A similar character by the same name appears in Madras Cafe, to meet a similar fate. Uma Maheswaran, who led another LTTE rival, PLOTE (People's Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam), was killed too. Some survivors of the PLOTE formed the mercenary band hired to carry out the 1988 coup in the Maldives that was foiled by Indian forces. Kittu, the one-legged propaganda chief of the LTTE, was entombed by Indian intelligence and navy in a gun-running ship in a famous, and frankly, brilliant black operation. K. Padmanabha, G. Yogasangari, EPRLF MPs, were among a dozen massacred by the LTTE in Madras a year before Rajiv's assassination. Sam Thambimuthu, the EPRLF MP from Batticaloa, in whose MPs' hostel apartment you were always assured a decent cup of tea and great conversation, was shot in 1990. Another Tamil MP, P. Joseph, was shot during Christmas mass in his native Batticaloa, and his wife was critically injured. With Prabhakaran gone, his ideologue Balasingham perishing to cancer in England, only two now remain. One of these is Balasingham's Australian wife, Adele, and the last was a RAW mole in the LTTE, so I still can't name him.

There is nobody all terrorists and militants hate more than peacemakers. The Taliban and the Lashkars kill many more innocent Muslims than Christians, Hindus or Jews. The Khalistanis killed more Sikhs than Hindus. The Kashmiri separatists will kill more Kashmiris than mainland Indians. And the Maoists will kill more tribals than non-tribal "exploiters". In all cases, most of the victims will be moderate, innocent, unarmed, particularly those seeking peace. In that sense, Sri Lanka's story has not been so different from others. It has just been enormously more brutal, in such a uniquely, clinically dramatic way.

Postscript: I was touched to see Neelan's son Nirgunan, now a banker in Singapore, come for my talk in Colombo last Saturday. I spoke to his mother, Sithie, and on my way back to the airport, stopped to bow my head at the touching memorial President Rajapaksa has built for the IPKF in his new parliament campus, something we haven't done for fear of annoying the Dravid parties. Senior Indian ministers avoid visiting it. My version of the IPKF story in the third, and last, in this series tomorrow.

 

[he-man]

@Inqhilab

mate pls edit ur posts and place articles in their order as ppl will understand nothing if they start with 3 rd one

 

[anilindia]

This proof that without proper intelligence how fatal it could be...
Salute to brave soldier..

 

[he-man]

This proof that without proper intelligence how fatal it could be...
Salute to brave soldier..

we played double game yaar...............first trained LTTE and then it got out of hand,typical congress bullshit

 

[The_Sidewinder]

My heart goes out to IPKF soldiers. They did their job well. They were successfull in safely helding provincial election with turn out of more than 60%. Till now it is a record in Srilankan history.

 

[Android]

Gandhi family From Indira to Sonia are the main culprits behind genocide of Lankan Tamils

 

[hkdas]

Such a long Lankan journey(1st)

From finding Tamil guerilla camps in 1984 to checking up on lost friends last week in Colombo
This new, occasional series should, in fairness, be a thank-you note to Shoojit Sircar, one of our new breed of young and thinking filmmakers. His latest Madras Café marks a new beginning in Hindi cinema. Unlike Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, it does not claim to be a biopic. And, unlike Milkha, it stays much closer to the real story which, again entirely unlike Milkha Singh's, is one of the saddest in our history: the LTTE-led terror, war with the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in north and eastern Sri Lanka, and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Of course, there is much fictionalisation, some for the convenience of storytelling and some for political caution. But there is enough for somebody who saw these events up close to go back to the story, and then tie up some ends with current research to retell it. That is why, as I said in the beginning, this is not a review of Shoojit's brilliant film, but a thank-you note. Because he has given me that nudge to start putting together a reporter's memoir of sorts. Publishers have often approached me to write one, and I have routinely fobbed them off with a permanent, lazy journalist's excuse: editors write books between jobs. That hasn't come to pass, nor is it likely to anytime soon. So, inspired by Madras Café, I am trying an unconventional approach to that memoir in the form of this series, where I will try and revisit, say, some 20 of the biggest stories of our times that I was eyewitness to. And don't get alarmed. I won't be inflicting this on you in a neverending serial, but only occasionally. Only when one of these stories somehow pops back in the news. Further, while the selfish reason, of course, is to get a headstart on my memoirs, these stories will also, I hope, put what happened in today's context. Like in this case, Lanka's still open wounds and its struggle with healing.

"First Person" in this series comes from the idea that I confine myself to my first-hand experience. And "Second Draft", because the passage of time gives you the benefit of reflection and hindsight to see what you covered in real time in fresh light. These stories were done in different periods between The Indian Express and India Today and I am grateful to the latter for allowing me the use of archival material, including pictures and some graphics.

I was assigned to follow up on Rajiv's assassination within about 10 days, as the first indications of a Sri Lankan connection emerged. I was already an old Sri Lanka hand of sorts, having been both lionised and demonised in that country. But more about that later.

I landed in Colombo in the first week of June, 1991. The first person I called was Lalith Athulathmudali, former defence and internal security minister, once a rising star in Sri Lankan politics, and one of the most brilliant and articulate politicians I have ever met in the subcontinent. By now, however, he was much diminished. Politically, he was marginalised in opposition to President Ranasinghe Premadasa. And physically, he was a wreck. A bomb aimed at President Jayawardene in the Sri Lankan parliament in 1987 had landed in Lalith's lap instead. He was a medical marvel now, living with hundreds of pieces of shrapnel in his body. To describe the Lalith I met in 1991 as a pale shadow of the man I knew from 1985 will be a phenomenal understatement. Politically, physically and even personally, he had no resemblance to the man then seen as Sri Lanka's P. Chidambaram (then a rising star in Rajiv's government, though nine years younger), and not only because they were both Harvard law graduates and handling sensitive internal security portfolios in their respective countries. They were both brilliant, articulate but measured to the extent of sounding cold by the subcontinent's standards. Lalith was also Benazir Bhutto's friend,

and preceded her as president of the Oxford Union.

But this afternoon, there was desolate quiet in his home. There was no offer of a full evening with a meal and cognac. I graphically remember, on the other hand, the surreal presence of a valet in a red muslin sari-like wraparound, a white blouse and petticoat, a few strands of beard —evidently a transvestite — serving us tea. Something was very, very odd with proud old Lalith, the ladies' man.

"So you've come to find out who killed Rajiv? I will tell you," he said, "the same gang that tried to kill me and failed, but will succeed eventually," he said.

"Which gang, Lalith, let's be specific", I asked.

"It is the LTTE, of course," he said, "but it isn't just the LTTE. This b...... is also hand in glove with them," he said. He was referring to his president, Premadasa.

"You have really got shaken up, Lalith," I said. "How can you make such a serious allegation?" I was quite sure that he had gone completely unhinged.

"You know nothing, my friend," he said.

"These b......s killed Vijaya Kumaratunga (Chandrika's matinee idol husband and peace activist, fondly described as the Amitabh Bachchan of Sri Lanka). This b...... killed Ranjan Wijeratne (Lalith's successor in the security ministry), he also got Rajiv killed. I survived once but he will finally get me killed. He will get Gamini Dissanayake (another prominent opposition leader) killed. Then he himself will get killed eventually. And you, my friend, do not ask too many questions here. You know too much. In fact, the sooner you go back, the better," he said.

Then he made another sensational claim. At the peak of IPKF operations in Sri Lanka, he said, Premadasa was supplying arms to the LTTE. And to add a touch of absurd irony, in Tata trucks gifted to the Sri Lanka army by India. He gave me copies of some government documents as evidence and which I could use without attribution. On the record, he had this telling line that we published: "When we get angry with someone, we may slap him. The LTTE will simply kill him."

Events later proved he had not gone unhinged. He was just desperately scared and bitter, but still brilliantly, and tragically, prescient. Everything he predicted came true. In April 1993, a gunman got Lalith. Initially, Premadasa blamed the LTTE, and produced the body of the usual suspect, a young Tamil with a cyanide capsule in his mouth. A commission later indicted Premadasa, and among others, a band of mobsters, three of whom got mysteriously and predictably killed. Just eight days later, Premadasa too was blown up by an LTTE human bomb at a May Day rally. You want to know some gory details? It was in the course of that honeymoon with Prabhakaran that the LTTE got this adolescent Tamil masseur to inveigle his way into Premadasa's household. The president was soon obsessed with him. So much that he took him along on his travels and nobody cared to frisk him. So he came, as was usual for the LTTE, with a bomb belt, and gave Premadasa a final hug of death. The only place where Lalith got his script a little wrong was in the timing of when Gamini, the new claimant to Jayawardene's legacy, would be killed. He was shot and bombed at an election meeting by the LTTE, a year after Premadasa.

And his other, more bizarre claim of Premadasa arming the LTTE? In a long interview with me, published in the May 15, 1995 issue of India Today ('Prabhakaran decided in cold blood to kill Rajiv', goo.gl/HCghFG), the new Sri Lankan president, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, confirmed that fact unequivocally. Even as a wreck, Lalith had been right on everything he said, beginning with his assertion that the LTTE had killed Rajiv. Of course, nobody has as yet found out if there was a Premadasa connection.

The IPKF had been the first to pick up that bizarre nexus between Prabhakaran and Premadasa. Lt Gen Amar Kalkat, the IPKF commander who finally turned the tide in Sri Lanka, had Prabhakaran cornered in his Kilinochchi jungle dugout. I remember exchanging notes with furious IPKF officers then who always suspected that RAW was playing a double game, that it did not want Prabhakaran killed as he was India's leverage with Colombo. The army suspected that RAW tipped Prabhakaran off more than once as they closed in.

In mid-1989, I, along with photographer Shyam Tekwani, travelled through Jaffna, Trincomalee and Batticaloa and spent time with Kalkat (who generously had us flown in his Mi-17 to all his three division headquarters, 54th, 57th and 36th) and this was the common ops room and mess whisper. There was also talk of the LTTE's sudden new firepower and even a bitter, diabolical suspicion sometimes that RAW was behind it. But soon, it became evident that an incredible new alliance between Prabhakaran and Premadasa had come into being against a common enemy, the IPKF. Posters appeared overnight in central Colombo, describing the IPKF as Innocent People Killing Force. And with M. Karunanidhi's DMK a member of V.P. Singh's new coalition in Delhi, the IPKF's mission was now well and truly over, and Prabhakaran had lived to fight and kill another day. In this case, he took revenge on Rajiv for sending the IPKF, and probably "rewarded" Premadasa for being such a loyal ally.

In that endless story of deceit, Shoojit's film gets another sequence right, though the timing is advanced by three and a half years. It is the "RAW-inspired" but failed rebellion of the LTTE number two "Mallaya", who is then betrayed by a compromised RAW officer and executed by Prabhakaran.

This is a real life story. But the man was Mahattaya, a nickname or nom de guerre for Gopalaswamy Mahendrarajah, effectively the LTTE's number two. He played with both RAW and Premadasa, and most likely the latter betrayed him, leaking details of his secret meetings with a senior RAW functionary "Chandra" (Chandrasekharan). Mahattaya was executed along with his 257 loyal soldiers by one firing squad near Chavakachcheri in Jaffna. But this happened on December 28, 1994 and not before Rajiv's assassination in May 1991, as the film claims.

The other thing the film gets right, but mixes up the time frame, is the betrayal by the RAW station chief in Chennai. K.V. Unnikrishnan, a 1962 batch IPS officer, had been caught by IB counter-intelligence in 1987, "compromised" to the CIA. He had apparently done India real damage but had nothing to do with Rajiv's assassination. One of his daughters was a talented shooter and, apparently, the CIA handler cultivated him by routinely gifting him boxes of ammunition, which were then imported and expensive. The next step was a honey trap, using a Pan Am stewardess, and blackmail. A story just like Madras Café's Bala's. Unlike Bala, who shoots himself, Unnikrishnan was in Tihar for a year and then, in one of those eternal mysteries, released. Fired from the IPS, he is now said to live a quiet life in Chennai. And his daughter's talent was for real. She won several shooting medals for India and is an Arjuna awardee.

Back to Lalith now. And different sorts of conversations with him through heady cognac evenings. An early 1984 story ('An ominous presence in Tamil Nadu', India Today, March 31, 1984) had given me notoriety in India and instant fame in Colombo. It had revealed, for the first time, the existence of Sri Lankan Tamil guerrilla training camps in India. South Block was furious. The charge of being anti-national was made by none other than Mrs Gandhi, and in public. Of course, Colombo did its best to "enhance" that charge by putting that story on thousands of pamphlets and distributing them all over the world. My central point was, we were feeding a Frankenstein's monster and it would devour us.

Therefore, when I first landed in Colombo in September 1985, for what was to be my first real foreign dateline, I was received very warmly, even lionised.

I was given the privilege of an invite to the national security minister's (Lalith's) home. He was reputed to be arrogant, dismissive, an anti-Tamil and anti-India hawk. But we became such friends in the first meeting that I got a repeat invite the next evening at his farmhouse, where he introduced me to his wife Srimani. He pointed to a framed picture of theirs with Giani Zail Singh on a visit to Rashtrapati Bhavan and spoke — vainly, as was typical of him — of how Gianiji, taking note of his wife's fair Dutch Burgher complexion, said she looked like a Punjabi. Of course, he later wrote a formal letter to me, complaining that I used his own particularly unflattering pictures with my stories.

The next day, September 11, was a sad one for Indian cricket. I was in the press box as we lost our first Test match ever in Sri Lanka. It was such a big story the next morning that it blanked out on the front pages the anti-Tamil riots which had meanwhile broken out in Trincomalee. The strategic port and resort city was barred to the foreign press.

But since that was the only real story in Sri Lanka then, I still decided to hop on to the train to Trinco. It involved some elaborate lying. I told Lalith, as well as Hardeep and Lakshmi Puri, then senior diplomats at our high commission (Lakshmi now works with UN Women in a key position, Hardeep recently served as our permanent representative to the UN and often writes on these pages) that I was going to Kandy to watch the third Test. Lalith frightened me by saying he may be going there too and would look for me in the press room during lunch.

I proceeded to Trinco nevertheless. The only name I knew there was Commodore Justin Jayasuriya, the Sri Lanka Joint Operations Commander (JOC). I had had reporters' luck finding myself next to him on the Indian Airlines flight from Madras to Colombo. Since he was an NDA alumnus, we found some common acquaintances and he gave me his number in Trinco. He was also generous enough to grant me an audience at his headquarters as I reached his burning city.

But trouble came the next morning. Taking pictures of a Tamil temple being burnt by a Sinhala mob, helped along by the armed police, I, along with a British freelancer and his girlfriend dressed in no more than a bikini with a sarong wrapped like a flimsy fig leaf, was arrested by the same soldiers, who locked us up, threatening to shoot and throw our bodies on the street. I dropped the two names I thought might work. Lalith Athulathmudali and Commodore Jayasuriya. Any reporter with some experience would tell you that one thing that rarely fails with armed forces in the subcontinent is throwing rank at them. But my lie was a bit more elaborate. I said I had to have lunch with Lalith the next day so I must be on that train to Colombo this evening. And that the JOC himself was supposed to ensure I presented myself before his minister in time. After some haggling, I was allowed to call the commodore, who, though confused, asked for me to be released. He also promised to leave word with Lalith's office that I would keep my "date" for "lunch". I was on that train to Colombo, and it turned out to be the last for many years. The next day, the LTTE blew up a bridge and it wasn't rebuilt for a very long time.

The next morning's Colombo daily had me hitting page one, on the very top. "Controversial Indian journalist so-and-so arrested while taking pictures of sensitive military installation but let off with a warning in a gesture of goodwill". Hardeep Puri was the first to call me with a mouthful — though only with kindly concern. I later learnt he too had found out about my arrest and had pulled strings to get me freed.

But it was different later that evening, as I was asked to present myself at Lalith's home again.

"You deceitful liar, I thought you were an honest young bloke," he said, "and you even lied to my commander that you had a lunch date with me. What if I had said no you didn't?"

I really had no answer. So I let him vent.

"And you told me you were to be in Kandy. I actually thought I'd give you lunch so I looked for you there, you liar. Who can ever trust you with stories you publish?"

I reminded him, gently, that his government did. Enough, in fact, to print my story out in its propaganda pamphlets, to my great embarrassment.

Lalith gave me another stern look, but a mock one, then both of us laughed, drank some more cognac and became friends, never mind that he was 20 years my senior.

Postscript: Lalith's wife Srimani took over his party after him but died in 2004 of cancer, at just 58. Over last weekend in Colombo, to speak at the India-Sri Lanka Society's celebration of India's Independence Day, I checked on his daughter Serela and was told she had moved overseas. Commodore Jayasuriya, who saved me much discomfort and probably my life, I was told, rose to number two in the Sri Lankan navy and now lives in London. I did walk around to check out old haunts and spots and remembered the many friends and acquaintances I had lost in that vicious war — 21 out of merely my first, January 1984 notebook with 28 names. But more about the war and death in the next part tomorrow.

Dead men talking(2nd)

Reporting on Lanka's blood-soaked years, I watched names disappear from my notebook.
This is one box nobody would like to check on his CV. Not even the most battle-hardened hack. But, early in September of 1989, I found myself in the wrongest place at the wrongest time. And witnessed my first, and hopefully only, live (apologies for that horrible malapropism, but we are all brainwashed by news TV now) execution ever. This was in the middle of Galle Road, Colombo's shopping and pleasure strip, studded with clubs and malls.

For just a moment, it had even seemed that the gunshot roar had come as a relief. There was a mild groan, and silence again. And as I reported then, in what you may call the first draft of this story ('Sri Lanka: Falling Apart', India Today, September 30, 1989), when a man is shot in the head with an M-16 rifle at 30 metres, he just drops dead. Soldiers jumped past streams of blood and poked the body with gun barrels. "Anyone who tries to take a picture will join this body in the ambulance," warned the officer. Since all of us had just seen him carry out the execution, nobody would even think about that. This was the Sri Lanka of 1989.

The victim had been clutching a bag. Soldiers suspected it contained a bomb and challenged him. He just sat down in fright as snipers took positions and a crowd of hundreds gathered, as if around a street performer. The man, obviously frozen in terror, just continued sitting quietly. It is a horrible comparison if you saw that film, but years later, as I watched Kevin Spacey, on his knees, his face a portrait of meditative peace, waiting for Brad Pitt to shoot him in David Fincher's disturbing dark thriller, Seven, this execution came back to me. Unlike Spacey's evil John Doe, this was a totally innocent man. It's just that you somehow saw calm, not fear, on his face.

The set-piece in place, and too scared to close-in, in case he was a suicide bomber, a sniper first shot him in the shoulder. He lay writhing in pain, still quiet. "Shoot him, kill him now," shouted the officer. Another sniper shot him in the head. Next to his body, his bag now lay, its contents spilled: fresh vegetables. Five minutes later, the road was open, and life back to normal. For me, it was just an evening walk from crowded Dehiwala to my hotel, Lanka Oberoi (now Cinnamon Grand).

No part of the subcontinent is unfamiliar with mass violence. But you've seen nothing like Sri Lanka in those years. Corpses floated down rivers, hung from trees, smouldered by the roadside, smelling of flesh and rubber. The smell told you the favoured method of execution in Sri Lanka then was not a single M-16 bullet, but "necklacing" — tie the arms, put a tyre round the neck, throw a tin of kerosene and a burning cigarette. On the drive from Katunayake airport to Colombo, as you crossed Kelaniya (also called Kelani Ganga river), where, a little upstream, the 1957 World War II classic The Bridge on the River Kwai was shot, you looked down instinctively for floating bodies. You were rarely "disappointed". The Colombo commuters' and school children's favourite pastime was hanging around the Kelani bridge looking for bodies. In fact, a day before I witnessed that execution, the state-owned Daily News reported that the price of fish was crashing: who would want to buy fish feeding on human bodies?

Mind you, this wasn't the Tamil north and the east. Prabhakaran was not to blame for this, though he was up to his own stuff, on the run from the IPKF, but carrying out the odd deadly ambush and cutting that diabolical deal with Premadasa. This was the turn of the Sinhala mainland to be on fire. The radical left JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna) insurgency raged. Sinhala killed Sinhala. Soldiers killed civilians, guerillas killed soldiers and state-sponsored vigilantes — Green Tigers, Yellow Scorpions, Blue Cobras and so on — killed whoever they wished to. Tens of thousands were killed during those months. Led by Rohana Wijeweera, as charismatic and cruel as Prabhakaran, the JVP paralysed Sri Lankan elites. My old friend and Tamil moderate politician and lawyer, Neelan Tiruchelvam, put it brilliantly, as only he could. "Doctors can't treat, teachers can't teach, lawyers can't defend. The very basis of our lives is under threat." In these five weeks, the toll in just Sinhala areas crossed 5,000. And remember, the total Sinhala population then would not have been more than 1.2 crore. This, when there had been no riots. Just targeted killings.

The JVP brutalised Sri Lankan society even more than the LTTE, because it wrecked their heartland. And then, all of a sudden, in fact just two months after I witnessed that execution, the JVP story was over. Rohan Gunaratna has written wonderfully detailed accounts of this, but basically, in November 1989, Wijeweera and his deputy were captured and killed. But not before they had revealed, under torture, all that they knew. Then, it was just a matter of the forces and the vigilantes picking out the rest within days. And the brutal 2009 assault that finished the LTTE was a similar success, on an enormously larger scale.

On the same tour of duty, the Tamil areas presented a different picture. The IPKF was now quite dominant, and the LTTE in hiding. Between RAW and the Indian army, two anti-LTTE armed groups, EPRLF and ENDLF (Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front and National Democratic Liberation Front) had been set up. Essentially, these were armed mercenaries crueller than the LTTE, but with not a fraction of their discipline. Eventually, the LTTE massacred most of them.

I have in my notebook two remarkable lines from these fighters. A namesake, Sekhar, said, "Life is like a hand grenade. You wait more than a second after pulling the pin and it is all over." Sure enough, this 18-year-old EPRLF fighter said this clutching a grenade in one hand, an AK-56 in the other. And Mangalaraja, 26, of the ENDLF, simply said: "First you fight for revenge. Then you can't do anything else." I also remember Jayantan, 10, and Paradaman, 12, Valvettithurai cousins who expertly dodged IPKF patrols to distribute mostly cyclostyled LTTE leaflets. They happily posed for pictures, bicycle, pamphlets and all, and spoke glowingly of how they waited to turn 15, so "we can use guns, not leaflets". From all accounts, subsequently the LTTE dropped that age restriction as well.

On the Sinhala side, nobody personified that cycle of killing and revenge more than the DIG of police, Premadasa Udugampola, then 46, and widely hailed as Sri Lanka's Dirty Harry. I drove to Kandy, in the mountains, where he was then posted, to see him. His only mission was to finish the JVP. "Why such cruelty," I asked him, surveying his office: several makes of grenade, and dum-dum bullets in the half-open drawer in his desk, the ammunition banned by the Geneva Convention and which he preferred in his favourite 38 Browning, and it would shatter a human body at close range. An Uzi submachine gun lay to his right, a light machine gun next to his chair and, not to take any chances, a commando knife under the pile of his files. "Why so cruel, you ask me?" he said, "how can I forget July 28, 1988?" That is when the JVP ransacked his native home in Galle, slaughtering his 78-year-old mother, brother, sister-in-law and two children. He caught each one of the killers and personally supervised their execution, "slowly, patiently". He made no excuses, no evasions. "They showed me no mercy. I show them no mercy," he said, pouring a refill in my tea cup. Once finished with the JVP, Udugampola joined politics.

But not everybody you came across was a bloodthirsty human bomb of some sort. Sri Lanka had its men of peace. They just lived even less than the mass murderers. One of every visiting journalist's favourite was lawyer and TULF (Tamil United Liberation Front) MP Neelan Tiruchelvam. We loved his home for its warmth, food, drink, insight and quotable quotes. I later served for several years on the board of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, which he and a fellow (Sinhala) intellectual, Kingsley de Silva, ran from Colombo and Kandy. It was on the day of one of those board meetings, on July 29, 1999, long after I had ceased to be an active reporter, that we decided to meet for breakfast, at 10, an hour before the board meeting. I waited for him, pacing up and down the lobby of the Intercontinental (now The Kingsbury) and wondered how Neelan, ever so British, could be so late. Until a bell boy told me he had just heard on radio that he had been assassinated on his way to the hotel. An LTTE human bomb threw himself on the bonnet of his car and pulled the trigger. His cremation that afternoon was one of the most devastating hours of my working life, and brought back many old memories. Until one froze.

At one of those relaxed, open-house dinners at his home, somebody asked him if it was dangerous to be in public life as a moderate in Sri Lanka, particularly if you hailed from Jaffna. Neelan, for ever a proud Jaffna-ite — he would love to take you to a proper Jaffna restaurant at Hotel Renuka — said it wasn't such a problem. And some risk was always to be accepted in public life.

I said, in Sri Lanka, the risk was a bit more than usual. I mentioned my first Sri Lanka notebook of early 1984. It contained the names of 28 persons interviewed. More than half of these had already been assassinated by June 1991.

"Keep that notebook," Neelan said, "and closely watch the survivors."

Then he asked if his name featured there. With that smile that, in the words of his student and now a top scholar, Ruwanthie de Chickera, who spoke at his funeral in July 1999, always suggested he was hiding a secret from you.

Actually, it didn't. But as I remembered that conversation, I also figured that the list of survivors was now down to seven anyway.

Most of these were decent men of peace. There was a scholarly, depressed exile in Madras called V. Yogeswaran, a TULF MP. I met him in January 1984 with his wife Sarojini. "Ceylon, actually, has no future," he said, "at best, it will be the Lebanon of South Asia," words made famous later, as the publication I worked for then used these in its advertisement campaign, "Read today, quoted tomorrow."

Yogeswaran and Sarojini returned to Sri Lanka in 1989 with hope, and joined TULF chief A. Amirthalingam in peacemaking. The LTTE shot them both as they sat sipping tea at home. The third TULF MP, M. Sivasithamparam, survived with a bullet in the chest. Amirthalingam had been killed already. Brave Sarojini persisted, returned to Jaffna, was elected mayor in January 1998, and lived in a house without security. LTTE hitmen walked in one day and shot her. Lakshman Kadirgamar, foreign minister, was killed by an LTTE sniper on August 12, 2005. T. Maheshwaran, UNP MP, was killed in Colombo in 2008. Nadarajah Raviraj, former Jaffna mayor, was shot in Colombo in 2006.

Other names kept disappearing from that notebook too. Sri Sabaratnam, nicknamed Tall Sri for his slim, lanky frame, who headed the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO) and who was my nightmare in Madras for ordering endless cups of coffee in my room at the Taj Connemara and finishing my per diem in a couple of hours, was slaughtered along with his 300 supporters by the LTTE. A similar character by the same name appears in Madras Cafe, to meet a similar fate. Uma Maheswaran, who led another LTTE rival, PLOTE (People's Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam), was killed too. Some survivors of the PLOTE formed the mercenary band hired to carry out the 1988 coup in the Maldives that was foiled by Indian forces. Kittu, the one-legged propaganda chief of the LTTE, was entombed by Indian intelligence and navy in a gun-running ship in a famous, and frankly, brilliant black operation. K. Padmanabha, G. Yogasangari, EPRLF MPs, were among a dozen massacred by the LTTE in Madras a year before Rajiv's assassination. Sam Thambimuthu, the EPRLF MP from Batticaloa, in whose MPs' hostel apartment you were always assured a decent cup of tea and great conversation, was shot in 1990. Another Tamil MP, P. Joseph, was shot during Christmas mass in his native Batticaloa, and his wife was critically injured. With Prabhakaran gone, his ideologue Balasingham perishing to cancer in England, only two now remain. One of these is Balasingham's Australian wife, Adele, and the last was a RAW mole in the LTTE, so I still can't name him.

There is nobody all terrorists and militants hate more than peacemakers. The Taliban and the Lashkars kill many more innocent Muslims than Christians, Hindus or Jews. The Khalistanis killed more Sikhs than Hindus. The Kashmiri separatists will kill more Kashmiris than mainland Indians. And the Maoists will kill more tribals than non-tribal "exploiters". In all cases, most of the victims will be moderate, innocent, unarmed, particularly those seeking peace. In that sense, Sri Lanka's story has not been so different from others. It has just been enormously more brutal, in such a uniquely, clinically dramatic way.

Postscript: I was touched to see Neelan's son Nirgunan, now a banker in Singapore, come for my talk in Colombo last Saturday. I spoke to his mother, Sithie, and on my way back to the airport, stopped to bow my head at the touching memorial President Rajapaksa has built for the IPKF in his new parliament campus, something we haven't done for fear of annoying the Dravid parties. Senior Indian ministers avoid visiting it. My version of the IPKF story in the third, and last, in this series tomorrow.


Long but informative.
Uncovering The War
by Shekhar Gupta
Reconstructing the IPKF disaster, piece by poignant piece, brought me face to face with rare courage —and inexcusable complacence.
India's unexpected war in Sri Lanka caught me on the wrong foot by 12,000 km. I was still finishing the last month of my sabbatical year in Washington DC when the fighting broke out. And as I returned home, the media was full of coverage, often loaded, of the IPKF disaster in Sri Lanka's Jaffna peninsula. Loaded because the Bofors scandal, and many other missteps, already had Rajiv Gandhi under widespread attack. Sri Lanka was therefore seen as "babalog" political stupidity, rather than military incompetence. In the process, we were guilty of both insensitivity to Indian soldiers, their courage and sacrifice, and conveniently overlooking the complacence of our higher commanders. Now, this was obviously not a war we were going to ever lose — though my friend Hardeep Puri, who was by then our deputy high commissioner in Colombo under J.N. "Mani" Dixit, tells you, sort of semi-lightheartedly, that there was one evening so tense that it sounded as if Palaly (Jaffna airbase and the IPKF's 54 Infantry Division HQ) was going to fall. Hardeep had just seen the truce agreement he had so painstakingly drafted and signed with Mahattaya (Madras Cafe's Mallaya) fall apart.

It is creditable how much of that initial messiness Shoojit Sircar has got accurately. The fact that early IPKF patrols were routinely ambushed, pinned down and annihilated. How its officers were picked out by snipers. How the LTTE seemed to have inside information on all IPKF moves (more about this a little later). The most creditable footage, however fleeting and sensitively handled, is of the Tigers ransacking Indian soldiers' bodies and picking weapons, souvenirs and trophies from them. Note, particularly, a boyish Sikh soldier sitting, frozen in rigor mortis. That quality of research you didn't expect from a mainstream Indian filmmaker, and we will shortly explain why.

On my return to India, I was deeply saddened — even offended — by the celebratory coverage of the war. Cover pictures of Indian soldiers' bodies, close-ups of Tigers displaying caps, identity cards, boots of dead Indian soldiers. You had never seen an Indian war covered like that, and you haven't since. Of course, I also felt rotten having missed out on the big story which, for the magazine, was covered by my friend and colleague Anita Pratap, who later worked for Time and CNN. She believes that Nargis Fakhri's Jaya was styled after her, and has sent emails to her old friends saying so. The photographer accompanying her, Shyam Tekwani, was my frequent travelling partner in Sri Lanka subsequently, and now teaches at the Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies, Hawaii. I did get into many arguments in our newsroom on how we had covered the story and why it was necessary to now reconstruct what exactly had gone wrong, and the lessons learnt, etc. My reward was being assigned that story now. And in the third week of December, 1987, I landed in Colombo, having been briefed by Gen Sundarji, his DGMO Lt Gen (later army chief) Bipin Chandra Joshi, and his staff.

Since association by events is sometimes the safest way to remember dates, particularly if you do not maintain elaborate notebooks — in my case, in fact, hardly, and notoriously the sketchiest ones, if at all — I can tell you I was on way to Jaffna from Colombo in a rented Mitsubishi Lancer on December 24 and had just crossed Vavuniya when everything came to a standstill. Angry, grieving mobs blocked the streets. MGR had just died — that's how I know the precise date — and a bandh had been declared by Tamils. I couldn't go forward or back, knew no Tamil, had no food or shelter, and you know how early the winter sun sets that far in the east. But I was lucky again, as an IPKF patrol of Maratha Light Infantry Regiment passed by and its leader, then a very young Captain C.K. Menon, offered me shelter in his camp. We connected decades later at the ITC Grand Central Hotel in Mumbai, where he was serving in a senior capacity, having left the army as a colonel (he has moved up the ladder in ITC hotels now). From him and his colleagues that night, in that small camp in the danger zone, I heard my first stories of the ordeal Indian soldiers had just been through. True enough, after absorbing the initial setbacks, they had taken and secured the entire Jaffna peninsula. But the price had been a shocker: 350 killed and 1,100 wounded in this month-long charge. The casualty rate, at 7 per cent of all troops involved, was twice as high as in our wars against Pakistan. One of the five brigades that assaulted Jaffna, the 41st, which was airlifted on October 17 and launched straight on the coastal road axis leading to Jaffna Fort (see sketch), had 272 casualties, or 17 per cent of its strength. The 72nd also suffered heavy casualties, including its deputy brigade commander, Col D.S. Saraon. The heavily armoured BMP Infantry Fighting Vehicle he was riding was blown up by a 200-kg mine. The 13.2-tonne vehicle was tossed more than 30 feet and its doors, each weighing more than 250 kg, were found more than a hundred yards away. Another illustrious battalion, 4/5 Gurkhas, had its commandant and all but one of its majors killed one afternoon. This is not a war anybody had expected and, regrettably, prepared to fight. I wrote a five-page reconstruction and analysis headlined 'In a rush to vanquish' (India Today, January 31, 1988).

T-72 TANKS, Mi-25 helicopter gunships had come without ammunition, infantry had been airlifted from places as far as Gwalior and thrown into battle without even three hours of familiarisation. There is no excuse for this kind of complacence. The IPKF's first casualties were five soldiers from its finest unit, the paracommandos. Waylaid by the LTTE while casually going to collect provisions on October 8, they were burnt in public with tyres thrown around their necks. That disastrous beginning spilled over into the most talked about setback then: the combined, heli-dropped paracommando and infantry raid (October 11) on the Jaffna University campus where Prabhakaran and his top aides were living. It went wrong from the word go. Only two-thirds of the commandos (10 Paracommando) could be landed and the infantry company (13 Sikh Light Infantry), which was to secure the landing ground, the football field from where IPKF helicopters used to routinely pick up LTTE commanders for talks, failed to fetch up, and the special assault forces contingent was reduced to fighting a battle for survival instead. As for Sikh LI, only a platoon could be landed, and in the wrong playground, several lanes of buildings away. The rest of the company could not land as helicopters came under medium machine gun fire. The platoon, led by Major Birendra Singh, a close relation of diplomat-politician K. Natwar Singh, was encircled and wiped out after a valiant fight. Only one of the 30, Sepoy Gora Singh, survived, and was taken prisoner by the LTTE. It is believed Prabhakaran displayed him to his fighters, kicked him in public and said, let him go, so he will tell them not to fight us again. Gora Singh, however, brought back the story of one of the Indian army's most poignant battles ever, where, out of ammunition, the last three survivors even carried out a final, suicidal bayonet charge. The LTTE looted and stripped all the bodies, piled them in the nearby Nagaraja Vihar Temple on public display, and then cremated them by simply throwing a barrel of oil over them. That's why it is so revolting now to see Tamil Nadu politicians feeling so sorry for the Tigers.

And this is why we had said earlier that Madras Cafe's footage of the first battles, along with the young Sikh soldier (remember the Sikh LI platoon) in rigor mortis and the LTTE boys plundering the bodies, was so remarkable. It was the first instance of Indian filmmakers challenging the old Haqeeqat-Hindustan ki Kasam-Border notion of Indian war cinema. I walked around that ground weeks later and still found shreds of the Sikhs' uniforms. In the nearby building, there was more evidence of the sickening plunder of those bodies: pieces of Sikh LI battle fatigues, cross-belts, boots, water bottles, epaulettes, all mixed with .50 mg MMG shells, sometimes ankle-deep. That tells you how much fire that one lost platoon withstood in the course of those valiant 12 hours.

The commandos, separated in the football ground, had done a little better, with six killed and nine wounded. They were finally rescued in an audacious and brilliantly innovative operation by their commanding officer, Lt Col Dalbir Singh, covered by three T-72 tanks of 65 Armoured Regiment. Since by now it was known that the Tigers had mined all approaches, Major Anil Kaul, the tank commander (his father had first raised this regiment), remembered a railway line skirting the campus and decided to drive the tanks on the rail tracks instead, for once surprising the LTTE. But his own tank was hit on the turret by an RPG shell (or an MMG burst) and he lost his eye and hand as he bravely peeped out to navigate. His inspired troops put him on morphine, bashed on, and ensured that heroic rescue of the commandos. The Col Kaul with an eye-patch that you see on your TV channels, usually furious over some military issue or the other, and who once famously demanded that I be hanged upside down from a tree and flogged (after our story on the army movements on the night of January 16, 2012, that spooked Raisina Hill), is the same valiant cavalry man.

Pardon me for leap-frogging the calendar, but Col Kaul's latter day anger apart, in Sri Lanka I got nothing but large-hearted access, affection and hospitality from the Indian army. I did have only one tough scrap, though well meaning. This was at Batticaloa in September 1989, where, after a briefing and lunch with the GOC of 57 Mountain Division there, I was stepping out to go to the city. As Tekwani and I came out of the general's ops room, we found three army trucks and a Jeep, machine guns mounted, tarpaulins ripped and battle-ready Sikh soldiers spilling over from each one. "This is your escort," said the general. We protested that we were safest as journalists, and going out with such a convoy would endanger our lives and the soldiers', as the LTTE may just presume we were some Indian VIPs. The argument became heated. And the irritated general gave up on us, saying, "All right, then you are on your own, and I am taking the chopper to an outpost. Then, if something happens to you in this area, at least I will not be responsible." But that "you are being stupid anyway". He was, of course, speaking from sincere concern. He was a wonderful soldier and his name is Maj Gen Ashok Mehta, who is now one of your more sensible and articulate TV generals. Yet another aside: he subsequently married prominent political journalist Aditi Phadnis. I can make a disclosure now, the original tip-off on Tamil rebel training camps in India, that led to the first story of March 1984, had come from Aditi's mother, Urmila, a highly respected international affairs professor at JNU. Now don't say that reporters' stories are filled with digressions.

Shoojit's film suggests that the LTTE knew all about IPKF moves because some traitor was leaking to them. He is only halfway right. There were no traitors, but the LTTE knew for sure. As the IPKF later discovered, the LTTE's communications, electronics and eavesdropping ability was on par with modern armies. An army College of Combat team later researched the disasters, particularly at Jaffna University, and concluded that the Tigers had intercepted the IPKF wireless on that assault night. Even the range and height settings of their machine guns were perfect when the helicopters arrived.

The five brigades that converged on Jaffna moved at different speeds and suffered a varying, but high, number of casualties. But the brigade that suffered the least, the 18th, also reached Jaffna the fastest. Why, I learnt during those many conversations over long nights spent at the regrouping and recuperating units' field headquarters. Its commander, Brigadier J.S. "Jogi" Dhillon, spoke at length about jiujitsu, of how to turn your enemy's strengths against him. So his troops moved only at night and only through the fields and lagoons, avoiding all roads, thereby skirting minefields and snipers. But most importantly, he showed the courage and military dash to use the most potent weapon in the IPKF's armoury: the deadly Mi-25 helicopter gunships, the only time that weapon has been used in our history. His brigade had to take the Tiger stronghold of Chavakachcheri (where Prabhakaran executed Mahattaya and his 257 soldiers later in December 1994), and heavy casualties were anticipated. He prevailed on the high command to let him use Mi-25s. All they did was fire just 32 rockets at the Chavakachcheri bus station, supposed to be the LTTE nerve centre. He took the town with just three casualties. There was the predictable outcry that many of the 28 Tamils killed by Mi-25 rockets were innocent civilians. But Jogi's point was, so what were they doing there? He quoted the Chetwode Oath to me, which made the safety and well being of his troops next only to his nation's security for an Indian army officer. "As the Americans used to sometimes call Vietnam, Shekhar, this is a dirty little war and people will die," he said, "and because many will die, they better be yours rather than mine." Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket had probably not released in India by then, so I am not sure he borrowed that line from the young marine there, though spoken in a different context.

Dhillon, Brigadiers Manjit Singh (the battered 41st) and B.D. Mishra (72nd) spoke of other experiences and lessons. How the Tigers had rigged Chinese-made sniper chairs on the top of palm trees where sharpshooters waited entire days with rifles equipped with telescopic sights, how they expertly picked out officers from Indian columns: a skill taught to them, sadly, by our own army instructors when we were hand-in-glove with them. Also, their expertise with electronics and explosives and their ability to marry both. At one point, the IPKF was so harassed by IEDs electronically detonated from afar that it cut off power to Jaffna for several days.

On the way back from Jaffna and on subsequent visits to Sri Lanka as well, I was given generous audiences in the newly built chancery, a monument to disastrous CPWD architecture and L-1 construction at such a premium ocean-front spot, by High Commissioner "Mani" Dixit who once had chided me for that 1984 training camps story but was now so genuinely affectionate. The Sri Lankan media mocked him as "viceroy", and Mani smirked as only he could as he cleaned and dusted his pipe and looked out of his window at the two Indian navy frigates routinely anchored close enough for you to see the markings and ensigns. "Sadly, Shekhar, you've proven to be right and we so wrong with the Tigers," he said. "These thugs were never to be trusted and I am sure nobody ever would." Not much later, Premadasa did, and paid with his life. But Mani also said another important thing. He said the IPKF experience had told him India was still not ready to be a big power. "The first evening of fighting, and I knew we were not yet ready for force projection overseas, and willing to pay the price, politically and militarily, for it. We are a long way from being a big power," he said.

Of course, over two decades, we became close friends as our paths crossed in Pakistan (when he was high commissioner there) and later, when he served as foreign secretary, he wrote a regular column for this paper and then returned to South Block as the UPA's first national security advisor. But you could see that he was somehow stressed in that job. The Mani Dixit smirk and twinkle were now missing. At a dinner at my home for Fareed Zakaria on January 2, 2005, I asked Mani why he looked so stressed. Then he spoke that other line which I have borrowed often, in many contexts as a political journalist. "It takes you a lifetime learning the ways of this benighted city," he said, "and by the time you learn them, it is too late in life to be of much use to you." As more guests came in, he said we should meet again at leisure and he would explain.

That was not to be. Dixit had a heart attack later that night and next morning so many of us, friends, fans, admirers and sometimes sparring partners, were at his funeral. Frankly, he would have been a much, much better man to tell you the story of that bloody period in Sri Lanka than any journalist watching from the sidelines, or filmmaker skirting political minefields.

Epilogue: I got some lashing in the Colombo press last week for saying at the India-Sri Lanka Society banquet that the country seemed to be missing the real peace dividend that should have followed the successful completion of a long war. Where is the creative, liberal, civil society renaissance that usually follows such wars? I said the army was still too big and, with 4 per cent of the able-bodied Sinhala male population still in uniform (India has around 0.2 per cent), the political and institutional balance was skewed unhealthily. I also spoke of the need to celebrate diversity and to build stronger institutions as, in a democracy, that was the natural protection against majoritarian excess.

I got calls from Colombo journalists saying I had challenged Sri Lanka's sovereignty and attacked its judiciary, etc. This is utterly fallacious. I believe, on the contrary, that Mahinda Rajapaksa has made a historic contribution to his nation and done a great favour to India and Tamil Nadu by ridding us all of the cruellest, most deceitful, fascist force in our history. He deserves India's gratitude. And the LTTE deserves nobody's sympathy. But Sri Lanka's peace dividend should not be confined to a construction boom.

 

[he-man]

@hkdas

yaar use red colour and size 4 or 5 for titles depicting 1,2,3 article number
use the settings

 

[illuminatidinesh]

man just read in the newspaper.......................5 min back

can u post other 2 stories too........thats is yesterday and day before yesterday too

its a 3 part article actually

This article is a muh-tod javaab for all the ppl sympathetic to the tamil cause,,,,the ltte was the most brutal organisation of its time and it was the best to get rid of these thugs but india did play a double game and paid a heavy price for that

Source: http://www.defence.pk/forums/indian-defence/277495-indias-forgotten-soldiers-ipkf.html#ixzz2elQ1XJBY

when you dont know the history then it is better to restrain from commenting.

The article is not worth reading, the IPKF soldiers paid the price not due to lack of intelligence but due to treachery of some in the command.

The article is not worth reading, the IPKF soldiers paid the price not due to lack of intelligence but due to treachery of some in the command.

 

[he-man]

when you dont know the history then it is better to restrain from commenting.

The article is not worth reading, the IPKF soldiers paid the price not due to lack of intelligence but due to treachery of some in the command.

The article is not worth reading, the IPKF soldiers paid the price not due to lack of intelligence but due to treachery of some in the command.

the article saysthe same..............have u even read it??

there are 3 of them

 

[Dandpatta]

When the war was on, I followed it closely in my teens. It was shocking to see pictures of Vavuniya and Batticaloa massacre with IPKF soldiers bodies strewn around with everything looted off their selves. The most harrowing pictures came from ASIA WEEK (a Hong Kong based magazine which is now closed) had pictures of soldiers tied to chains with rubber tyres around their necks. Below were captions where the photo-journalist mentioned that these were the last few moments before they were to be set on fire (with kerosene inside the tyre tubes).

There was a Sindhi journalist (I forgot his name) and I think he went on to win an award of some sort for his reporting of the Sri Lankan debacle .

 

[Sashan]

Though IPKF lost soldiers it is the only one which emerged a hero in the whole episode - it fought with its arms tied behind the back while there were so many backstabbers - Srilankan government, Karunanidhi - the b***d who never even came to Chennai port to receive the IPKF troops returning back, diplomats from Delhi including Dixit, army officers sitting in Madras ordering the IPKF commanders without understanding the ground realities - The triggering point of the fight between IPKF and LTTE - Thilappan fasting could have been prevented by the Indian Ambassador there but for his callous attitude nor the death of 13 of the 17 LTTE leaders due to cyanide consumption once the army officers in Chennai decided to ignore the local IPKF commander's advice and tried to handover the leaders to SL army.

 

[Abingdonboy]

Man this is heartbreaking stuff- for insitance the Jaffna raid where an entire platoon fought to the death. Unimaginable levels of bravery.