Obama’s ‘Diwali’ visit to Delhi:
Implications for Lanka
Dr Dayan Jayatilleka
Except for the single piece by an Indian columnist (a former senior
civil servant), there is hardly any mention, leave alone assessment, in
the Sri Lankan newspapers, of a portentous event with (at least)
indirect implications for our country and which has been discussed in
publications and seminars from Washington to Delhi, Islamabad, Tokyo and
Djakarta. That is the Deepavali visit of President Barack Obama to India
followed by Indonesia and Japan.
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Barack
Obama |
The visit of the leader of the world’s sole superpower to the South
Asian region’s preponderant power, at a time when the two States are
strategic partners, is of great significance. It should be of cardinal
significance to a small State on the doorstep of the regionally
preponderant power. Closer ties - political, strategic, cultural,
economic and diplomatic - between the State with the most powerful Navy
plying the Indian Ocean (the US) and the Indian Ocean State with that
ocean region’s most powerful navy (India) should certainly be of first
order strategic significance to a small island State located within that
ocean.
Opinion makers
Sinhala and Tamil opinion makers got it very wrong once before. In
the Jayewardene-Athulathmudali era, the South thought that its relations
with the USA could offset the enormous strategic weight of our
inescapable neighbour India. We paid a terrible price for that
monumental and obvious miscalculation.
The Tamil opinion makers made the opposite error. They thought that
their leveraging of the Tamil Nadu factor and through it, Delhi, could
secure the Tamils of Sri Lanka a deal far beyond anything that
minorities of comparable size and proportion had obtained elsewhere.
They were partially and momentarily successful but that achievement
proved ephemeral. Both the Tamils and India suffered for that equally
monumental miscalculation. So the Sinhalese ideologues overestimate the
internal factor at the expense of the external, while the Tamils do the
opposite.
Of course, in their continuing dialogue of the deaf, each would argue
that we are no longer in the 1980s; things have changed. One side would
count on the Indo-US convergence, the other the rise of China.
One side would mention the Sri Lankan State’s monopoly of force
throughout its territory and the elimination of the Tamil insurgency and
the other would note that the liquidation of the Tigers also means that
there is no Tamil Army that will, for its own reasons, resist India and
ironically serve the South as a proxy or balancer.
Post-war Sri Lanka
It is not that the identification of these factors is wrong. It is
that those ideologues, Sinhala and Tamil, who bring them into the
debate, seem to overestimate their favourite factors and are unable to
understand their respective limits. Another round of ethnic conflict and
contention in whatever form, is not necessary, if only reason and good
sense can prevail.
Having commenced with a critique of the myopia of the South, one must
complement it with a tale of miscalculation in the North. In a recent
interview, the TNA’s respected leader Sampanthan states his perspective
on the resolution of the Tamil question today, in post-war Sri Lanka and
it is a perspective that, in its fundamental assumption, is lamentably
wrong. He says:
“...People must have the right to determine their destiny in the
territory in which they live, within the framework of a united,
undivided country. After the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement in 1987, the 13th
Amendment was the first Constitutional step. Thereafter, efforts have
been made over a period of 23 years to evolve a political solution that
will be acceptable to the people through the Mangala Munasinghe Select
Committee proposals during President Premadasa’s time, through the
Constitutional reforms that emerged between 1995 and 2000 during
President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s time, through the Oslo
declaration and the Tokyo communique during Prime Minister Ranil
Wickremesinghe’s time and through the APRC after President Rajapaksa
assumed office in 2005.
Indo-Lanka Accord
The President addressed the inaugural meeting of the APRC, the
experts’ committee report and the deliberations of the APRC. Much work
has been done. A fair amount of consensus has emerged from these
processes.”
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India
getting ready for Deepavali. File photo |
(Interview given to Arthur Wamanan, The Nation, October 31, 2010)
* Sampanthan does not tell us why the 13th Amendment was ‘the first
Constitutional step’. That is a position that was not reflected in the
Indo-Lanka Accord and the understandings of the time. Discussion on
future measures to fully implement either the Accord or the 13th
Amendment in no way envisaged another Constitutional step. The 13th
Amendment was never intended by Colombo to be a first step of a ladder!
* If Sampanthan were so positively disposed towards each of the
exercises he lists here, from the Mangala Munasinghe to the ‘95-2000’
CBK proposals and the 2003 Tokyo declaration, he and his party should
have welcomed and supported them at the time, which they did not.
* Sampanthan seems to live in a Wonderland in which the proposals he
listed were never accepted and implemented because of the prevailing
balance of forces and climate of opinion, but can be built upon or
considered ‘steps’ at a time which is politically, strategically and
ideologically far less conducive to their acceptance or even
consideration.
*He does not explain how he thinks a Constitutional enhancement in
the direction of internal self-determination will pass muster at an
islandwide referendum. Perhaps he knows it won’t but wishes to delineate
the ‘Tamil polity’ that will, as a future zone for the exercise of
external self-determination.
Sampanthan’s deus ex machina seems to be India. He fails to
comprehend the lessons of the Accord and of today’s Afghanistan.
External factors can force a solution but the internal factor is needed
to make it stick.
The Tamil leadership didn’t just miss the bus - it missed a whole
fleet of buses. Having done so, it must recognise that the external
balances can only prevent the rollback of prevailing Constitutional
arrangements with a bilateral backdrop, not unfurl a telescopic ladder
to self-determination of a minority, just as the Sinhalese establishment
and society must recognise the converse.
While Delhi supports self-determination in cases of foreign
aggression and territories internationally recognised as occupied, no
leadership in the global South is as allergic as is India’s to the
slightest notion ‘self determination’ of ‘peoples’ or territories within
the borders of existing states. This is with excellent and fairly
obvious reason.
If the Tamils’ right to self-determination is recognised or conceded
and exercised anywhere, it won’t be on the island of Sri Lanka.
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