In an interview on Sri Lanka

So, your next choice is Lost Opportunities by Kethesh Loganathan. Who was he and what is his book about?

So Kethesh was part of one of the other Tamil militant groups, the Eelam Peoples Revolutionary Liberation Front or EPRLF. Originally he was a militant, but he saw the brutality of the armed struggle and so he abandoned that and became a journalist and then a political activist. And he ended up spending a lot of time reflecting on the possibility of other militants brutalized by the war turning to democratic politics. He was also one of the most knowledgeable scholars on constitutional change in Sri Lanka. And what his book does is try to document all the lost opportunities to bring about a political settlement to this conflict. Because throughout the 61 years since Sri Lankan independence, there have been efforts to solve Tamil and other minority grievances politically. Issues such as language rights, devolution of power to the regions, and power sharing. Kethesh’s book is a history of the attempts to resolve such issues, though tragically, we were unable to do so. The Sinhalese didn’t have the political will to really come forward with proposals to solve these problems politically.

But Kethesh was personally involved in many of these talks - when there were attempts to come to a political solution in the eighties and early nineties. So he had inside knowledge, he really knew what was going on and what all the players were saying and doing. He really knew the history. So that’s what makes the book particularly interesting.

And he was murdered too?

Yes. I have a huge intellectual debt to Kethesh – he was my mentor. I learned much about politics and how to be a political activist from him. He was assassinated by the LTTE, on August 12, 2006.