How does Prabhakaran's death impact India?

There are two ways of looking at this.

You can look at what Prabhakaran did vis-a-vis India. He fought against the IPKF but that people may have overlooked. He killed Rajiv Gandhi. And, as far as the security establishment was concerned, there were several other things that the LTTE did which cannot be forgiven.

Number one was that he trained insurgent groups from India, including United liberation Front of Assam. The LTTE also trained insurgent groups in Tamil Nadu including a group called the Tamil National Retrieval Troops. These are obviously the reactions of a Prabhakaran who thought he should also take on India so that India never again interferes with the Sri Lankan Tamils.

If you look at it from a purely narrow Indian state point of view, I think they would say good riddance; sorry he is no more but good riddance.

Prabhakaran, at the end of the day was probably one man who proved the popular notion of Tamils being very weak wrong. The methodologies he adopted to prove this were not correct, but I think he could be remembered differently.

Once the LTTE ceases to exist, assuming it ceases to exist, it will cease to have an impact on India and Indian policy makers.

But there could be one problem. Leaving from Colombo to the west will be near impossible in the absence of proper identification and passports. This would mean that there is a big possibility that a large number of people trained in the use of arms and ammunition would come to Tamil Nadu as refugees and eventually settle down. If they live happily ever after without any differences, there is no problem. But otherwise, there could be problems.

How is the Congress going to react to this?

They seem to have taken the stand that the affairs of the Sri Lankan state are more important to us than the affairs of the LTTE. In the last three months, this was very clearly visible as senior people in the government of India publicly started describing the LTTE as a terrorist organisation.

This terminology was confined until now only to the annual reports of the home ministry. So much so that people like Subramaniam Swamy and J Jayalalithaa often wondered whether this woman is actually the woman whose husband got killed on May 21, 1991. But in the last three months, the Indian state has obviously tilted very formally, visibly, physically to side with the Sri Lankan state.