Bad Coins Drive the Good out of Circulation
S.H. Venkatramani, Sr. Correspondent.
Comrade. K.Pathmanabha will go down in journalistic files as the deceased Secretary General of the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF). The media is used to scratching at the surface. After all, “Medium” is the message.
But Mr.Paadmanabha - Comrade Nabha to EPRLF cadres, Sri Lankan Tamils, and countless admirers around the world was more than just a leader of a Sri Lankan Tamil militant group. In an age when expediency is increasingly becoming the guiding principle in politics, here was a rare bird committed to certain principles and a definite political ideology. He was firmly moored to a leftist political philosophy and wedded to the ideas of equity and distributive justice.
Unlike the leaders of other Tamil militant groups, Comrade Nabha was not at all motivated by a desperate desire to carve out a pocket burrough for himself. True, his EPRLF also initially positioned itself as a group fighting for Eelam. But Eelam, for Mr. Pathmanabha, was not a geographical area to be physically liberated from the clutches of Sri Lankan soldiers. It was a revolutionary political philosophy which motivated him. And he always saw Eelam in the geo -political context of the Indian subcontinent, unlike other Tamil militant leaders who couldn’t see beyond the nozzles of their revolvers.
Most Tamil militants didn’t know, and even now don’t know to make the transition from the militancy to politics. But here was the leader of a militant group who was first and foremost a political ideologue, and who took to militancy as means to subserve his political ideology.
In most political parties themselves, not to speak of militant and guerilla groups, the ideological fervour gets diluted down the line. This doesn’t happen with the EPRLF. comrade. Nabha was able to keep the group knit by a shared commitment to a common political ideology. And for all that, he was unassuming and soft spoken.
There was perhaps an element of inevitability about his falling a victim to the assassin’s bullets. In politics, as in economics, Gresham’s law holds: bad coins drive the good out of circulation. And comrade. Nabha was sterling material.
