Indo-Lanka relations in a post war context:

Large scale development takes pride of place

Speech made by Indian Express Editor-In-Chief Shekhar Gupta at the inauguration ceremony of the courses in international relations held at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS) on September 18, 2010. Second part of this article was published yesterday

New Delhi is a complex place with many distractions along with people running the government and hence Sri Lanka is not always on their minds. They also get weighed down by Tamil Nadu politics. Tamil Nadu politics is central to India because it is a State that gives clear verdicts. India's coalition politics has shaped up in such a way that a ruling coalition cannot be set up unless the party that won the election in Tamil Nadu is part of that coalition. The Indian Parliament has 543 seats; the party that gets 272 can rule India. Since no single party can get that many seats, the main parties have to look to the nine states of India, where change is likely to take place.

Any party that wins five States will have at least 150 seats or more and can collaborate with the regional parties to form a coalition. One of the regional parties has to be either AIDMK or DMK because either of the two will inevitably win 30 or more seats, which is critical for a coalition; hence there cannot be any complications with Tamil Nadu. It is no wonder that when Sri Lanka was improving and increasing its connectivity by opening its markets across the Palk Straits, India was digging a deeper mote between the two countries.

Foreign policies

In our entire discourse with the United States, starting with Bill Clinton's visit to India, the constant metaphor has been de-hyphenating the relationship between America and India. The last 15 years though has seen a de-hyphenation of that relationship leading to the formation of two foreign policies for the two countries.

Previously, the US used to look at South Asia in the context of India and Pakistan; there was no separate foreign policy for the two countries to the extent that a visiting US dignitary from a President to a junior Assistant Secretary would inevitably visit both countries on one visit. It was known as the two country rule. India began a process of dismantling that policy. India can tell the US and its people that there is a relationship with America that is not entirely governed by whether India considers the US through the lens of being either pro-Pakistan or anti-Pakistan or whether Pakistan gets more arms or not.

The US also values the relationship with India irrespective of its relationship with Pakistan. The hyphen comes back whenever there is a terrorist attack or when a Pakistani politician lets off a salvo or an angry rally against India is staged in Pakistan. It is possible that there could have been a hyphen between India and Sri Lanka that made the relationship dependent entirely on the war in the North. Until the war was on, everything about Sri Lanka was viewed through the prism of the war, because the war meant Tamil interests and complications in the South of India. The war also changed a lot in India.

Political sympathy

The loss of Rajiv Gandhi's life, to die the way he did and where he died left a deep scar in the minds of Indians. In choosing to die the way he did and where he died, Rajiv Gandhi finished the separatist problem in Sri Lanka and ended the larger political sympathy for Sri Lankan Tamil separatism in India. Rajiv Gandhi was loved in South India as well and the people there witnessed the consequences of a violent movement, after all Rajiv was only in the Opposition. It influenced Tamil minds to such an extent that it changed their perspective on the LTTE and the conflict in Sri Lanka. It also stirred the conscience of the North Indian elite of New Delhi who realized that although distant, Sri Lanka was no longer far away and that callousness could see a similar tragedy revisit India. The extent of the danger of the rebel group was not comprehended when India lost hundreds in the IPKF in Sri Lanka as it was not close to home. India has to be grateful to Sri Lanka for setting up a memorial for the IPKF, which India is still to do owing to complicated politics surrounding IPKF operations in Sri Lanka.

Rajiv assassination

When I visited Sri Lanka in 1989 there were posters labelling the IPKF the 'Indian Peoples' Killing Force' and demanding its withdrawal. I remember meeting up with Lalith Athulathmudali at that time. He challenged me to corroborate the allegation that while the IPKF was fighting the enemy, that was the LTTE, then President Ranasinghe Premadasa's Army was providing weapons to the LTTE to be used against the IPKF and he had documentary evidence to prove that weapons supplied to the LTTE had been given by India to the Sri Lankan Army.

This was a vicious situation. The Sri Lankan Government's move to set up a memorial for Indian soldiers who died fighting is a big turning point and a commendable act, which is also an indication that the hyphen in the relations is coming apart. Events such as these require closure, otherwise it endures for generations.

I visited Sri Lanka again in 1991, just following Rajiv Gandhi's assassination to follow the investigation on the killing being conducted here. When I met Lalith during this visit, a great deal of things had changed for him. He advised me to leave Sri Lanka claiming that the same forces that killed several prominent people in Sri Lanka and killed Rajiv Gandhi and were targeting Gamini Dissanayake and him, were marking me.

He predicted that they would soon succeed in their intentions. He said that the same forces think that I knew too much that would help draw up a connection between them and the Rajiv Gandhi assassination and hence I would be their target very soon. Lalith had already had an attempt on his life that had transformed him into a wreck. I have known Lalith as a very proud man, who was used to violence as the Defence Minister. Once when I had a picture of him published with an article, he sent me a letter on his official letterhead stating that every time an article on Sri Lanka is published an unflattering picture of him was published which was not to his liking and sent a fresh set of pictures. He was vain to that extent. But when I met him in 1991 he had survived a bomb attack and was carrying shrapnel in his body. He was a broken man by then. I told Lalith that as a man who loved politics and enjoyed being the Defence Minister, it was strange for him to worry about such intimidation. But ultimately his foresight was right and the so-called forces he had named succeeded in ending his life.

The Rajiv Gandhi assassination started the process of closing the war in Sri Lanka. The perils of this kind of insurgency was known to the Tamils in India only with Rajiv's killing, without which even a tough leader like President Rajapaksa could not have succeeded in this war. It would have been impossible for India to have otherwise looked the other way as the war progressed here had not Rajiv Gandhi been assassinated, as the final phase of the war here coincided with elections in Tamil Nadu. The sequence of events over a decade helped the two governments to coordinate carefully to calibrate the war with the elections in Tamil Nadu.

Congress Party

The war is over now. The hyphen is gone, but it is intellectually challenging, as the paradigm on which the relationship between the two countries had been built for over 30 years is no more. I recollect asking Lakshman Jayakody the reason for so much antipathy for India in Sri Lanka during my first visit in 1985. His answer was that India was hostile towards Sri Lanka; that India was hostile towards Jayewardene and his government and the way he carried out his politics. Jayakody supported his claim by narrating a story that had taken place when J R Jayewardene was campaigning in the 1970s against Sirimavo Bandaranaike and her son Anura.

During the infamous emergency in India in the 1970s, the people had been deprived of their Civic liberties and elections were delayed. The symbol of the Congress Party at that time was the cow and the calf, which became a metaphor during election campaigning after the emergency, which was an allegory of Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, who were identified with the emergency. The symbol was subsequently changed. Jayewardene used the same analogy during his election campaign to draw parallels with then Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike and her son Anura, claiming that since India discarded the cow and the calf, it was time for Sri Lanka also to do the same. Jayakody said that when this was played out in the South block, Mrs Gandhi was not happy.

Mrs Gandhi had a rigid mind to be driven by such nuances and it is hard to believe she would have given into such a provocation. The point in recounting this story is to illustrate that even trivial incidents such as the one described above had defined the relationship between the two countries in the past. It prevented Sri Lanka from reaching out to India and beyond Tamil Nadu, which is no more with the end of the war. When the old paradigm is shattered, one is nevertheless challenged intellectually, especially policy makers, politicians, think tanks, diplomats and journalists to wake up from any intellectual indolence and as for India, it has a greater challenge in being concerned about the influence of a bigger country in Sri Lanka.

US officials

It is very tempting to be intellectually lazy, especially when the formulas, formulations, statements and the 3 x 5 cards as described by the Americans - which US officials were given during start talks in Geneva to fit their suit pockets with standard answers for the four most frequently asked questions at start talks and every official would have the same answer - are in place and when a policy remains in a paradigm for an extensive period of time, a great number of such 3 x 5 cards are used to play against issues.

The challenge before both Indian and Sri Lankan policy-makers is to move away from the conventional 3 x 5 cards. India has a greater challenge in being concerned about the influence of a country bigger than India and it is as if poetic justice that the discussion is held in an institution largely funded by that country and the responsibility is so much greater for Indian policy-makers.

We have to also challenge ourselves democratically. Being a representative of free media, there are a great number of underlying dangers in depriving the media of its freedoms and being swayed by the heady afterglow of victory. Many democracies have suffered because they have become distorted by the euphoria of victory, particularly if it is a victory against its own people. Following the 1971 war with Pakistan on Bangladesh, Mrs Gandhi sent back the Indian Army to its rightful status in a positive way. It is time that Sri Lanka got over the euphoria of winning an internal war as it was against its own people.

I would like to recount an experience with J N Dixit, the much reviled and controversial Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka in the 1980s. I must say that when I wrote the story on Sri Lanka he was displeased with me and during a visit to Sri Lanka he ranted and chided me. During my subsequent visit to Sri Lanka in 1987, which was prompted by a picture I saw in India of bodies of IPKF soldiers in Sri Lanka that hurt me deeply, as I had been away most of the time that year on a scholarship to the US, he had a completely different attitude.

The new High Commission building had come with two Indian frigates not far away. Dixit though was not very popular in Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan press would often irately describe him as the viceroy of Sri Lanka. On that visit Dixit told me that two years back everyone had been livid with me for exposing the presence of LTTE training camps on Indian soil. He said that two years later he knew I was nevertheless right. He went onto say that India did not know the capacity of the monster, until it unleashed itself on India and India will have to spend time, energy, money and invest some lives in dealing with it. Dixit said sometimes although warnings come early enough, they are ignored owing to complicated politics and the goings on in the capital cities of Colombo and Delhi. Concluded