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“Hello, Revolutionary!” It was not without reason that Hardeep Singh Puri, then a first secretary in Colombo, greeted Sri Lankan journalist D.B.S. Jeyaraj thus during a media briefing at the Indian High Commission.

The year was 1988, when the Indian military had deployed in the island nation’s north and east and was getting bogged down in what would turn out to be a costly war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Jeyaraj was one of the journalists who frequented the Indian mission to get updates on the fighting during the “5 pm follies”.

The inadvertent tribute by Puri, now a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Cabinet, was one of the earliest recognitions that David Buell Sabapathy Jeyaraj would go very far in journalism – and he did.

Starting from the late 1970s, Jeyaraj chronicled with passion and honesty the Tamil nationalist struggle as it slowly embraced violence before becoming one of the world’s most powerful insurgencies that brought Sri Lanka almost to its knees.

His career began with the Virakesari Tamil daily before he switched to English journalism four years later. It was his command over both languages and his ability to raise and nurture umpteen sources that earned him a place no other journalist covering Sri Lanka could match.

Jeyaraj’s family was........

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