M.R. Narayan Swamy

By M.R. Narayan Swamy There is an important reason President Anura Dissanayake must be equally looking forward to a meeting on August 3 with leaders of six Tamil and Muslim parties in Sri Lanka. In the first major initiative since coming together on July 13 to flag issues of common concern, the six parties sought a meeting with Dissanayake to address a string of unresolved issues plaguing the Tamil-speaking communities. Immediately after Batticaloa MP Shanakiyan Rasamanickam sent a letter req

By M.R. Narayan Swamy It was close to midnight on July 28, 1987, when I got a tip I had been waiting for: Velupillai Prabhakaran and Anton Balasingham were in a meeting with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, ahead of his trip to Colombo to sign the India-Sri Lanka Agreement. My source was the indefatigable Shankar Rajee of EROS. This was breaking news. The Tamil Tigers, we knew, were unhappy with the proposed accord and were avoiding Gandhi. The TULF and other militants had given their approval, ev

By M.R. Narayan Swamy Despite ideological U-turns since taking power in 2024, Sri Lanka’s dominant ruling Marxist party remains a united political force, although it is most likely to lose if fresh elections were to take place now, experts and insiders say. Most people spoken to insist that President Anura Dissanayake remains personally far more popular than his own Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) or the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition, which he leads. Dharman Wickramaratne, an acknow

By M.R. Narayan Swamy “He is a cardinal, isn’t he? Why does he always talk like a politician?” No one could have put it better when describing Cardinal Albert Malcolm Ranjith Patabendige Don, known simply as Malcolm Ranjith. And those words came from a respected member of Colombo’s Catholic community. Probably because the government appears to be on his side, the Cardinal may not realise that there is widespread disgust over his unending aggression about a supposed international conspiracy be

By M.R. Narayan Swamy Realising that the war for Tamil Eelam would need a constant supply of weapons, Velupillai Prabhakaran set up in 1985 Kadal Pura, a modest sea wing in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Over the years, it grew into the formidable Sea Tigers, which threatened to overwhelm Sri Lanka’s navy. Once the fourth and final Eelam War resumed in August 2006, it became payback time. The Sri Lankan Navy rapidly sank in 2007 the LTTE’s awesome warehouse ships, left and right.