> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # M.K. Sivajilingam, Tamil Nationalist Who Defied Bans to Honor the War Dead, Dies at 69 - URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/m-k-sivajilingam-tamil-nationalist-who-defied-bans-to-honor-the-war-dead-dies-at-69/ - Published: 2026-11-15T02:40:35.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-15T02:56:21.000Z - Author: Our Reporter - Tags: Obituary, November 2026 **JAFFNA, Sri Lanka:** M.K. Sivajilingam, a maverick Tamil politician who spent four decades provoking Sri Lankan governments, the security establishment, rival Tamil parties and, at times, his own allies, died late Saturday at his home in Valvettithurai, on the northern coast of the Jaffna Peninsula. He was 69. He died at about 11:35 p.m. A kidney transplant he received in Colombo in June had failed, and he had since been in intensive care in Colombo, Jaffna and Point Pedro. When doctors at Point Pedro Base Hospital concluded they could do no more, he was taken home, where he spent his last three days. Mr. Sivajilingam served two terms in Parliament for Jaffna District and sat on the Northern Provincial Council. Since November last year, he had been chairman of the Valvettithurai Urban Council. Valvettithurai is where he and Velupillai Prabhakaran, founder of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, were both born and grew up. The two men were distant relatives through Mr. Prabhakaran’s mother’s family. When the Tigers hunted down members of his own militant group in the 1980s, Mr. Sivajilingam narrowly escaped. He held national office for less than a decade, and he was better known for what he did outside it. After the Tigers’ defeat in 2009, he continued to call Mr. Prabhakaran the leader of the Tamil nation. He organized remembrance events for the war dead at a time when the security forces were breaking up such gatherings. He also ran in elections he had no chance of winning, once in the Sinhalese heartland, to make a point. ## Militant years Mahalingam Kanagalingam Sivajilingam was born on Aug. 15, 1957, in Valvettithurai, a fishing and seafaring town in the Vadamarachchi area. He grew up near the town’s Amman temple and, after his marriage, lived in the Nediyakadu neighborhood. He came of age as Tamil anger rose over language policy, university admissions, and anti-Tamil violence. He joined the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization, or TELO, one of several armed groups then fighting for a separate Tamil state, and worked in its political wing. In 1986, the Tigers turned on TELO, killing its leader, Sri Sabaratnam, and many of its fighters. Mr. Sivajilingam survived. In later years, he became one of the most outspoken public defenders of the organization that had nearly wiped out his own. After the 1987 India-Sri Lanka accord, TELO’s surviving members moved into electoral politics. Mr. Sivajilingam became the party’s national organizer and later its chairman. ## Parliament, and trouble in India In October 2001, TELO joined three other parties to form the Tamil National Alliance, backed by the Tigers, who then controlled much of the north and east. Mr. Sivajilingam won a Jaffna seat that December and was re-elected in 2004. In December 2008, as the army’s final offensive against the Tigers gathered pace, India’s central government ordered him to leave the country within 72 hours over his open support for a separate Tamil state and for the Tigers. He went to Chennai instead and appeared at a protest near the Sri Lankan deputy high commission organized by Vaiko’s party, the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. In December 2009, he was stopped at Chennai airport and sent back, and in 2010 he was refused entry again. ## The Prabhakaran family The war ended in May 2009 at Mullivaikkal, on the northeast coast, with the Tigers crushed and Mr. Prabhakaran dead. His elderly parents, Thiruvenkadam Velupillai and Parvathy Ammal, were held by the military. When Mr. Velupillai died in army custody at Panagoda in January 2010, Mr. Sivajilingam received the body, with the government’s permission, and arranged the funeral. He then took on the care of Parvathy Ammal, who had been partly paralyzed by a stroke for about a decade. He spent months trying to get her treatment abroad. In March 2010, he escorted her to Singapore, from where relatives planned to take her on to her daughter, Vinothini, in Canada. The plan fell through. In April, she flew to Chennai for treatment, and India’s Congress-led government refused her entry at the airport. In May, she returned to Valvettithurai. She was cared for at the Valvettithurai government hospital until her death on Feb. 20, 2011, and it was Mr. Sivajilingam who announced it to the press. When soldiers at the hospital tried to inspect photographs taken of her body, he confronted them and accused the military of fearing “not only the son, but even the mother.” ## Elections he could not win By then he had broken with the alliance. In January 2010, he ran for president as an independent against Mahinda Rajapaksa, who had presided over the end of the war, and won 9,662 votes, less than 0.1 percent. Some Tamil critics said his candidacy helped Mr. Rajapaksa by sharpening the ethnic divide in the contest. Others accused him of having been paid to split the Tamil vote, which he denied. With N. Srikantha, another dissident, he formed the Tamil National Liberation Alliance, which won no seats in the parliamentary election that April. The two rejoined TELO and the Tamil National Alliance in 2011, and that year Mr. Sivajilingam won a seat on the Valvettithurai Urban Council. In 2013, at the Northern Province’s first provincial election, he was elected to the council on the alliance ticket. He was among nine members who refused to be sworn in before the new chief minister, C.V. Wigneswaran. On Oct. 14, he took his oath at a seaside Hindu temple in Mullivaikkal. On the council, he pressed for an international investigation into wartime abuses, and in March 2014 he took that demand to diplomats at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. His most criticized campaign came in 2015\. Mr. Rajapaksa had lost the presidency that January and was seeking a parliamentary seat from Kurunegala, a Sinhalese-majority district with a large population of soldiers. Mr. Sivajilingam fielded an independent list there in protest. Mr. Rajapaksa won 424,539 preference votes, and Mr. Sivajilingam received 91\. Mr. Rajapaksa’s allies presented the race as a contest against a relative of Mr. Prabhakaran, and some Tamil politicians said Mr. Sivajilingam had handed them a gift. He ran for president again in 2019 and received 12,256 votes. TELO had opposed his candidacy and started disciplinary proceedings, and he resigned from the party. He lost a race for Parliament from Jaffna in 2020 and later became general secretary of the Tamil National Party, which Mr. Srikantha leads. ## The fight over remembrance In November 2018, the Valvettithurai police took him into custody at a celebration of Mr. Prabhakaran’s birthday and released him after recording a statement. In September 2020, he defied a ban to organize a remembrance at Kondavil for Thileepan, a Tiger political leader who died on a hunger strike in 1987\. The Attorney General later indicted him, and in 2023 the High Court granted him bail on two sureties of one million rupees each. Investigators once asked him if he had cut a cake on Mr. Prabhakaran’s birthday because the two were related. “Yes, he is a relative,” he said. “But that is not why I cut the cake.” He did it, he said, because Mr. Prabhakaran was the leader of the Tamil nation. Ranil Wickremesinghe had signed the 2002 cease-fire with Mr. Prabhakaran, he reminded them, “not with Sivajilingam.” Parthipan Varatharajan, a member of the Nallur Pradeshiya Sabha, wrote this year that the banana trunks Mr. Sivajilingam carried to remembrance sites, through years of military surveillance and threats, laid the groundwork for the large commemorations now held across the north. ## A last office, and an appeal for help In the May 2025 local elections, the Tamil National People’s Front won seven of the nine wards on the Valvettithurai Urban Council. In October, the All Ceylon Tamil Congress, under whose registration the front contests, nominated Mr. Sivajilingam to a vacant seat, and at the end of November the council elected him chairman. By then his kidneys were failing. In May this year he told reporters, his voice unsteady, that a transplant and related treatment could cost nearly seven million rupees and that he had already spent about 1.9 million. After two terms in Parliament and years on the provincial council, he said he owned no house, land or vehicle. Donations came from Tamils at home and abroad. A French Tamil traders’ association gave 2.5 million rupees through the Yarl Traders’ Association, the lawyer K.V. Thavarasa gave one million rupees through a family memorial trust, and members of the Nallur Pradeshiya Sabha pledged their monthly allowances. He had the transplant at a private hospital in Colombo on June 11\. In September, he was moved to intensive care in Colombo. On Oct. 24, he was admitted to the intensive care unit of a private hospital in Jaffna, and early this month he was moved to the intensive care unit at Point Pedro Base Hospital. On Oct. 30, while he was in intensive care, the council he chaired passed a resolution asking the Northern Province governor to seek an explanation for his sick leave. The motion was brought by a member of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi. It was backed by that party’s five members, one member of the Eelam People’s Democratic Party and one from the National People’s Power. On Nov. 10, officers of the police Terrorism Investigation Division went to his home, questioned his wife at length and left a summons ordering him to appear before a court in Mullaitivu on Dec. 18\. Mr. Srikantha, acting as the family’s lawyer, said the summons did not say what case it concerned, and he condemned the visit as pressure on a family that was already at his bedside. His body is lying at his home on Kal Road in Nediyakadu, Valvettithurai. Funeral rites will be held there at 10 a.m. on Monday. At about noon, his body will be placed at Valvettithurai Junction for the public to pay their respects, and tributes will be delivered. It will then be taken to the Ooranie Hindu cemetery in Valvettithurai for cremation.