S2E28: “I called Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger supremo Prabhakaran a megalomaniac": Author

Apr 10, 2025

25:05

forum

Ask episode

view_agenda

Chapters

auto_awesome

Transcript

info_circle

Episode notes

A conversation with M R Narayan Swamy, veteran South Asian journalist and biographer of slain Tamil Tiger supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Synopsis: The Straits Times’ senior columnist Ravi Velloor distils 40 years of experience covering the Asian continent, with expert guests.

As Sri Lanka approaches the 16th anniversary of the end of its civil war, Ravi speaks with M R Narayan Swamy in this episode.

Swamy is the author of several books on Sri Lanka’s now-vanquished militant group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and he talks about his most recent book – The Rout of Prabhakaran.

Swamy’s book details the last days of Tamil Tigers supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran who was killed, along with hundreds of fighters and Tamil civilians, by the Sri Lankan army in May, 2009.

In this podcast, he discusses why Prabhakaran, who once controlled a third of Sri Lanka’s landmass, and two-thirds of its coastline, met his bloody end; the mistakes he made along the way, and the magical hold he seemed to hold on his cadres.

Highlights (click/tap above):

2:30 A post-mortem on Prabhakaran, and Tigers

5:40 ‘Political harakiri’ – the big lessons from the defeat

13:10 Tigers compared with Hamas

16:25 “Unforgivable Western complicity”

19:35 Tamil insurgency effectively ending

23:10 Can Sri Lanka now be another Singapore

Host: Ravi Velloor (velloor@sph.com.sg)

Read Ravi's columns: https://str.sg/3xRP

Follow Ravi on X: https://twitter.com/RaviVelloor

Produced and edited by: Fa’izah Sani

Executive producer: Ernest Luis