The brutal killing of Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front’s secretary-general K. Padmanabha, along with 14 others, in Chennai on June 19, 1990 had a lasting impact on the contemporary politics of Tamil Nadu. It also delivered a body blow to the EPRLF, most of whose leaders were wiped out in the attack in a busy colony at Kodambakkam.
The assassination led to a furore, and the then DMK government and Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi became the prime target of political attack. Then on, critics of the DMK, such as the AIADMK and the Congress, carried on a relentless campaign until they got the DMK government dismissed in January 1991 on the ground that Karunanidhi and his administration were “pusillanimous” in dealing with the security situation and were “not being able” to maintain law and order. The EPRLF, a key adversary of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), “has never been able to fill the vacuum” caused by the 1990 killings, says EPRLF’s former central committee member Sritharan Thirunavukkarasu, also known as Sugu. It went through different rounds of churning. These days, it is a political party that has a limited base in parts of the Northern Province — Jaffna and Vavuniya — in Sri Lanka.
