@mrpaluvets

There are some names history celebrates, and there are some names history deliberately buries. In Sri Lanka’s political memory, Alfred Duraiyappa is constantly presented as a “victim of Tiger violence,” a Sinhala State friendly Tamil politician whose assassination in 1975 is repeatedly weaponised by Colombo as a murder of a Tamil moderate. But the story that the Sri Lankan state, its media, and its textbooks refuse to tell is that Duraiyappa’s hands were stained with Tamil blood long before anyone fired a gun at him. One of those stains belongs to a child. His name was Kesavarajan. He was a 15 year old boy from Sulipuram, a Victoria College student. A teenager with books, not weapons. A boy who loved his mother tongue, who like thousands of Tamils, was swept up in the excitement surrounding the International Tamil Research Conference of 1974. This conference was not merely an academic gathering; it was a celebration of identity. Jaffna was decorated street to street. Tamil scholars fro...