This is a brutally frank post-mortem of the nihilist politics that led to the bloody and brutal end of the LTTE’s founder, Velupillai Prabhakaran, in May 2009, bringing a quarter century of armed conflict to a close.

For too long, the miseries of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority have been blamed on the Sinhalese, successive governments in Colombo, the Indian State, even the international community, and sections of Tamils within the island nation.

This book, based on extensive research and interviews, clears away many cobwebs of a troubled history. It concludes that while the reluctance of the Sri Lankan State to come to terms with Tamil political aspirations played its part, at Prabhakaran’s door lies much of the blame for dragging the Tamil community through three decades of a horrific war for the pipedream that was Eelam, a war that yielded no solutions, and which ended with his own death alongside the carnage of Tamil civilians and the demise of the LTTE.

M.R. Narayan Swamy, one of India’s best-recognised writers on Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict, has been a journalist for more than four decades. He has visited Sri Lanka numerous times to cover the Tamil separatist campaign, often spending months on the island.

This book—his fourth on the subject—is the outcome of countless interactions with Tamil guerrillas, military generals, diplomats, policymakers, and others in the Sri Lankan government and beyond.

Even after the LTTE was crushed in 2009, he continues to write about the conflict’s dark shadows that still haunt Sri Lanka.

Narayan Swamy lives in New Delhi.