"13 EPRLF men killed in Madras"

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

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

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

... contd.