To a "small mind" such as mine, a product of which is reviewed in Radical Philosophy, quoted in a British intellectual website (Culture Wars) and available at the Harvard Bookstore (rather different from the output of the greater minds she applauds and perhaps imagines she is one of), columnist Shanie seems a little a strange. To my response that I did not wish the commemorative event to be exclusively or primarily a critique of the Tigers for Rajani’s killing but only wished that it should have been explicitly mentioned ONCE, Shanie’s rejoinder is that I should re-read my column because it consists mainly of that critique (The Island, Oct10, 2009). That’s some weird argumentation. My article clearly indicated that my criticism would have been void if there had been a single explicit mention in any of the speeches, of the Tigers as the killers of Rajani. The fact that it was the central thrust of the article was because it was a crucial, glaring and revealing absence.

Shanie’s further point that everybody who attended the event knew that Rajani had been killed by the Tigers is specious. Everybody who visits the Holocaust memorial knows who sent the Jews to the gas chambers, which does not prevent the embedded naming, indicting and shaming of the Nazis and Hitlerism at the site and down the ages. A columnist writing in the Daily News (The Morning Inspection) has made references to a great number of massacres and atrocities in history and inquired of Shanie as to whether her theory holds and that no mention should be made of the perpetrators, when in all these cases, mention is routinely and axiomatically made. To this, all we hear are the sounds of Shanie’s silence.

Rajani must be commemorated, not falsified. Shanie writes: "Rajani and her fellow academics in the UTHR never countenanced injustice, terror or violence". She simply has to clarify whether she refers to Rajani during her brief UTHR-J years 1987-89 or whether it is a more general statement. If Shanie meant that "Rajani…never countenanced injustice, terror or violence", as a general statement, the latter certainly made a notable exception when she chose to join the Tigers even after the Tigers had in 1982, in an act that reeked of "injustice, terror and violence", murdered the political ideologue of the PLOT, Sundaram, arguably the most politically promising and progressive ideological mind of the Eelam movement! Doubtless this historical fact was among the many that Shanie was ignorant of.

Shanie borrows Dayapala’s de-contextualized recounting of my initial reaction to Rajani’s murder. She should read DBS Jeyaraj’s 20th anniversary piece on Rajani on his blog or Transcurrents (Sept 21), in which he confirms that "When Rajini was killed there was some confusion initially about who her killers were. Some university students staged a protest demonstration blaming Tamil armed groups functioning as lackeys of the Indian army. This was so because Rajini had very often clashed with the Indian officials on issues of human rights violations. Subsequently it became clear that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was responsible…" It is that initial impression which I had received from sources in Colombo which I communicated in good faith to Dayapala at the time.

To conclude on an amusing note, Shanie writes that "…has exposed Jayatilleka as a man for all seasons". She is blissfully unaware that "a man for all seasons" is one the highest compliments that one can be paid for the quality of consistent principle and integrity, and was the title of the movie celebrating Sir Thomas More in which Paul Schofield played the leading role. I have the sneaky feeling this was not the sense in which Shanie intended to use it. One wishes that a regular columnist in the English language media were not so illiterate as to use phrases, the meaning of which she is manifestly ignorant of—and that her pious pomposities were matched by genuine awareness and knowledge.