Twenty years later, Tamil broadcaster Relangi Selvarajah’s killers still remain unknown

This story is published in collaboration with the Free Media Movement of Sri Lanka as part of a series around Black January, which commemorates crimes against Sri Lanka’s journalists. It has been translated from Tamil and edited.

RELANGI SELVARAJAH captivated audiences with her magnetic voice – first as an actor, and later as a broadcaster. Her father, the renowned theatre practitioner K K V Sellaya, encouraged her love of dance and passion for acting. In time, she won respect as a senior journalist with deep knowledge of politics, society and economics, becoming a radio announcer and television anchor. This prominence would prove to be her undoing. 

This August marked 20 years since Relangi Selvarajah’s death. However, no proper investigations have been conducted into her killing. It has simply been reported that she and her husband were shot dead by “unknown gunmen”, with the identity of their killers a matter of speculation. 

Coming from an artistic background, Relangi studied the classical dance form bharatanatyam from the age of five. She became an excellent dancer and later taught at the Meesalai Veerasingam Mahavidyalaya in Jaffna district, in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province. Relangi also acted in several stage plays produced by her father, which opened the door to her first film role. In 1978, she starred in the Sri Lankan-Tamil film Theivam Thantha Veedu, a love story between a dancer and a nadaswaram musician. She won the best actress award at the national film awards for her portrayal of the dancer, Kumudini.

A year later, Relangi joined the Jaffna-based radio station Manikkural as an announcer. In interviews reflecting on her career, she credited the veteran broadcaster S K Rajen from IBC Tamil Radio for bringing her into the field and encouraging her. 

She also mentioned that her favourite radio presenters were B H Abdul Hameed, known as the voice of Radio Ceylon and for his work as a television anchor on various Indian reality television shows, and Satsorupavathy Nathan, who was herself a beloved Tamil broadcaster on Radio Ceylon due to her fluency in English, Sinhala and Tamil. 

The accolades Relangi earned in dance and theatre paved the way for her to join the state-run Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, then the home of Radio Ceylon, as a radio announcer in 1987. She later went on to work at the government-owned television station Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation (SLRC), where she eventually rose to become the deputy director of the Tamil division. She also had a stint at the government-owned  Independent Television Network. 

In the 1990s, Rupavahini aired ‘People’s Voice’, a show that was widely discussed in Sri Lanka’s North. The show was sharply critical of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the violence the groups wrought in the north and east of the country. The programme was co-hosted by Nadarajah Atputharajah, a member of the Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP), a Tamil militant group that would later become a pro-government political party and paramilitary organisation. Nadarajah, or Atputhan as he was colloquially known, was also the editor of Thinamurasu, a Tamil weekly.