India's Sri Lanka policy - a projection

Is India going to be pushed, prodded or propelled, in its policy towards Sri Lanka, down the very path that it took in the 1980s?

Dayan JAYATILLEKA

STANCE: The All India Bar Association (AIBA) has joined the raucous voices emanating from Tamil Nadu, calling for a more vigorous and one-sided policy on the part of New Delhi towards Colombo.

While it goes against India's interest to be even handed between the LTTE, which perpetrated an act of foreign terrorism on its soil, and Sri Lanka, a friendly neighbour, voices such as that of the AIBA actually argue for a policy that is lopsided: against the Sri Lankan government, Armed Forces and the Sinhala majority; in favour of the Tamils and uncritical - even silent- towards the Tigers.

Slippery slope

These voices are redolent of those that propelled New Delhi's Sri Lanka policy in the 1980s. Before India pays heed to these voices and impulses, it should remind itself that the slippery slope of the '80s culminated in 1,200 Indian soldiers and one Indian political leader dead on Indian soil, precisely at the hands of those - or elements of that community which - New Delhi intervened on behalf of!

There are other factors that India needs to bear in mind. If India were to turn a Nelsonian eye to LTTE arms smuggling through Indian waters, it would expand the area of operations of the Sea Tigers and allow the LTTE to rebuild its infrastructure in Tamil Nadu; an infrastructure which over the medium and long term, would support militant or irredentist sentiment.

A policy of looking the other way or worse, extending covert support to the Tigers as in the 1980s, would only strength the LTTE and its performance, augmenting a destabilizing force which has hurt India once (and proved completely unmanageable). Such a policy would also act as an incentive for all other armed militants on the Indian subcontinent.

It would be as destabilising for the South Asian regional sub-system, as the support once extended to Islamic militancy by the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, has been for the world-system!

It Ain't the Eighties

Calls for Indian intervention on behalf of the Tamils - as distinct from support to its counterpart the democratic Sri Lankan state and Armed Forces, with devolution linked in - can swiftly degenerate into a quagmire for India.

In the 1980s, Sri Lanka was unable to resist Indian intervention because of a dual lack - political will and political legitimacy - on the part of the Government of the day.

The J.R. Jayewardene Government was lacking in legitimacy due to a succession of authoritarian actions, ranging from the disenfranchisement of its main democratic opponent Sirimavo Bandaranaike and the jailing of activists of the main democratic opposition the SLFP, the utterly unfair criminalisation of the JVP on the false charge of participating in Black July '83, and of course the infamous referendum of December '82, which froze in place an obsolete parliamentary majority instead of holding the General Elections scheduled for 1983. By 1987 J.R. Jayewardene had an armed insurgency in his rear.

None of those conditions obtain today; indeed the reverse is true. The administration has no crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of its citizens, i.e. it has internal legitimacy unlike the JRJ administration.

Secondly the Government has a nationalist, patriotic and anti-interventionist orientation, as evidenced most recently in President Rajapakse's significant recent statement that India need not intervene directly in Lanka's crisis.

This marks it out from the administration of 1987 which caved into Indian pressure and became India's junior partner (and in the eyes of some, proxy).

To illustrate my point, one must imagine what would have happened in 1987, i.e. the resistance that would have been mounted, had the government been led not by JRJ, but a more patriotic leader such as Premadasa, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Lalith Athulathmudali or Ranjan Wijeratne.

Though in any conventional contest the Sri Lankan Forces would have been crushed, this would not have been so in the event of an asymmetric strategy being adopted.

Given the personalities, social and political forces, and ideological make-up at play, it is difficult to assume that a Mahinda Rajapaksa administration would respond in less nationalist a manner.

Iraq in Waiting

Though some, foreign and local, may toy with conspiracies to replace Mahinda Rajapaksa with a puppet administration of Ranil Wickremesinghe or Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga or a combination thereof, the bulk of the Sinhala people would regard this as an illegitimate imposition, and with their support and sympathy, most of the Armed Forces, the JVP, the JHU and the more organic elements of the SLFP and UNP would engage in a protracted unconventional resistance to intervention and hegemony.

This would result in an Iraq scenario. Iraq, rather than glorious national liberation struggle as in Vietnam or WW2 Yugoslavia under Tito, will be the parallel, because this country will tragically respond, not as unified whole, but along the lines of existing or reactivated ethnic, linguistic, regional and religious, i.e. parochial lines as in Iraq, generating two types of struggles: one against the external hegemony and the other against ethnic or ethno religious rivals (often neighbours) perceived as allies of the intervening force. Thus, an anti-interventionist struggle and fratricidal civil wars: a Hobbesian scenario.

For any external intervenor, it will be a quagmire worse than Iraq. In Iraq, the US-UK bloc is at least supported by the majority of the country's people, the Shiites, because Saddam Hussein's regime while holding Iraq together as one country, was based upon a minority, the Sunnis. The anti-US insurgency is therefore limited to the Sunni triangle.

In Sri Lanka, the government and state rest on the majority community. Any intervention in support of Tamils, as urged by elements in India, is by definition, in support of a minority - itself led by or containing the unreliable, unmanageable LTTE. Such intervention will be opposed by the majority or at the least, a majority of the majority.

Demography does not permit neat borders to be drawn, Cyprus-like; and even if they are, those long borders will be porous.

No Exit

When the intervention comes from a neighbouring source which awakens deep seated and long term collective memories of hostility among a vast majority of citizens, and this hostility is reinforced by a schism in faiths - constituting a classic civilisational 'fault line' in Huntington's sense - then it is a nightmare for any intervening power.

If we endgame the scenario that is emerging with the present calls for intervention in support of Sri Lanka's Tamils, what emerges is a picture in which India risks her new found status and prospects by being embroiled in a messy domestic dispute of ancient provenance. It is an intervention from which there would be, as Sartre titled one of his plays, no exit.

India's only realistic option is to support Sri Lanka politically, diplomatically, economically and materially, and as the price tag, ensure the accelerated implementation of an adequate devolution package. All other options are fraught.