
K.P. Nayar in the Telegraph on how India will pay a heavy price for abdicating a Sri Lanka policy:
The death of Velupillai Prabhakaran brought back a flood of memories. If history is to determine the day when India’s pre-eminence in all of South Asia began its decline, it would be November 17, 1986. Prabhakaran, the founder of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, would be one of the characters who set in motion a process that brought about this decline. And if history is to fix the responsibility on a single individual for triggering the onset of that decline, it would be P. Chidambaram, who was then the naïve minister of state for internal security in Rajiv Gandhi’s government.More here
M K Bhadrakumar, a former Indian diplomat who served in Sri Lanka in the 1980s in rediff.com:
A long time ago, we created Prabhakaran. We picked him up as an urchin from nowhere. What we found charming about him was that he was so thoroughly apolitical -- almost innocent about politics. He was a simpleton in many ways, who had a passion for weapons and the military regimen. He suited our needs perfectly.
Which was to humiliate the J R Jayewardene government in Sri Lanka and teach it a hard lesson about the dangers of being disrespectful to India's status as the pre-eminent power in the Indian Ocean. Jayewardene was too Western-oriented and behaved as if he never read about the Munroe Doctrine when he read history in Oxford. We didn't like at all his dalliance with the Israelis and the Americans in our very backyard.
So, we fostered Prabhakaran and built him up as a pinprick on Jayewardene's vanities -- as a Bhindranwale of the Deccan.
More here
B. Raman writes:
A picture of Prabakaran supposedly alive watching with a smile Sri Lanka TV showing him dead is circulating in the Internet.
For example, here.
Clearly, a bad, amateur photoshop job: