Monday, November 22, 2010

DbsJeyaraj and his Changing Stripes!

One can ponder why a person like DbsJeyaraj often overlooked among Tamil journalists considering their work involved in the Tamil or English media channels, by pro-Tamils. Many who were familiar with Dbsjeyaraj in the past know his involvement of RAW, India’s intelligence agency, during the IPKF days of Jaffna in late 80s, while he worked as a reporter for Hindu newspaper, which was nothing but a mouth-piece of Indian government. And it is all well-documented. What we do not know how far he kept his contacts with the RAW since then.

With the kind of background he has had in the past, his work often comes under scrutiny, especially from the pro-Tamils’ point of view. Because of the public scrutiny, he had trimmed down his criticism of LTTE or hardly any criticism at all, for the last decade in which time LTTE was a formidable force in SL. Ever since the military debacle of LTTE in May 2009, things had changed dramatically- so had Dbsjeyaraj’s stripes. Using the current circumstances- many people, even the pro-Tamils, are quiet sceptical of LTTE’s decisions during the peak of Wanni war in 2009 - DbsJeyaraj gradually paced his attacks against both LTTE and Tamil interests. What I cannot understand why a person like Jeyaraj who portrays himself a warrior in his articles has selective amnesia- undermining the LTTE only - while he never talks about the federal solutions, nor Tamil grievances. And the low point of his attacks comes in his latest article which stamps “Tamilnet” as a LTTE channel. So much as Tamils valued the Jaffna library, which was burned by Sinhala mobs in 1983 riots, Tamils should not lose Tamilnet that is a vital resource for them, and that should be protected at any cost against all the external powers. I do believe that most of his writings are anything but vague. And it is time for him to change his mentality of “if sabotaging LTTE endangers the Tamil interests, so be it”.