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On my watch

Lucien Rajakarunanayake

India’s own confrontation with terror

“Terrorism continues to rear its ugly head in our region. It remains the single biggest threat to our stability and to our progress. We cannot afford to lose the battle against the ideologies of hatred, fanaticism and against all those who seek to destroy our social fabric....

“Terrorists and extremists know no borders. The recent attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul and the serial blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad in the last few days are gruesome reminders of the barbarity that still finds a place here in South Asia. We must act jointly and with determination to fight this scourge. We must defend the values of pluralism, peaceful coexistence and the rule of law”. Those are the words of Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh addressing the 15th SAARC Summit in Colombo on August 3, this year.


Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi

There have been more terrorist bombings in India since then, and there is a strong body of opinion in the country that the Indian Government must take even tougher measures than at present to stem the tide of terrorism that seems threatening to overwhelm democratic and secular politics. No doubt Dr. Manmohan Singh remains convinced of the need to be firm and determined to defeat the forces of terror. It is this determination of the Prime Minister and the Union Government that appears to be making the forces in Tamil Nadu that support the terrorism of the LTTE, to bring pressure on New Delhi to change its position on defeating terrorism in Sri Lanka, and by association in India and the rest of South Asia, too.

The sudden pleas on behalf of the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, who one is told are facing genocide and a host of other perils at the hands of a ruthless Sinhala military are heard only when the LTTE, which makes a palpably false claim to be the sole representative of the Tamils of Sri Lanka (and when it pleases Prabhakaran, even the Tamils of South India and Fiji, too) is facing a strong challenge to its military power.

Today, the situation has changed to that when even the former commanding officers of the IPKF agree that it is not a situation of the LTTE facing a tough adversary in the Sri Lankan Armed Forces, but is in fact facing inevitable defeat. Therefore, those who are ready to appease the forces of terror on both sides of the Palk Strait, see the need for pressure on New Delhi.

The politicians of Tamil Nadu, whether from Karunanidhi’s DMK, parts of the Left Front, and a few other rump organisations that have little following even regionally, are suddenly emerging as the saviours of the Tamils of Sri Lanka, as they see the opportunity for new heroism in Tamil Nadu with a general election due very soon.

It is desperation in the face of the new challenge of elections, at a time when the Indian voters could well opt for major change that may see all or most of its old or ageing political faces being pushed aside, that prompts these parties and politicians to suddenly take up the cause of the Sri Lankan Tamils; and seek to embarrass New Delhi into precipitate action that works more against India’s own interests in the continuing battle being waged against terror.

Mix of extremism

Being the world’s largest democracy, India is bound to have the widest range of political opinion, which swings from one extreme to another. Yet, as each general election has come and gone one sees the hold of the middle grow stronger.

In the midst of a palette of extremists of many aims and hues, the middle ground has held, as one can see happening in that other large democracy - the USA - where the forces of the extreme right are having short shrift despite what some believed was the attraction of a Sarah Palin, and an ageing war veteran who does not blush at stoking the fires of racism and hatred, but is being rejected for that very reason.

There is little doubt that New Delhi will feel the pressure from Tamil Nadu. It must certainly be feeling the pressure from other extremist and obscurantist forces that seem hell bent in dragging India into an age of intolerance.

Yet, New Delhi did face up to much stronger pressure when the Left Front threatened, and finally withdrew its support from the Congress-led Alliance over the nuclear deal with the USA. Dr. Manmohan Singh was able to withstand that pressure, making what at one time seemed a dead-deal very much part of modern reality in India.

Similarly, it was only last week that New Delhi confronted the forces of religious extremism, especially in the South, when it informed the Supreme Court that the Ram Sethu, or Rama’s Bridge has nothing to do with the Hindu religion, and signaled the Government’s decision to go ahead with the Sethusamudram Project.

It was a major step in support of the secularism that underlines the Indian Constitution, and gave a significant blow to the forces of religious extremism, that can pose considerable threats to New Delhi.

All this give cause for more than mere hope that New Delhi also stands firmly in support of its own policy on Sri Lanka and LTTE terror that it has consistently followed for the past several years, especially after the LTTE’s assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.

It has been a policy of not being in any way supportive of the LTTE, on the question of Sri Lanka’s sovereignty and territorial integrity; and also its support of Sri Lanka in the common battle that is being waged against terror by both countries.

It is a situation where New Delhi has continued to regard the LTTE as a terrorist organisation that deserved to be banned by the Indian Government, and where its two leading members, Velupillai Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman, are wanted by the Indian courts for their role in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. What the agents of extremist Tamilian pressure in Tamil Nadu, led by Chief Minister Karunanidhi are seeking, is to make New Delhi do a complete volte-face of its studied position on the situation in Sri Lanka, only to please the electoral dreams and racist ambitions of increasingly opportunist politicians.

What genocide?

Genocide is a handy word in the lexicon of those in the NGOs and INGOs eager to destroy the image of a country, with no relevance to the actualities taking place there.

We have seen it being used very liberally against countries or societies that are not the most favoured by the Western powers; while there is a conspiracy of silence over such allegations when they seem more warranted in countries and societies that carry out policies satisfying to the resource and influence hungry West.

Yet Karunanidhi & Co have also accused Sri Lanka of practising genocide against the Tamil people, in the attempt to pressure New Delhi to tango to their tune in support of the LTTE.

As these unquestioned agents of the LTTE and its forces of terror, who have been silent all these years about the brutality suffered by the Tamil people including their children, at the hands of the LTTE, are now trying to come forward as their defenders take delight in bandying “genocide” against Sri Lanka, it is relevant to quote a more knowledgeable person on the subject.

This is what former Indian Law Minister Subramanian Swamy said on the allegation of genocide in an article in the New Indian Express last Wednesday (Oct 15): “Recently there have been hectic efforts to get the Government of India to pressure the Sri Lankan Government to end the “genocide” of Tamils and to enter into negotiation with the LTTE. Is there genocide going on in Sri Lanka? No, if one goes by the United Nations definition of genocide.

The 1948 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide signed by 135 countries including India and Sri Lanka has elaborately defined the term “genocide”.

“By this definition that is available to any literate person by just going to the Google, we can say there is no genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

“There are a large number of Sri Lankan Tamils who say that there is no genocide in their country, including well-known persons such as Anandasangaree of TULF, SC Chandrahasan of Ofer, Devananda presently a Minister and Karuna an MP. May be the pro- LTTE parties in India have a new definition of genocide, which is that if the Sri Lanka Army kills then it is genocide, but if the LTTE kills then that is part of a freedom struggle. The truth is that the internationally banned terrorist organisation, the LTTE, is losing in the battlefield, and it is only a matter of time before its headquarters in the jungles of Jaffna is overrun.”

Tamil Nadu apologists

It is obvious that the Tamil Nadu apologists for the LTTE are now confusing suicide with genocide. What is seen in the continued refusal of the LTTE to accept the reality of impending military defeat is its propensity to suicide. If there is even a trace of genocide or something even akin to it, it is the danger that the LTTE puts the Tamil people into by forcing them to be in the areas of military confrontation, for the purpose of using them as human shields, and also giving a false slogan to its supports in Tamil Nadu to use in pressuring New Delhi to change its policy on terrorism.

Subramanian Swamy poses the question whether India should intervene to prevent the inevitable decimation of the LTTE? He sees this as the question of importance for India, and that now is the moment of truth for clarity and transparency.

As he explains it: “There is confusion now in our approach to Sri Lanka because of a hidden compulsion of the UPA government.

The confusion is manifested in the following contradiction: On the one hand, the Indian government has banned LTTE as a terrorist organisation because of its murderous activities, including the killing of Rajiv Gandhi; on the other hand, despite the continuing assassinations by the LTTE of pro-Indian Sri Lankan politicians and its open interference within India by financing pro-LTTE politicians and training other terrorist organisations, the Indian government pontificates that the “peace dialogue” of the Sri Lankan government with the LTTE must take place. This has in effect ended up legitimising the terrorist outfit and thus making the ban meaningless.

“We have to remove the fault line in our policy towards the LTTE, and secure our geographical neighbourhood.

We have to regard the LTTE a part of the problem and not part of any solution of the crisis because of that outfit’s links with India’s terrorists such as PWG, Naxalites and ULFA, and with ISI of Pakistan and even al-Qaeda as well as with de facto separatist Indian political parties such as the DMK, PMK, Dalit Panthers and not to mention 38 paramilitary connected terrorists outfits roaming the forest areas of Tamil Nadu.”

The voices that are heard in India over the Sri Lankan policy of seeking to eliminate terrorism from our midst, and hopefully also across the Palk Strait, are certainly not confined to the raucous led by Karunanidhi today.

There are many sober voices that command attention among Indians, as a countervailing force to the voices of extremists that we now hear calling for unmitigated support for the LTTE. One more such voice of sanity that certainly gives more importance to India’s own interests in the current situation is that of Malini Parthasarathy, the Executive Editor of The Hindu, who said thus in an article on “The dangers of Tamil chauvinism” published on October 14.

“Time appears to have stood still for most Tamil Nadu’s politicians who seem completely insulated from the complex ground realities that mark India’s new political landscape.

India’s political establishment and civil society are anxiously grappling with the enormity of the horrific new threat to Indian society - terrorism - fast becoming an everyday reality on the streets. But oddly enough, seemingly oblivious of the contradiction, political parties in Tamil Nadu, led by the MDMK and the PMK, have recently plunged into high-pitched activity aimed at garnering support for the LTTE, a deadly terrorist organisation.

Dead giveaway

“These parties have launched a campaign in the State ostensibly to express solidarity with the Sri Lankan Tamils trapped in the war zone in northern Sri Lanka but the timing of this campaign which appears to have materialised overnight, is a dead giveaway.

The Sri Lankan Army, just two kilometres away from the LTTE’s administrative capital, Kilinochchi, has successfully encircled the Tigers and their leader who are virtually trapped in their bunkers.

For the first time in years, the Sri Lankan Government appears to be on the brink of a major success in its battle with terrorism. There is now the very real prospect of the capture of the elusive LTTE chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran, who is behind the assassination of a former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi.

“Tamil Nadu’s politicians clearly have different standards for India and for Sri Lanka.

It would appear that they accept that battling terrorism in India and saving Kashmir from Islamist Jihadis are important national tasks but not so in Sri Lanka which has been menaced for more than two decades by the LTTE.

It was the LTTE which pioneered terrorism in South Asia and produced two generations of suicide bombers who have claimed numerous high-profile victims.

For far too long have the legitimate aspirations of the Sri Lankan Tamils been held hostage to the hegemonic ambitions of the LTTE chief Prabhakaran who has consistently sabotaged all attempts to find political solutions to the ethnic conflict.”

Malini Parathasarthy adds: “There is a strong sense of deja vu, listening to the rhetoric and speeches of leaders in Tamil Nadu, whose understanding of the Sri Lankan political situation is mired in a time-warp, their images of the ethnic conflict drawing primarily from scenes of two decades ago, particularly the flashpoint of 1983, when the Welikada prison massacre highlighted dramatically the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamil community and brought thousands of refugees to Indian shores. But after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian national psyche recoiled from a continued engagement with the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis.

“Since the 1990s, New Delhi’s policy has been to acknowledge the terrorist character of the LTTE and the imperative of a military confrontation with that organisation, while continuing to offer moral encouragement to Colombo to find a political solution that would provide a framework to empower the Tamil community.

Meanwhile, India made clear its utter repugnance for the LTTE by banning it not just because it was involved in the murder of Rajiv Gandhi but because it viewed the LTTE as a terrorist movement that would continuously strive to stimulate the secessionist sentiment in Tamil Nadu as long as Sri Lanka continued to have ethnic strife.

“The situation in Sri Lanka itself has undergone profound changes since the 1980s, when it was easier to conceptualise purely political solutions and rule out military responses to the violent dimensions of the conflict.

“At that point in time, it was indeed possible to sideline the militant groups of Sri Lankan Tamil politics by engaging the political interlocutors in the Tamil community such as the urbane leaders of the TULF, notably Appapillai Amirthalingam, who recognised the key to political empowerment lay in the democratic process.

But with the ruthless elimination of every credible interlocutor in the Tamil community by the LTTE which insisted that it was the sole representative of the Sri Lankan Tamils, the space for a political solution has narrowed over the years, rendering null and void the several exercises seeking devolution of power to the Tamil community.”

The forces of extremism and obscurantist racism that are hitting the headlines in Tami Nadu today, are clearly not the only voices heard on the Sri Lankan situation. As much as they are in a time-warp on the Sri Lankan situation, there are political groups here too trapped in a similar time-warp about the intentions and interests of India in the current context.

There is the need for better understanding today that the Forces of terror are as bad or even worse a threat to India than it is to Sri Lanka.

What is needed is to see a genuine confrontation of thought in India on the issue of terrorism and the continuity of its policy against terrorism, whatever be the source or origin, as enunciated so well by Dr. Manmohan Singh at the recent SAARC Summit in Colombo.

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