A NECESSARY TRIP - India should indicate that it values its ties with Sri Lanka

BY SWAPAN DASGUPTA

Popular interest in history and even contemporary politics is invariably enhanced by posing the vexed what-if question. To those terribly agitated over the Indian prime minister's participation in the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Colombo later this month, there is a counterfactual question that is worth posing. Had the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam succeeded in their bid to carve an independenteelam out of the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka, would its supremo, Velupillai Prabhakaran, have chosen to apply for membership of the Commonwealth?

How liberation movements conduct themselves after winning power depends on many imponderables. To that extent it is impossible to be certain about how a victorious LTTE would have conducted itself. However, one thing is certain: the philosophy, the methods and the overall orientation of the Tamil Tigers were always at odds with everything today’s Commonwealth stands for. The LTTE’s unwavering faith in a one-party State, its total intolerance of all dissent within the Tamil community, its targeted assassination of all those it considered its enemies and the ruthlessness with which it conducted its 20-year war against the Sri Lankan State set it apart from other similar movements in South Asia.

Regardless of the fact that a large number of LTTE supporters in the Tamil diaspora located in Europe, North America and Australasia were middle-class professionals and law-abiding citizens of their adopted countries, they bankrolled a vicious war machine that can only be compared with the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. This apparent contradiction needs to be explained, if not politically, then by using the tools of social psychology.

Yet, whatever complex explanations may be proffered to explain this bizarre schizophrenia, one thing is very clear: the LTTE could not have been defeated with the rules devised by the Marquess of Queensberry. A ruthless and fanatical army that showed scant concern for collateral civilian casualties needed an equally determined response.

That the final months of the war led to unspeakable brutalities and what are called ‘human rights abuses’ is well known. Some of these transgressions have been documented by both propagandists and well-meaning human rights bodies. But it would be a travesty to believe, as is often the case these days, that the departures from a gentlemanly conduct of war was the prerogative of the Sri Lankan army alone. No history of the civil war will be complete if it ignores the fact that the responsibility of the non-State player was far, far greater.

What is interesting is that the whole world was aware of the true nature of the LTTE and quietly encouraged the Sri Lankan government to finish the job as quickly and efficiently as possible. This included New Delhi which, in spite of calling for a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the problem, wanted an end to the LTTE problem once and for all. This was not because there is some residual support for Sinhala chauvinism in South Block. The government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa was given the diplomatic and military space to go for broke precisely because there was a deep understanding of the long-term threat the LTTE posed to both countries. India’s present-day ambivalence has its roots in domestic politics and not in the diplomatic and military assessment of the rebellion.

Those who have mounted a sustained campaign to force the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, to skip the CHOGM in Colombo beginning November 15 have targeted Rajapaksa. This is understandable. Apart from being perceived as the victor of the civil war and the man who re-united the island, the Sri Lankan president has come across as a man who is not amenable to pressure, both domestic and international. A leader with a firm grip on the public pulse, the president is keenly aware that the psychological scars of a long-standing ethnic divide can only be healed by a combination of peace and prosperity. His blunt style and his insufficient personal commitment to a devolution package that was thrust on Sri Lanka by Rajiv Gandhi in 1987 has made him an object of suspicion for those who feel he is instigating Sinhala chauvinism. But his critics forget that governing Sri Lanka democratically calls for a deft balancing act and, in particular, being mindful of the deep Sinhala distrust of weakness. Translated into an ethnic mould, it implies being forever vigilant that the yearning for Tamil autonomy does not descend into a revival of separatism.

Actually, India has little reason to complain about Rajapaksa’s balancing act. Immediately after the civil war ended, New Delhi’s thrust was on the revival of ‘normal’ politics in the Tamil-majority areas through the devolution of power. Fears were expressed that the president would ride the crest of Sinhala triumphalism and dilute the 13th amendment — which New Delhi views as an article of faith solely because it was negotiated by Rajiv Gandhi. It was well known that Rajapaksa personally favoured district councils over provincial councils. However, notwthstanding his personal preference, the president has stuck to the commitment he made to India.

Likewise, fears were expressed that the elections to the provincial council in the Tamil-dominated Northern Province would be put off indefinitely and that any election would be unfair. The September election which produced a conclusive majority for the Tamil National Alliance and the election of a well-respected former judge of the supreme court as chief minister has put an end to these fears. Rajapaksa, it is clear, has stuck to his side of the bargain.

Under the circumstances, it makes no diplomatic sense for India to succumb to the extremist pressure of the Tamil diaspora and the regional parties of Tamil Nadu. A multilateral CHOGM is not the occasion for grandstanding. Neither is it the appropriate forum to raise new issues centred on the internal governance of Sri Lanka. These must await a more relevant occasion, if indeed they have to be pressed. India would have been happy to attend a CHOGM at, say, Islamabad, in spite of the deterioration of bilateral relations with Pakistan. Why should it be different for Sri Lanka?

For a small country that has only just come out of an extremely damaging civil war, the CHOGM is an opportunity to showcase the return to normalcy. For Sri Lanka, India is the big neighbour and Sri Lankans, cutting across the ethnic divide, look to India as a benign presence in the region. Manmohan Singh may not be the flavour of the season within India but he represents India internationally and is the symbol of India. His ungrudging presence will be a major signal to Sri Lanka that New Delhi values its deep ties with the island.

Boycotting the meet would be churlish. Such a short-sighted move will not weaken Rajapaksa politically. Instead, it will be regarded as an affront whose impact will be felt long after Manmohan Singh retires to a Lutyens’ bungalow to pen his memoirs. And, as for the cabinet ministers from Tamil Nadu who are urging New Delhi to be reckless, their unsafe Lok Sabha seats will not be made safe by an impulsive boycott.

For long, Manmohan Singh has been berated for yielding to the line of least resistance. Although rather late in the day and bereft of any wider electoral significance, he can afford to take a stand and do the right thing by travelling to Colombo.

The Telegraph, November 8, 2013

Sri Lanka’s diaspora dilemma

By Swapan Dasgupta

Decision-making in any country, particularly a noisy democracy, is a complex and often infuriating process. Yet, which voices should matter most in moulding the collective destiny: those who feel for the country or those who live in it?

Ideally, both categories should be co-terminus and, by and large, they are. However, since the 1960s and particularly since technology and globalisation made the world a much smaller place, almost all the South Asian countries have been confronted with a new reality: the diaspora.

For the Government, India’s “overseas citizens” are no longer a “brain drain” but assets whose generous remittances help in managing the current account deficit. The country has demonstrated its gratitude and enshrined its links by offering exceptional privileges to PIO/OCI cardholders. If, at any point in the future, India is in a position to play a more active global role, the contribution of our Overseas Citizens will be immeasurable.

And yet there are occasions when we see our Overseas Citizens as a nuisance. Maybe the earlier sense of superiority that came with the suitcase of goodies to distribute to the poor, left-behind relatives has waned. But the condescension that comes with a sense of I-know-best-what-is-good-for-India often has many gnashing their teeth.

The social media has actually increased this gap between those who care for India and those who actually experience it on a daily basis. The most extreme and inflammatory messages on twitter, for example, can invariably be traced back to some Indian living in North America, doing a mid-level job who has very limited social interaction with colleagues and neighbours. He may be living in a well-appointed Hicksville suburb but mentally he has transported himself to India via the social media. It is a schizoid existence and invariably generates a perspective of India that is both frozen in time and distorted by the lack of everyday social interaction. Reading Indian newspapers on the net and watching Indian news channels on cable cannot ever compensate for the more rounded view provided by the drudgeries of daily existence.

However, a few crazy interventions on the social media don’t amount to much. Overall, India’s Overseas Citizens are a good, hardworking and supportive lot. India can be proud of them.

Cross the Palk Straits and a very different image of the diaspora emerges. Sri Lanka may be tiny speck on the map and better known these days for the slinging arm of Lasith Malinga and the classical elegance of the well-spoken Kumara Sanghakara. However, this tropical paradise has just emerged from a 30-year civil war that was unbelievably bloody and damaging. Merely reading about the “ethnic conflict” cannot convey the horror and the pain the country endured—and with a very stiff upper lip.

The origins of that war lie in a divisive, chauvinist politics that, thankfully, the country has now repudiated. There is a sense of optimism in Colombo and a great sense of relief in Jaffna that the war which probably left no family in the island unaffected is over.

Tragically, the quiet elation over a new dawn is being soured on a daily basis by a diaspora that wants its own version of Sri Lanka, crafted in Canada, UK and Norway. That may of the 8 lakh-strong Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora left the island under traumatic conditions is undeniable. They nursed that bitterness so strongly that they actually bankrolled the most brutal military machine since Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. It was this easy and unending supply of diaspora funds that gave the LTTE the luxury of never having to bother about public opinion inside Sri Lanka. The diaspora bankrolled murder.

Today, the LTTE has been militarily defeated but the diaspora funds are being used to keep the old Sinhalese-Tamil divide in politics and international relations. There is peace and growing prosperity in the Tamil areas, and only the political loose ends remain. This in itself is a challenge but the reconciliation process isn’t helped if the diaspora is determined that its unchanging historical memory and hateful vision for the future must set the tone for the country they left behind.

Imagine our reaction if India’s politics was sought to be remote-controlled from Southall and New Jersey.

Sunday Times of India, June 16, 2013 

SRI LANKAN DIASPORA POWERS TAMIL POLITICS

Last week, I sent a twitter message from Jaffna town which I was visiting after 25 years. “There are more sandbags and police pickets in south Delhi”, I observed, “than there are in Jaffna town.”

This terse message based entirely on my observation provoked howls of protest. Various individuals responded denouncing me as “anti-Tamil” and a stooge of Sri Lankan President Rajapaksha, the latest whipping boy of the morally indignant. It is entirely possible that a brief 24-hour visit to a town where it was once common to find gun-totting members of various para-military factions walking with a swagger, does not qualify me to pass judgment on the totality of the situation in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province.

Yet, it would be fair to say that the Jaffna I returned to was a very different place from the war-torn but sleepy town that existed in the late-1980s. What I encountered was a mid-sized town with good roads and lots of new buildings, bustling with activity. The Nallur temple looked as grand as ever and the Jaffna library whose burning in the 1990s had created so much tension was a picture of old-world serenity. The stadium named after Alfred Durriapah, whose murder was among the first of the LTTE’s ‘hits’ seemed well maintained and there is even an Indian Consulate in place in a carefully renovated bungalow. Yes, there were the occasional signs of the bitter war that had ended barely four years ago; but anyone who didn’t know that this town was once in the frontline of one of the most ugly civil wars of all times would never have guessed.

This is not to say that everything is hunky dory. At a gathering of members of Jaffna civil society, there were voices raised against the acquisition of “Tamil lands” by the Sri Lankan army in its security zone adjoining the airport. There were complaints about “Sinhala colonisation” of areas in the southern regions of the Northern Province. And in Colombo, MPs belonging to the Tamil National Alliance presented us (a five-member team invited by the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies) with a well-written account of Tamil grievances. Its leader, the 80-year-old Rajavardayam Sampanthan, who resembles a majestic Roman senator both in appearance and eloquence spoke about the Sri Lankan Government’s underlying desire to make the Tamil people “extinct” from the Northern and Eastern Provinces.

Yet, at a lunch hosted by businessmen of Indian origin in Colombo, I asked a Chettiar businessman how many Tamils there are in the capital city. “About 30 per cent of the city” he replied. “And do you control 60 per cent of the business?” I asked smilingly. “Only 60 per cent”, he retorted with a tinge of disappointment. “It’s more like 70 per cent” he said with a hearty laugh. Clearly, the noble Sampanthan’s theory of Tamils being an endangered breed in Sri Lanka doesn’t have too many takers south of the Elephant Pass.

The ‘Tamil problem’ that provides livelihood to the global human rights industry and provokes indignation in some circles in India seems essentially a Jaffna problem, and should be renamed as such. At the heart of the problem is the term devolution which was recommended to the Sri Lankan Government as a possible solution to the problem by the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) set up by President Rajapaksha in the aftermath of his famous military victory over the murderous LTTE.

For India, which still takes a needlessly gratuitous interest in the internal affairs of a sovereign neighbour, ‘devolution’ basically means implementation of the 13th amendment which formed a part of the embarrassment called the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord signed by Rajiv Gandhi and JR Jayawardene in 1987. This amendment promised two things: the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, the so-called Tamil homelands, and the formation of Provincial Councils, akin to India’s State Governments.

But two problems have arisen. First, the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces was set aside by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court on procedural grounds. Sampanthan calls it a “dishonest judgment” but the de-merger is now a reality. Secondly, it would seem that apart from the Northern and Eastern Provinces, the Sinhala areas aren’t terribly enthused by the idea of Provincial Councils. Yet, elections to the Provincial Councils have been held in all provinces barring the Northern Province. At one time it seemed that the Government was having second thoughts about holding Provincial Council elections in the Northern Province but President Rajapaksha has categorically announced that the democratic exercise will be undertaken in September. The TNA, which is certain to win the election, now says that the powers of the Provincial Councils are inadequate. It wants the local Government to control land and the police. The Government may concede the first point but there is no way it will relax its control over all aspects of security in the North.

Who can blame Colombo for its reluctance? It’s just four years since the LTTE was decimated and it’s just too early for the Central Government to let down its guard. It is not that there is a desire to militarise the province. The Sri Lankan Army is present in large numbers in the Northern Province but it operates well below the radar. Logistically, the army wants to insulate itself in the security zones, build strategically located cantonments and operate as a rapid response force just in case insurgency resurfaces.

Ideally, the TNA should have no problem with this arrangement because its members were also murderously targeted by the LTTE. Moreover, it has declared, perhaps under Indian pressure, that it is committed to the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka. It may still believe in emotional separatism but it has formally abjured political separatism and abandoned the erstwhile TULF’s call for ‘self-determination’.

At the same time, its actions suggest that it wants to keep tensions and the ethnic conflict alive. It doesn’t make sense until you realise that Tamil separatist politics derives its main impetus not from the ordinary people of Jaffna who are desperate for a breather but by the Tamil diaspora, the ones who bankroll the seemingly respectable, ‘moderate’ politicians. With a view of the island that is frozen in time, it is the diaspora that is proving to be the biggest impediment to Sri Lanka getting over its troubled history.

Sunday Pioneer, June 9, 2013

LANKAN TAMIL ISSUE SNOWBALLING OMINOUS

By Swapan Dasgupta

The silly blow-hot-blow-cold games involving the Congress and the Samajwadi Party have, perhaps naturally, agitated the political class and prompted endless speculation over the timing of the next general election. The political turbulence has affected the capital markets and given rise to fears that the sense of drift which has affected economic decision-making will make a mockery of Finance Minister P.Chidambaram’s attempts to talk up the economy and prevent a further loss of investor confidence.

The concerns are real but the Congress-SP spat pales into insignificance compared to the larger implications of the one-upmanship games that are beginning to plague Tamil Nadu. The past week has witnessed a deliberate attempt by both the AIADMK and DMK to up the ante over the Sri Lankan Tamil issue. The Tamil Nadu Assembly has passed a resolution pressing the Centre to harden its stand against Sri Lanka, view it as an unfriendly country and insist on a referendum in the Tamil-dominated provinces. A spate of orchestrated demonstrations throughout the state has led to Sri Lankan cricketers having to opt out of the IPL matches in Chennai; and the MDMK leader Vaiko has demanded the prosecution of Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner to India on charges of sedition for a purported email that suggests that the island nation has historical links not merely with the Tamils but with the people of Orissa and Bengal.

To view these developments as bouts of seasonal madness that affects different parts of India at the onset of summer is, of course, tempting. In a more serious vein, however, the developments in Tamil Nadu are more ominous and need to be viewed far more seriously.

For a start, there is a blurring of lines between human rights and political aspirations. I don’t think there is anyone in both Delhi and Colombo who can deny that the last phase of the civil war in 2009 was particularly grim and bloody. However, it is also conceded that excesses were committed by both sides, and not least by the LTTE which gambled on being able to extract a cease-fire by using Tamil civilians as human shields. The meddlesome human rights industry in the West may like to paint the civil war as a one-sided offensive by the state but those familiar with Sri Lanka know that the real forces of darkness were led by V.Prabhakaran.

Whether four years after the conflict, a so-called independent inquiry into human rights abuses will resolve anything is a matter of debate. If such an inquiry helps in the larger process of ethnic reconciliation it would be welcome. However, if it becomes an instrument for the surreptitious political rehabilitation of the fascist LTTE, it must be avoided.

In any case, the issue of “war crimes” is about the past. What is more relevant at the moment is the larger question of the political accommodation of the Tamil minority in the Constitutional structure of Sri Lanka. This is a problem that has dogged Sri Lanka since its Independence in 1948 and has been complicated by the somewhat irrational paranoia in the Sinhala community over a ‘federal’ Constitution. Equally, there has been a lot of intransigence on the part of the Jaffna Tamils—a privileged community during British rule—which has veered from provincial autonomy to secessionism. The Jaffna Tamils have pressed for the merger of the Northern and Eastern provinces as the ‘Tamil homeland’, something that it totally unacceptable to the Muslims and Sinhala people of the Eastern Province. Today, they are pressing for the full implementation of the 13^th amendment which gives the Northern and Eastern provinces exceptional autonomy, including control over education and land. Colombo’s hesitation is based on its reluctance to transfer full police control to the provincial governments.

The wariness is understandable since there is still insufficient confidence in the ability of the Tamil National Alliance to prevent the LTTE from regrouping. Four years is still too little a time to be absolutely certain that the one-party Eelam the LTTE espoused and even succeeded in translating into reality for some time, has been totally uprooted.

What is clear is that the debate over the 13^th amendment is an internal debate of Sri Lanka. It is of no business of either India or other members of the UN. Yes, New Delhi can privately encourage the Sri Lankan Government to hasten the confidence-building process. But ultimately it is for a democratic government in Colombo to grapple with the problems posed by differentiated citizenship.

The recent agitation in Tamil Nadu, bankrolled in many cases by those who earlier sponsored the LTTE, have a clear purpose: to transplant the remnants of a defeated secessionist movement in Sri Lanka into India. There is a calculated attempt to suggest that the rest of India doesn’t care about Tamil interests and that Tamil Nadu must chalk its independent foreign policy route, if possible with the Centre’s help and if necessary independent of New Delhi. Those who made Eeelam their life’s only mission now see opportunities to link Jaffna and Chennai in a common endeavour.

We are witnessing, for the first time since the Dravidian movement abandoned separatism after Independence, an attempt to sow the seeds of a new separatism that links Northern Sri Lanka, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the overseas Tamil diaspora. The threat can’t be left to acquire a menacing dimension. 

Sunday Pioneer, March 31, 2013

A Scapegoat for Political Games

By Swapan Dasgupta

Since issues and ‘causes’ are most often a fig leaf for other hard-nosed calculations, there is an understandable reluctance to take the formal pronouncements of political parties at their face value. This is particularly true of the Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu. Although the main Dravidian parties trace their political ancestry to the pre-Independence Justice Party and the anti-Brahmin social movement launched by E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, there is precious little in their present day actions to suggest that they are guided by lofty ideas. Having alternated control of the state government since 1967 and having become stakeholders at the Centre since 1996, Dravidian politics has conveyed an unmistakable impression of being guided by venality alone.

Given this backdrop, it is hard to completely discount the suggestion that the DMK’s dramatic withdrawal from the UPA last Tuesday morning—a move that has left the Congress completely at the mercy of two Uttar Pradesh-based parties who can barely tolerate the sight of each other—was guided by a touching concern for the plight of the Tamils of Sri Lanka. Had that indeed been the case, the DMK (which always had a soft corner for the separatist Eelam movement) would have exercised its clout to force India to join other Western countries in 2009 and press for a cease-fire across the Palk Straits. True, DMK chief M.Karunanidhi did go on a symbolic fast to highlight his concern over the military elimination of the dreaded LTTE. But it is an open secret that despite nominal appeals for restraint, New Delhi was not unhappy that the LTTE was roundly vanquished and its leader V.Prabhakaran eliminated.

Yes, there was some concern at the high civilian casualties during the final stages of the bitter civil war. At the same time, New Delhi, through its bitter experience of the IPKF misadventure, knew very well that LTTE showed scant respect for the Geneva Convention and other rules of military engagement. The use of civilians and particularly children as a human shield was a recurring feature of the LTTE’s military strategy. Indeed, the reason Prabhakaran’s last stand turned out to be such a bloody affair was precisely because the LTTE had gambled on the fear of collateral damage forcing the Sri Lankan army to stall. If Colombo refused to blink, it was due to a corresponding realisation that it was confronting one of the most brutal and fanatical armies ever raised. Those familiar with Ian Kershaw’s The End, a masterly study of the final five months of the war against Nazi Germany in 1945, will see parallels with what happened in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka four years ago.

Of course, the term ‘human rights’ hadn’t entered the vocabulary of international politics in 1945—a reason why the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and erstwhile Czechoslovakia has been erased from Europe’s collective memory. In any case, the application of human rights to a regime that organised the Holocaust would have been laughable.

Likewise, the invocation of human rights to a dispensation that combined brutality with unwavering fanaticism and which controlled the Tamil areas through efficient intimidation seems as out of place today as it would have in Germany 1945. There has been a brutalisation of Sri Lanka ever since the civil war began in 1983. But the hardening of the Sri Lankan military—which used to be a ceremonial force—is in direct proportion to the blood-thirstiness of the LTTE. The efficacy and wisdom of Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka may occasion legitimate debate. But there can be no debate over the fact that the LTTE personified evil.  

The irony is that the pundits in New Delhi and the political class in Tamil Nadu are fully aware of the real face of the LTTE and even the danger it posed to India. It is relevant to recall the LTTE’s calculated, cold-blooded murder of Rajiv Gandhi during the election campaign of 1991. It is also pertinent to refresh public memory of the Congress Party’s dissociation from the United Front Government of I.K. Gujral in 1998 after the Jain Commission reported the cosy relationship between the DMK and LTTE. True, the imperatives of coalition politics may have forced the Congress to enter into an alliance with Karunanidhi’s party after 2004. But domestic expediency is no reason to forget the past entirely, particularly the unhappy chapters relating to the manner in which Prabhakaran did a Bhindranwale on a cynical regime.

There are a lot of forces and individuals who were responsible for Sri Lanka’s nightmare years. The Bandaranaike family cannot escape responsibility for triggering the process of ethnic polarisation in 1956; other Sinhala politicians cannot disown their roles in the marginalisation of moderate Tamil politicians; and even the Buddhist clergy had a role in stoking a regressive majoritarian outlook. But among those responsible was also India. Would the LTTE have emerged as a force had it not been for New Delhi’s covert support?

Finance Minister P.Chidambaram has sought to send a “resolute” message to Colombo. Perhaps President M. Rajapakshe could do with some softening. But will New Delhi show the same resolve in attacking China for its treatment of its Tibetan minorities? Is Colombo being targeted because it is a small player? Are the principles of ‘constructive engagement’ determined by the electoral calculations of Tamil Nadu? Let’s not make Sri Lanka a scapegoat for the political games we play at home. 

Asian Age, March 22, 2013

A friendly neighbour's betrayal

By Swapan Dasgupta

From the late-1980s till the end of the long civil war in 2009, travelling to Colombo was both a joyous and deeply depressing experience. The happiness came from the warmth and generous hospitality of the Sri Lankans, particularly the residents of Colombo-7 who opened their doors to a Bengali. Legend has it that that Vijaya, the first king of the Sinhalese, came by sea from Bengal.

But this welcome was always tempered by sadness. Many of those with whom I had struck an instant rapport were dead—killed by an assassin’s bullet or a bomb explosion. Their faces still haunt me: Lalith Athulathmudali, one of the most erudite and clever politicians I have encountered; Ranjan Wijeratne, the fiercely outspoken ex-planter; the soft-spoken Tamil constitutional lawyer Neelam Tiruchelvam; and the genial TULF leader A. Amirthalingam whose blood-splattered residence I visited just an hour after he was gunned down. Although Lalith’s murder remains an enduring mystery, the others were all killed by the most vicious terrorist organisations ever created: the LTTE.

Those who haven’t experienced Sri Lanka of those days will never fully comprehend the colossal tragedy of an idyllic island being transformed into the killing fields. Nor will they gauge the horrifying extent to which the LTTE transformed large numbers of a hitherto docile, industrious and peaceable community of Tamils into carbon copies of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Under the one-party state envisaged by LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran, Tamils of the Northern and Eastern provinces had two choices: acquiescence or death. The LTTE didn’t merely kill prominent Sinhalas and Rajiv Gandhi: it eliminated almost every Tamil opposed to it and hounded the Tamil middle classes out of its barbaric Eelam and, indeed, out of Sri Lanka.

Life in South Asia is said to be cheap. The LTTE made it worthless in Sri Lanka. By the middle of the civil war, brutalisation had become the norm in the island that once symbolised serendipity. Tamils killed Tamils, Sinhalas killed Sinhalas, and they both killed each other with a staggering degree of recklessness. When the civil war erupted the Sri Lankan army was essentially a ceremonial force. By the time it dispensed with Prabhakaran’s Tigers in 2009, it had become a redoubtable fighting force.

Of course there was spectacular brutality in the last days of the civil war and civilian casualties were staggeringly high. But ask any IPKF veteran and you will know that the LTTE never distinguished between its fighters and ordinary women and children. Indeed, many of those women and children in civilian clothes turned out to be hardened LTTE fighters. The suicide bomber was the creation of the LTTE well before the Al Qaeda had become a global menace and so was the human shield behind which the Tigers operated.

This is not to justify the trigger-happiness of the Sri Lankan in the last days of the civil when a reported 40,000 civilians were killed. It is merely to indicate that there was a context to the viciousness of the war—as vicious as the last months of the war against Germany during World War II. The human rights lobby that secured the condemnation of Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Commission debate last Thursday cited civilised niceties and international law to pour scorn on a small country. They didn’t take into account that what happened in the summer of 2009 wasn’t military action against unarmed civilian demonstrators—as happened during the initial stages of the Syrian uprising—but an ugly war.

What is particularly galling is India’s effrontery in voting against Sri Lanka. If any country was secretly delighted and relieved that Colombo had finally put an end to the LTTE menace, it was India. India, after all, had nurtured the LTTE—one of Indira Gandhi’s most short-sighted and cynical moves—before realising that it had created a monster that was potentially capable of infecting Tamil Nadu with its poison. Yet, for the sake of his government’s survival, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meekly acquiesced in the condemnation of a country that had preserved itself against overwhelming odds.

India’s vote was a colossal betrayal of a country that is trying hard to forget the past and begin afresh. 



Sunday Times of India, March 25, 2012