One more voice falls silent

BY MAYA RANGANATHAN| IN Media Practice | 06/02/2010

Chennai: For perhaps the third time since its inception in 1998 and for the first time with a prior announcement, the website Tamilnation.org, a compendium of 600 pages on everything to do with Tamils, history and culture, closed on Jan 25, 2010. No explanation has been given except a ‘respectful’ farewell on its homepage to its ‘visitors from many lands’ carrying quotations from the Tamil classic Purananuru and Mahatma Gandhi, among others.

Tamilnation.org was no news website, although it provided links to like-minded news websites. It argued passionately for the rights of the Tamil people and asserted the supremacy of their culture, yet it stood apart from the merely propagandist websites, owing to the range of assiduously-referenced intellectual and historical material it incorporated. Non-political content included interesting insights into the evolution of Tamil language, Hinduism, Carnatic music, Bharatanatyam, 100 most important Tamils and their contribution and the political history of the Tamils. Its success lay in the fact that it was hard to ignore for this very reason, even by those who differed with its ideology. In the war for Eelam, Tamilnation.org, the labour of love of Nadesan Satyendra, an attorney based in the United Kingdom, was a powerful weapon indeed. Notwithstanding its attempts to disclaim identification with the LTTE and its assertion that it stood for all Tamils, the LTTE slant in its content was not hard to miss. The website came down heavily on critics of the LTTE, sometimes with ill-concealed hatred and most often with scathing remarks.

The first time Tamilnation.org went offline was on June 30, 2001 for undisclosed reasons. It re-commenced operations on May 15, 2004. Although no explanations were given on resumption, it was understood that the website had closed to address some legal issues and was back online once they were settled. It was apparently sorely missed then, more for the historical and academic articles it contained as the plethora of welcome messages that it featured on recommencing operations, indicated.

More recently, the website shut operations on May 17, 2009, when it went offline abruptly following the announcement by the Sri Lankan Government of the death of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) supremo V Prabhakaran. It ‘reopened’ on June 18, 2009, with an explanation that the month’s closure was to mourn the death of the national hero and to allow time for ‘reflection’. 

The silence then, as it does now, spoke more eloquently of the confusion that had besieged the Tamils, especially the members of the diaspora. Caught between the LTTE-loyal media that had belatedly set about hinting at the losses suffered by the Tigers in the civil war that raged in the North and East of Sri Lanka in 2008 and early 2009 and the vulgar celebrations of victory by the Sri Lankan Government that followed announcement of death of Tiger leaders in May 2009, most Tamils sank into a state of denial over the quick extermination of their ‘invincible’ leader. Perhaps, it was the confirmation of Prabhakaran’s death and that of his aides by LTTE’s head of International Relations S Pathmanathan that prompted the Tamils to engage in ‘reflection’.

With the Tamils in the North-East confined behind barbed wires and intellectuals focussing on the urgent need for humane rehabilitation of the internally-displaced persons, the diaspora speaking through its many websites, sought to define the next phase of the struggle.  Assertions that the ‘goal of a separate Tamil state would be pursued from abroad’ and efforts to organise a transnational government seemed to be the outcomes of the ‘reflection’, but changes in operation were hardly discernible.

Tamilnation.org  continued to vociferously support the LTTE’s line of thinking and it was evident in the manner that it commented on journalist Anita Pratap’s column in The Week on the lessons to be learnt from the military rout of the LTTE. Tamilnation.org wrote criticising Ms Pratap, who had hitherto been one of the most-lauded journalists for her admiration of the LTTE leader and support for the organisation, ‘But they (Tamils) do not need lectures on that score from the Anita Prataps of the world’.

It is not clear what has prompted Tamilnation.org’s current closure. It is perhaps to do with a realisation for renewed reflection; or a sense of futility in the wake of the re-election of Mahinda Rajapakse as the Sri Lankan President; or perhaps an effort to distance oneself from the murky politics of the Tamil ethnic issue. Whatever the reason, it is lamentable that one more voice in the public sphere has been silenced; that the space for dissent and democratisation has shrunk by that much more; and that heterodoxy in virtual space may become as rare and extinct as in the real world.