The Rebels We Armed: When India Trained the LTTE

KaustubhaReflections

Jul 14—2025

“History has a habit of showing up at your doorstep with a suitcase you once gave away.”
—From Bhola’s less-than-thrilled face when I told him this story.

Let me take you back to a moment in history not often found in school textbooks—one that involves a clandestine alliance, a fateful miscalculation, and a rebel group that would one day assassinate a former Indian Prime Minister.

Yes, I’m talking about the time India—our democratic, non-interventionist, chai-sipping Bharat—secretly trained the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE. It sounds like the plot of a bad political thriller. But it’s all too real.

And, as with most of history, it didn’t start with evil intentions.

🌊 A Crisis Across the Palk Strait

Sri Lanka in the late 1970s was a simmering pot. Ethnic tensions between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority had been boiling for decades. The Tamils—many of whom traced their ancestry to India—faced discrimination in education, employment, and language rights. It wasn’t just injustice—it was humiliation, bureaucratized.

And then came Black July, 1983—a pogrom where over 3,000 Tamils were killed in anti-Tamil riots across Colombo and beyond. The horror wasn’t just in the violence, but in the state’s apparent indifference to it.

Thousands of Tamils fled to India. Camps in Tamil Nadu overflowed. Emotions ran high. And New Delhi—always wary of unrest in its backyard—saw a storm coming.

🤝 Operation “Help the Brother”

This was the Cold War era, mind you. Everyone was arming someone. The Soviets had Afghanistan. The Americans were dancing with the Mujahideen. Why not India, too?

Enter RAW—the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency. Between 1983 and 1987, RAW began quietly training several Tamil militant groups, including the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), the TELO, and the EPRLF. The training grounds? Remote parts of Tamil Nadu and even a few secluded bases in Uttar Pradesh.

Yes, Bhola looked at me incredulously too—“Uttar Pradesh?! For sea guerrillas?”

But the idea was simple: equip Tamil militants to pressure the Sri Lankan government into a political settlement. A nudge. A reminder that India wouldn’t tolerate ethnic cleansing in the region.

Only problem? The LTTE wasn’t interested in nudging. They wanted a separate state—Eelam. And they were ruthlessly efficient.

According to ex-RAW officer B. Raman and several former operatives interviewed in Tiger by the Tail by M.R. Narayan Swamy, these groups received training in small arms, explosives, ambush tactics, and even basic naval demolition—training that would later power the Sea Tigers, LTTE’s fearsome marine division.

Officially, India maintained plausible deniability—yet RAW’s field operatives, backed by sympathetic politicians, were executing a parallel foreign policy beneath the radar.

🔫 What Did the Training Involve?

According to various retired intelligence officials and investigative reports, the training wasn’t a weekend boot camp. We’re talking small arms usage, explosives handling, intelligence gathering, ambush tactics, and yes—even underwater demolition.

Some groups were even flown to India’s northeast for specialized jungle warfare training. The Indian government provided not just weapons and money, but legitimacy. These weren’t rogue actors anymore—they were freedom fighters. Or so we told ourselves.

Meanwhile, in Tamil Nadu, local politics played its part. Many Dravidian leaders were sympathetic to the Tamil cause—some even vocal about supporting Eelam. M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) is widely believed to have financially supported the LTTE, while other groups like TELO and PLOTE also operated with India’s tacit blessing.

By the late 1980s, the LTTE had turned on its former allies—eliminating TELO, EPRLF, and PLOTE in a brutal purge to establish itself as the sole voice of Tamil resistance.

And as history often does, it gave us what we asked for. But with consequences we didn’t imagine.

🕊️ From Friend to Foe: The IPKF Debacle

By 1987, under pressure to stabilize the region, India brokered the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. It was meant to bring peace. Tamil autonomy would be granted. Militants would disarm.

In return, India sent the IPKF—the Indian Peace Keeping Force—to Sri Lanka.

Now pause here and savor the irony: we trained the rebels, then sent our army to disarm them.

Imagine a father giving his son a cricket bat, only to be later sent in as the umpire, insisting, “No more hitting!”

Predictably, the LTTE refused to surrender. They saw the Accord as a betrayal. Clashes broke out. What began as peacekeeping became war. Indian soldiers—some barely trained for jungle warfare—were ambushed by the very rebels we had armed.

Between 1987 and 1990, over 1,200 Indian soldiers died in the conflict. The IPKF returned home humiliated. And the LTTE? Hardened, embittered, and more determined than ever.

💣 A Horrific Turn: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination

Then came the ultimate price.

On May 21, 1991, in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, a suicide bomber named Dhanu approached former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi during an election rally. She bent down to touch his feet—a traditional gesture of respect—and detonated explosives strapped to her body.

Rajiv Gandhi was killed instantly.

Investigations revealed the plot was orchestrated by the LTTE leadership. Why? Retaliation. Rajiv had sent the IPKF. He had betrayed their cause, they believed.

As documented in the Jain Commission report and corroborated by confessions from captured LTTE operatives, the plot was deliberate and meticulously planned. India’s flirtation with proxy warfare had come home. In blood.

🧩 The Quiet Denials and Noisy Silences

To this day, the Indian government has never officially acknowledged the full extent of its support for the LTTE. Some retired officials have hinted, others outright confessed. But the files remain closed, the words carefully chosen.

It’s not a comfortable truth. We like to remember our diplomatic triumphs—non-alignment, peace missions, the moral high ground. But we forget that even Mahabharata had a Krishna willing to bend the rules for the right outcome.

Only in this case, the gamble didn’t pay off.

And after the IPKF withdrawal, India’s policy shifted sharply. For nearly two decades, Delhi adopted a “hands-off” approach to Sri Lanka—neither mediating nor intervening, wary of past ghosts.

Ironically, in the 2000s, India would later assist the Sri Lankan Navy in tracking LTTE boats—targeting the same Sea Tigers we once helped train.

🔍 Why Did We Do It?

Was it compassion for Tamil lives? A geopolitical check on Colombo? Domestic political pressure from Tamil Nadu? Or a desire to project regional power?

The answer, as always, is: all of the above.

In geopolitics, morality and strategy are often roommates in a cramped hostel—they share a space but don’t always get along. India saw a chance to influence Sri Lanka’s politics and protect Tamil interests—but underestimated the LTTE’s ideological fervor and capacity for violence.

And once blood was spilled, the exit door closed behind us.

📜 Lessons We Still Haven’t Learned

Today, we speak often of “strategic depth,” “regional influence,” and “counterinsurgency.” But have we really absorbed the lessons of our own history?

Proxy wars are like lighting fires in your neighbor’s backyard to warm your own home. Sooner or later, the wind changes.

Training insurgents, no matter how noble the cause may seem at first, creates a beast that rarely listens to its maker. The LTTE weren’t grateful students. They were revolutionaries with a dream—and dreams, once ignited, don’t extinguish politely.

Also worth remembering: the LTTE was later declared a terrorist organization not just by India, but also the US, the European Union, and Canada. Their methods—suicide bombings, child soldiers, civilian massacres—left no room for ambiguity.

🙏 A Footnote From Bhola

When I told Bhola this story over chai, he sipped slowly and said, “So… we gave them the guns, then went to take the guns back, and then got blown up?”

Exactly, I nodded.

He shook his head, unimpressed. “Next time, maybe we just send pens.”

I laughed. But he was on a roll.

“Pens, sir. Notebooks. Moral Science textbooks. Or one big application form for hostel admission—nothing breaks revolution like a food queue and broken ceiling fans.”

📣 History Is Not a Secret—It’s a Mirror

Dear reader, if this story unsettled you, good. It should. Not because we should be ashamed of our past—but because we must be aware of it.

History isn’t there to flatter us. It’s there to remind us: the road to unintended consequences is always paved with short-term certainties.

So the next time we speak of training someone else’s rebels, let us remember the LTTE—not just for what they became, but for how they began.
With our help. With our hope. And ultimately, with our heartbreak.

Like Arjuna aiming his bow only to realize—his target once sat beside him in the same chariot.

🪔 If this story made you pause, reflect, or raise an eyebrow, share it with someone else who loves the quiet corners of history. After all, as Bhola says, “A tale untold is like pickle unopened—it loses its flavor.”

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