Indo-Lanka relations on a successful plane

Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh appears determined to use the opportunity created by the Tigers’ demise to fully normalize relations with its southern neighbour and to embrace the regime, states the Wall Street Journal on President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s visit to India this week.

Singh, it said, had conveyed to Rajapaksa that the end of the rebellion plus elections earlier this year, which voted the Sri Lankan President back into office provided a historic opportunity for the country’s leaders to address all outstanding issues in a spirit of reconciliation.

No doubt this [new strengthening of India-Sri Lanka relations] will be anathema to some in Tamil Nadu whose sympathies lie with the defeated Tigers. But K. Santhanam, former director-general of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, says this marks a new era in relations between the two countries after their turbulent recent history.

He notes that sympathy in India for the LTTE plummeted after a Tamil activist assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on the campaign trail in 1991 and that the new initiatives between the two countries will be taken by most in India as another major step on the path of normalization. It is an idea for which the time has come, he said, the Wall Street Journal reported on June 10.

This success will also not please the pro-LTTE groups in Tamil Nadu that were hyper-active to cause major disruption to last week’s IIFA Awards in Colombo. They had some success in taking some of the shine off the IIFA event.

The Brand Ambassador of IIFA Amitabh Bachchan himself kept away from the event, and many other big names of Bollywood stardom also showed greater interest in the box-office success of their own films in India.

There was also much cold feet on show, at the threats of LTTE revenge on those who participated. This situation on the IIFA Awards was helped no little by the lukewarm attitude of the IIFA organizers in Sri Lanka on effectively countering the strategy of the pro-LTTE lobby in Tamil Nadu, where they did not even think it necessary or useful to have a good understanding with the Indian journalists residing in Sri Lanka, and also sought little help from our Deputy High Commission in Chennai for the work at hand. Yet, IIFA has come and gone, and the wider message that Sri Lanka is now open for business has now been made.

While this is a success worthy of record, it is necessary to consider how developments such as those that targeted the IIFA Awards could be prevented for future events of importance, and also assess the roles of those who made such a situation possible.

The CEPA bogey

If there was satisfaction in some quarters about IIFA being less of a starlit event than promised, there was hectic activity by them in seeking to whip up opposition to the proposed Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with India, which has been in the pipeline for a very long time. With President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s first State visit to India after his resounding victories in the Presidential and Parliamentary Elections, there were clear attempts to build up anti-Indian feeling over CEPA, and make it a stumbling block in the development of better relations with Sri Lanka.

Its popularity clearly in the dumps, with the Fonseka factor not giving them any purchase to move upwards in public ratings, there were clear signs that the JVP was going back to its original anti-Indian strategies.

Although later it did vote in Parliament to give citizenship to all plantation workers of Indian origin, the JVP’s policy and rhetoric over CEPA has showed that when necessary it was ready to embrace racism for political gain.

In its present situation of defeat, the JVP was eager to move into the Sinhala mainstream that is being led towards reconciliation by President Rajapaksa, through a virulent anti-Indian campaign that seeks to win over the influential business sections of the Sinhalese. Sections of the media gave full vent to their anti-Government feelings, using the veil of opposition to the alleged dangers of CEPA in their strategy to chip away at the President’s and Government’s popularity.

The media onslaught on CEPA was made easy by the voices of a few professionals, some chambers of commerce and industry and some corporate leaders who were ready to join the bandwagon of protest and talk of the extreme dangers that CEPA, which no one had read in its total draft, posed to the nation. The threats to Sri Lankan employment was so exaggerated as to say that with CEPA in place we would even start getting Indian barbers swamping the hairdressing business in the country. It was the stuff of Goebbelsian falsehood used to maximum effect, by those engaged in the politics of desperation.

Great impact

Significantly, CEPA did not feature in the talks between President Rajapaksa and the Indian leaders, in what turned out to be a memorable visit of outstanding success. There were seven agreements signed and the Joint Declaration had wide ranging agreement on matters from Constitutional Reform to Peace and Reconciliation, IDPs and Resettlement, to economic partnership, joint ventures in the power sector, the expansion of Sri Lankan Railways, resumed ferry services between Sri Lanka and India, extending to partnership in archaeological work, oil and gas exploration, and space technology and communications.

Among the many agreements reached, the most timely and of great impact is the Indian assistance to built 50,000 houses for the IDPs, who were the victims of the LTTE’s violence and displaced as they were forced by the LTTE leadership to move from place to place, before the final rout of the terrorists in May last year. If New Delhi showed its interest in maintaining the strongest ties with Sri Lanka, by arresting the pro-LTTE demonstrators such as Vaiko in Tamil Nadu protesting the visit of President Rajapaksa, the Indian leaders made an even stronger expression of support and friendship towards Sri Lanka, and the Rajapaksa administration, with his assistance for housing for the IDPs. It must be noted that at the discussion the TNA and EPDP had with President Rajapaksa on the eve of his visit to India, one of the key issues raised by both Tamil leaders was that of housing for the IDPs. Although the TNA leader R. Sampanthan, made several conciliatory gestures towards the President at this meeting, this was not seen in his statements to the media the very next day, and in his statement in Parliament that centred on the housing problems of the IDPs, and sought to make much political capital from it.

The agreement to provide speedy housing to 50,000 families of those displaced by terror, in both the North and East, which adds up to shelter for 250,000 people, would go a long way in easing the problems of these unfortunate victims of terror, and also help blunt a good deal of the ill-informed or deliberately misleading criticism of Sri Lanka over its treatment of the IDPs.

The Basil factor

If the TNA makes much of it criticism in public of the Government’s handling of the IDP situation, it was not so when its delegation led by Sampanthan met President Rajapaksa last Monday. The TNA leader’s response to the President’s call to place trust in him to solve the problems of all communities, was the endorsement of such trust by the TNA.

On the issue of a political settlement, when the President emphasized that he would not bow down to terror, and would not give what the terrorists wanted, Sampanthan, leading a 13-member TNA delegation, was quick to respond that the TNA is not demanding the same solution as Prabhakaran did, and asserting that the party was firmly against separation of the country. One hopes the TNA’s new offer of participation with the Government on resolving issues affecting the Tamil people, is not another Jekyll and Hyde exercise in a new strategy of deception.

Of course much of the sting in the criticism of the IDP situation raised by the TNA was blunted by the answers that Minister Basil Rajapaksa had at the ready. It is interesting to see a minister have such answers at one’s finger tips as it were, where he was ready to explain any delays and rebuff with facts and figures criticism that was not based on fact. Such method not only in countering opposition but also in taking one’s own case to the people and one’s critics is worth of emulation by others engaged at key levels of Governance. The Basil Factor, as one sees it, will certainly play an important role in enhancing the credibility of the Government on a wide range of issues.