-By A Special Correspondent | New Delhi & Colombo
(Lanka-e-News -04.Nov.2025, 11.00 PM) In a city obsessed with diplomatic choreography, the optics were impossible to ignore. At New Delhi’s stately Hyderabad House last week, Sri Lanka’s opposition leader Sajith Premadasa was seen shaking hands with senior Indian officials — a smiling, camera-ready figure framed by tricolour flags and mahogany tables.
Yet, for many in India’s military establishment, the scene was not one of diplomacy, but of historical amnesia.
Because Premadasa is not just any opposition leader. He is the son of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, the controversial Sri Lankan leader who, in the early 1990s, secretly armed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) — the same guerrilla force that killed hundreds of Indian soldiers during the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) intervention between 1987 and 1991.
For the widows and veterans of that ill-fated Indian expedition, the sight of Premadasa junior being welcomed by Indian ministers was, as one retired colonel put it, “a stab through the uniform.”
To understand the outrage, one must revisit the blood-soaked years of Sri Lanka’s civil war — and the political gamble that defined Ranasinghe Premadasa’s presidency.
By 1987, the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord had brought Indian troops onto Sri Lankan soil to disarm Tamil militants and stabilise the island’s north. But what began as a peacekeeping mission quickly descended into open war between the IPKF and the LTTE, who viewed the Indians as occupiers.
Caught in the middle was Colombo — and a rising politician named Ranasinghe Premadasa, then Prime Minister, who saw the Indian presence as an affront to Sri Lankan sovereignty.
When Premadasa became President in January 1989, he made a decision that would haunt Indo-Lankan relations for decades: he supplied the LTTE with arms, vehicles, ammunition, and funds to fight the very Indian troops who had come to restore order.
For Delhi, it was a stunning betrayal.
For the LTTE, it was a gift — one that allowed them to wage a ferocious campaign that killed nearly 1,200 Indian soldiers.
And for many Indians, especially those who served in the IPKF, that betrayal has never been forgotten.
Among the documents circulating in Colombo’s political and military archives are several photographs from the early 1990s showing the young Sajith Premadasa — then in his twenties — at public events with his father and members of the LTTE’s political wing, including Anton Balasingham. (See the Picture)
Though there is no evidence that Sajith himself took part in any political or military decisions, the images have become symbolic of his proximity to a regime that treated the LTTE as both enemy and ally, depending on convenience.
“Ranasinghe Premadasa handed arms to the Tigers in 1989,” recalls a retired Sri Lankan intelligence officer who served in Colombo at the time. “The LTTE used those same guns against Indian soldiers. Sajith was part of that inner household — he knew the atmosphere, he saw the visitors. To see him now embraced by Indian officials is surreal.”
For the families of Indian soldiers who never returned from Sri Lanka, the wounds remain open.
In Tamil Nadu, where the IPKF recruited heavily from local regiments, there is anger and disbelief.
Lakshmi Narayanan, widow of a sergeant killed in Vavuniya in 1989, spoke to The Lanka E news from her home in Coimbatore.
“We were told our men were fighting for peace. Then we learned that the Sri Lankan president himself was giving weapons to the people who killed them. And now that man’s son is being welcomed by India? What message does that send to our families?”
Her voice breaks. “Does India remember its soldiers only on parade days?”
Officially, Sajith Premadasa’s visit to India is billed as part of “opposition outreach and regional dialogue” — a chance for New Delhi to engage with all major Sri Lankan political actors ahead of Colombo’s next elections.
In practice, it is a delicate exercise in balancing memory and pragmatism.
India’s Foreign Ministry insists the visit “reflects the enduring partnership between India and the Sri Lankan people, not individuals.” Yet, for India’s military fraternity, that line rings hollow.
Colonel . Sharma (Retd.), who served in the IPKF’s Jaffna operations, told Lanka e-News by phone:
“We lost good men in those jungles. And the man whose father supplied weapons to our killers is now shaking hands with the same government we fought for? That’s a moral collapse.”
Critics say the BJP-led government’s outreach to Premadasa reflects its geopolitical pragmatism rather than moral clarity.
India is desperate to counter growing Chinese influence in Sri Lanka, where Beijing-backed infrastructure projects have multiplied over the past decade. With the ruling NPP government in Colombo leaning cautiously toward socialist nationalism, Delhi sees Premadasa’s centrist opposition as a “friendly fallback.”
“India is hedging its bets,” said Dr. Subramaniam, a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “Delhi cannot afford to alienate any faction in Colombo, even if that means hosting the son of a man who once defied India militarily.”
Ranasinghe Premadasa’s covert dealings with the LTTE remain one of the most controversial chapters in Sri Lankan political history.
Declassified Sri Lankan documents and testimonies from former military officials reveal that in 1989, the President authorised the transfer of truckloads of small arms, jeeps, and communication gear to the LTTE, ostensibly to pressure India to withdraw the IPKF.
The strategy worked. By March 1990, India, frustrated and politically drained, withdrew its troops. Within weeks, the LTTE turned on its benefactor — assassinating Premadasa in 1993 with a suicide bomb during a May Day rally.
“Premadasa played with fire,” says retired Sri Lankan colonel Peiris. “He armed the Tigers to fight the Indians, but the Tigers devoured him. The irony is tragic.”
Sajith Premadasa, now leader of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), has largely avoided discussing his father’s wartime legacy. When asked by foreign journalists about the LTTE connection, he often deflects: “Those were different times.”
Yet, his critics accuse him of moral evasion.
“Leadership demands honesty about history,” said former EPRLP leader, “Sajith cannot inherit his father’s political name but disown his political actions.”
His recent visit to Delhi, they argue, was less about policy and more about rebranding — an attempt to secure legitimacy on the international stage as Sri Lanka’s alternative leader.
Adding to the controversy are persistent questions about Premadasa’s academic record and financial conduct.
He has long claimed to hold a degree from the London School of Economics (LSE). Yet, discrepancies in alumni records have prompted scrutiny. When pressed in local interviews, Premadasa insisted that he “completed the necessary coursework,” though some faculty sources suggest he attended briefly under a short-term program.
The issue may seem trivial to Delhi’s diplomats, but in Sri Lanka — where allegations of elitism and privilege run deep — it has become a political metaphor.
“He talks of equality but carries the arrogance of inherited privilege,” said Colombo-based analyst Kusal Perera. “Even his academic story doesn’t add up.”
Premadasa also faces questions over irregularities in the Central Cultural Fund (CCF), a public trust under his former ministerial portfolio.
Auditors allege that millions of rupees allocated for heritage projects remain unaccounted for. While no direct charge has been filed against Premadasa, the controversy has dented his reformist image.
“The opposition has failed to be an opposition,” remarked Dr. Harsha de Silva, an economist once close to Premadasa. “They criticise the government, but they cannot clean their own backyard.”
Against this backdrop, the Indian government’s warm reception for Premadasa raises uncomfortable questions.
Is New Delhi ignoring history for short-term strategy?
Or has India quietly forgiven the man — or rather, the lineage — that once aided its enemies?
One retired Indian general offered a grim analogy:
“If Pakistan invited the son of a man who armed the Taliban, we would call it hypocrisy. Why is it different when we do it with Sri Lanka?”
Among India’s veterans’ associations, particularly in Chennai and Bengaluru, the sentiment is one of betrayal.
Major (Retd.) Rajagopal, who lost a leg in a mine blast near Mullaitivu, says the government’s hospitality towards Premadasa “dishonours the sacrifice” of IPKF troops.
“We fought, bled, and died on that soil. The LTTE we battled were using weapons supplied by his father’s government. History cannot be whitewashed with protocol smiles.”
The major pauses. “This is not diplomacy. This is erasure.”
Indian officials, however, appear unfazed.
In off-record briefings, Foreign Ministry sources stress that “today’s engagement is about tomorrow’s Sri Lanka”, not the past.
It’s a line that may satisfy think-tank realists in New Delhi, but it does little to soothe those who lived the war.
“Strategic pragmatism is one thing,” said retired Indian diplomat Mansingh. “But nations that forget their dead risk losing their moral compass.”
Between 1987 and 1990, the IPKF operation claimed the lives of 1,165 Indian soldiers, with more than 3,000 wounded.
Many of those men were under-equipped, under-informed, and thrust into a complex ethnic war not of their making. The Sri Lankan government’s duplicity — cooperating by day, colluding with the LTTE by night — made their mission near impossible.
That duplicity was orchestrated by Ranasinghe Premadasa himself.
Three decades later, his son’s emergence as India’s “dialogue partner” may be geopolitically convenient — but morally incoherent.
There is also a political subtext in India’s hospitality.
Premadasa’s current rival, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the NPP, represents a populist left-leaning movement wary of both India and China. For Delhi, courting Sajith Premadasa offers a softer, pro-Western alternative — a man who speaks English fluently, quotes Western economists, and looks “modern.”
“He fits the Delhi template of who should lead Sri Lanka,” quipped a South Asian diplomat. “Educated, predictable, and malleable.”
But moral debts are not easily erased by modernity.
It is tempting, in diplomacy, to rewrite history.
But in this case, history still breathes — in the veterans who limp on prosthetics, in the widows who light lamps for lost soldiers, and in the dusty archives that record how Sri Lanka’s leader armed his own insurgents to kill Indian troops.
Sajith Premadasa may claim no part in his father’s decisions. Yet, as the inheritor of that political legacy, he cannot expect to be immune from its shadow.
And India, as a nation that prides itself on honouring its fallen, must decide whether strategic engagement can ever justify historical indifference.
As Sajith Premadasa concludes his Delhi visit, offering handshakes and soft promises of partnership, it is worth recalling the words his father once uttered in 1989:
“Sri Lanka will not be a playground for foreign soldiers.”
Those soldiers were Indian. Many never came home.
And today, their widows watch on television as the son of the man who armed their killers is welcomed in the same capital those soldiers died defending.
Diplomacy may demand pragmatism, but history demands memory.
In New Delhi’s corridors of power, that memory seems to have been misplaced — perhaps conveniently, perhaps deliberately.
But in the villages of Tamil Nadu and the hearts of India’s veterans, it has not been forgotten.
-By A Special Correspondent | New Delhi & Colombo
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by (2025-11-04 22:10:32)
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