*Prabhakaran’s Death and the Politics of the Double

It is reported that when the Americans captured Saddam Hussein, one of the first questions that arose in their minds was whether their captive was the ‘real’ Saddam. Their captive, over intense questioning, denied that he had ever manufactured his double. But I suspect that the rumor of Saddam’s double will never entirely disappear, not even after many books have been published, each purporting to give the true and real story of Saddam. The question of the ‘real’ Saddam has many more layers than the Americans can imagine, and one must begin with the question of how real Saddam was to his subjects. He led a shadowy existence, one might say: by his own confession, for fear of his life, long before the American invasion of Iraq, he moved from one spot to another and rarely slept in the same bed twice. So, even when he was not being hunted, he lived the life of a fugitive. Saddam also imagined himself as a Saladin, a Haroun Rashid, even a Hammurabi. When Saddam denied that he had a double, he meant it in more than the literal sense. What is a double to one with multiple identities?

With the death of Prabhakaran, the question of the double will doubtless come up again. Men such as Prabhakaran are always believed to have a double: the mythography of the ‘spectacularly evil one’ can entertain no other outlook. The double is supposed to confound the opponent; but the double is also a sign of the evil one’s moral turpitude, a clear sign of the fear in which he lives. If the villain plots to have his double, his opponents are even keener that he should have one – as if that were a vindication of their moral superiority.

I have read on Tamil diaspora websites that the LTTE denies that Prabhakaran has been killed by the Sri Lankan armed forces. The man who has been identified as Prabhakaran is, according to his supporters, his double. And it would not be surprising if the LTTE were to produce a photograph or two of Prabhakaran purporting to establish that he is alive, most likely watching with bemusement his body being displayed before TV audiences.

Prabhakaran’s supporters and his detractors are, then, equally invested in the idea of the double. For many of Prabhakaran’s supporters, the will to believe that it is his double that is being displayed is the last desperate act of fealty. It may be well and good to believe that your hero is immortal, but for the present the imperative is to deny the fact of his death and claim that the struggle is alive. For his opponents and detractors, the double points to the moral cowardice of Prabhakaran. The cowardly leader sends others to their death, but has a morbid fear of plunging into death himself. That the idea of the double, however, need not be so utterly compromised or morally vacuous is amply demonstrated by Kurosawa’s film Kagemusha, “The Shadow Warrior.” Set in medieval Japan, the shadow warrior or impersonator, none other than a common thief, plays the part of Lord Shingen, whose death is to be kept a secret for three years. With great skill, the kagemusha creeps into Shingen’s skin and begins to play the part so well that he himself is confounded about his own identity. As Shingen, he keeps the enemies at bay; and when, towards the end, his fall from a horse reveals his ‘real’ identity to others and he is dismissed from the royal household, the members of the clan begin to perceive that the man they had taken to be a mere double was the fount of their reality. With the double’s ignominious departure, the Takeda clan changes course and is sent to a crushing defeat. The kagemusha himself becomes a martyr – but martyr to what, one might ask?

*Prabhakaran: In the Shadow of Che?

Velupillai Prabhakaran, the much-feared and notoriously secretive leader of the Tamil Tigers, is dead. The obituaries come pouring in, but it seems somewhat odd that Prabhakaran should be remembered with an obituary. An obituary is not merely a notice of the death of some well-known personality; it is an appreciation of a life that has come to a close. Perhaps, in the very appearance of obituaries of Prabhakaran in the New York Times and the Guardian, there is an implicit acknowledgment that Prabhakaran, who was among the most wanted ‘terrorists’ of the world, also had the approbation of many Tamils, in Sri Lanka and wider diasporic communities, who looked to him as the embodiment of their aspirations and the person most likely to turn the dream of Tamil autonomy into something like reality?

One famous photograph of Prabhakaran, the one featured in today’s Guardian, shows him seated below a large framed print of Che Guevara, flanked on either side by an armed bodyguard. Every armed revolutionary over the last several decades has attempted to lay claim to Che’s legacy, though it has been reliably said of Prabhakaran that he spent the greater part of the last twenty years, when he made rare public appearances and was holed up in his jungle hideouts, watching Clint Eastwood’s films and practicing the fast draw. Prabhakaran’s lifestyle was surely not calculated to earn him a large following as a renowned revolutionary. Leaving aside the question of whether the portly Prabhakaran could have been, in the market-driven economy of the modern world with an accent on the cool and the sexy, a match for the irrepressibly handsome features of a youthful but pensive-looking Che, Prabhakaran’s influence appears to have been confined to the band of the hard-core following that he had acquired among Tamils at home (and especially abroad).

It is true as well that Che’s posters are plastered everywhere, while Prabhakaran barely had a public presence in the ordinary sense of the term except in the posters and pamphlet literature of the LTTE. Once every year, on the occasion of Maveerar Naal, or Great Heroes Day, his speech to LTTE cadres would be keenly awaited for signs of his thinking or political and military strategy. And, yet, in a curious way, Prabhakaran seems to have held his own against Che, and might even have had a more lasting impact. His presence in the Tamil diaspora can only be underestimated at great peril: the anger even despair of his many ardent supporters in the Tamil diaspora may subside over time, but the diaspora’s dreams persist long after the country imagined as the ‘homeland’ has been transformed. Many Tamils will continue to swear by Prabhakaran even if fundamental political changes are effected in Sri Lanka. Secondly, there can be little question that while Che remains an enduring even romantic symbol of the revolution, or rather I should say the unfulfilled revolution, Prabhakaran did far more to transform insurgent warfare than anyone else one can think of in the last few decades. The LTTE, under his leadership, was among the first armed organizations to deploy the internet effectively to raise funds. Before there were Palestinian, Iraqi, and Pakistani suicide bombers, there were LTTE cadres who showed the way. Among their most prominent victims was Rajiv Gandhi, the former Prime Minister of Gandhi. Indeed, in virtually every innovation of insurgent warfare or (as some would say) terrorism, Prabhakaran’s LTTE has been the pioneer.

In death as in life, Prabhakaran remains elusive. I shall say more on that tomorrow.

*A Pyrrhic Victory? The ‘End’ of the LTTE and the ‘Tamil Question’

The Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapakse, has proclaimed the end of the three-decades old civil war that reportedly has taken more than 100,000 lives. In a speech to the nation, Rajapakse has declared that Sri Lanka has achieved a military triumph over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or, as they are commonly known, the Tamil Tigers. The LTTE leadership has been killed, and among the dead are, reportedly, the secretive Prabhakaran, who forged a unique if ferocious and unrelenting fighting force and led it in a bitter war to the end with the Sri Lankan army and state; Pottu Amman, the LTTE’s intelligence chief; and Soosai, commander of the Tiger’s naval forces.

Many more details of the last stage of the war will surely emerge as human rights organizations and journalists, who had hitherto been barred from the scenes of military action, swoop into the pockets of northeast Sri Lanka from where the Tigers staged their last futile acts of resistance. But this much is already clear: in its drive for military supremacy, the Sri Lankan army put tens of thousands of Tamil civilians at great risk, often in sheer defiance of calls to ensure the safety of civilians, and the 7,000 odd Tamils who lost their lives in the last stage of conflict stand forth as mute testimony to the reckless disregard for human life shown by both the Sri Lankan army and the Tigers. The Sri Lankan army claims, as official armies generally do on such occasions, that the Tigers used the civilians as ‘human shields’; the Tigers, on the other hand, allege that the Sri Lankan army, in its single-minded and bloody pursuit of a victory that had seemed ever so elusive, was determined that nothing, not even the lives of innocents, would be allowed to stand in the way of total victory. That both views should have some credibility is evidence enough of the reputation that both the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers had deservedly acquired for brutality, senseless killings, and the callous disdain for human lives that have signaled the hostilities in this long-drawn war. It is characteristic of both the Sri Lankan armed forces and the Tamil Tigers that, down to the very end, they should have been so fiendishly true to the reputations that they wore around themselves as ornaments of their sincerity.

Wars have been described as tragic and senseless by countless number of commentators, though there is no end to them in sight. When it is the rebels or insurgents who triumph, they often find that a military victory is perhaps more easily accomplished than the task of reconstruction. Rebels have, as well, been known to become dictators. But the triumph of states over insurgents is almost always a pyrrhic victory, unless one is willing to accept the idea that a nation-state can be something other than a repressive force in history. For the present, the question is: having compelled the LTTE into submission, is the Sri Lankan state prepared to treat the Tamil as equals? Is it prepared to take seriously the question of autonomy within a federal republic, and is it willing to persuade the Sinhalese that they have to disown some of their privileges? Had these questions not been ignored in the first place, what might have been the need for LTTE? Much the greater part of the task of the state, which does not inspire much confidence, is before it: not only will it have to work with a subjugated and angry Tamil population, it will have to keep the hounds among the Sinhalese at bay. So much for victories.