Burning Lanka doesn't always work out well

By Swapan Dasgupta

Diplomacy, it has been said, essentially involves lying for your country. By that logic, there is likely to be widespread sympathy for the complete loss of face for India’s representative to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Just about a week ago, India’s envoy was busy engaging with the US and other countries on the draft of a resolution which, while paying token obeisance to Tamil victimhood, would not trigger a ferocious xenophobic reaction in the rest of Sri Lanka. The objective was laudable: to soften the blow on Colombo while accommodating some of India’s domestic concerns.

When he returned to Geneva for last Thursday’s crucial session, he was armed with a new brief: to impress upon the DMK and the global Tamil diaspora that India’s sympathies lay with those who have trying unceasingly to secure the partition of Sri Lanka.

It is fortunate that procedures prevented India from rehabilitating the LTTE before the international community. Yet, this cynical grandstanding, aimed exclusively at preventing Congress stalwarts from losing their Lok Sabha seats at the next election, made India a laughing stock in the region. The ire of Colombo will not be directed at the US which sponsored the resolution. Washington is too powerful and too remote for Sri Lanka to even attempt any meaningful retribution. The blow will fall on India which, ironically, was more than happy when the fanatical Tigers were militarily decimated in 2009. India’s economic and strategic interests in Sri Lanka will suffer and the beneficiary will be China. More to the point, India’s foreign policy will be perceived as wildly erratic and susceptible to sectional pressures, even of the disreputable variety.

It is mildly reassuring that this self-defeating misadventure in Geneva wasn’t accompanied by a resolution in Parliament pillorying Sri Lanka for “human rights abuses” and “genocide”. Mercifully there were enough MPs who prevented this needless bullying of a small country with which India has a deep civilizational relationship.

Nor are these links confined to the Jaffna Tamils and Tamil Nadu. The Sinhala people too look up to India as a pilgrimage centre for the land of the Buddha. And, to stretch the point further, the Sinhala people also trace their ancestry to Orissa and Bengal, the home of the legendary Vijaya who established the first Sinhala kingdom around 543 BC. Sri Lanka’s India connection is clearly not confined to Tamil Nadu.

And, if civilizational links determine diplomatic posturing, would the Government have dared contemplate a resolution attacking China for its assault on Tibetan identity? Why did Parliament contemptuously repudiate the Pakistan National Assembly’s gratuitous resolution on Afzal Guru? Consistency may be the virtue of small minds but wildly erratic conduct doesn’t behove a country that has pretensions of emerging as a global player.

There are times when it is politically rewarding to rise above sectional pressures and do what is in the larger national interest. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did precisely that in 2008 when he called the Left’s bluff over the Indo-US nuclear agreement. It was his resolute stand for a larger purpose that gained the UPA considerable goodwill and was a factor in its re-election in 2009.

That the UPA leadership chose to unsuccessfully placate the DMK which used the Sri Lankan Tamil issue as a ruse to sever an alliance that had otherwise become a liability is revealing. It suggests that there already weak central command structure of the Government has become almost non-existent. The Government gives the appearance of being a replica of the later-Moghul Empire where a nominal badshah in Delhi lacked authority and was buffeted by different regional pressures—a situation deftly exploited by the East India Company.  This incoherence has, quite predictably, affected India’s foreign policy—a field that is the sole responsibility of the Centre. Our think-tanks can pontificate endlessly over a foreign policy ‘doctrine’ and dissect the nuances and calibrations but the reality is cruel. India has lost its capacity to be a meaningful global player. Today, national security merely implies a game of transfers and postings.

Elections may be a year away but more than ever India needs a government with a mandate. And, if possible, a Prime Minister with clout.

Sunday Times of India, March 24, 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