Political chicanery- An international plague!

[The third EYE – Political Perspective]

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Politicians are politicians and it matters little whether they are from Sri Lanka, England or India. They are all susceptible to that common trait of political opportunism and hence they could descend down to any depth to earn a few votes.

Recently we had UNP stalwarts cheering for the LTTE in London, may be for killing their leaders Premadasa, Athulathmudali and Gamini. And then we had the Indian intelligence discovering that the LTTE has passed death sentence on Karunanindi, a man who helped the movement grow in Tamil Nadu.

Now come the latest news and it is about the gentleman politics of David Miliband and the concerns he so stridently expressed about the plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. A leaked US Embassy cable by Tim Waite, a Foreign Office team leader on Sri Lanka, explained why the then Foreign Secretary was lavishing so much attention on the island’s plight. It said that “With UK elections on the horizon and many Tamils living in Labour constituencies with slim majorities, the government is paying particular attention to Sri Lanka, with Miliband recently remarking to Waite that he was spending 60 percent of his time at the moment on Sri Lanka.” Thus David Miliband has been concerned only about his own political future and that of the Labour Government and the Tamil issue in Sri Lanka has only been a fig leaf.

Democratic politics

When you view the larger picture of all these scenarios what is at issue is not the political future of the UNP, Karunanidi or David Miliband but rather the future of democratic politics itself; of lack of principles in democratic politics. Should politicians go to the extent of pandering a movement that bred the most ruthless terrorist outfit in the world because they consider such pandering would help them to be in power?

In the case of the UNP they know that they do not have a hope in hell of coming to power through elections in Sri Lanka so they have chosen to tarnish the country’s name abroad so that at least that way they could entertain some hopes of making the government unstable perpetrating its downfall. The irony however is that in the process they are justifying a bunch of criminals who dealt the worst blows to democracy in Sri Lanka by killing democratic leaders of all political parties including the racist Tamil parties. Every time a UNP parliamentarian crosses over to the Government the UNP institutes disciplinary action against those members.

But now their members have joined the LTTE betraying the country and the party leaders whom the LTTE killed, and still that act does not seem good enough to warrant disciplinary action. For the UNP it is treacherous to join the Government but it is alright to join the murderous LTTE.

National icon

In Tamil Nadu, you only have to peep in to a bookshop to notice the number of books, mostly in Tamil, written about Prabhakaran. Writing about Prabhakaran is good business in Tamil Nadu because he is a national icon there. But that is not because he did any good to the Tamils in Sri Lanka (in fact he has made it worse) or India but because the Tamil Nadu politicians patronized Prabhakaran whipping up tribal sentiments over the years to garner votes in their own constituencies. Now with the revelation that the Tiger remnants are planning to stage assassinations in Tamil Nadu, the belligerent and uncompromising nature of racialism should now dawn on Karunanidi. For David Miliband it is all a matter of numbers.

The Tamil expatriate community in Britain is said to be 300,000 strong and that is number worthy for Miliband to champion their cause. But had there been a bigger number of Sinhalese in Britain Miliband probably would have pursued a Sinhala cause instead of a Tamil cause.

Thus Miliband, like everybody else, is open for bribery and corruption. Bigger the vote bigger the cause! With all that the Labour lost the elections and that shows that the average British voter is more intelligent than Miliband expected them to be. They know that it is hypocritical to cry for a few thousand terrorists in Sri Lanka when the Labour Government has helped kill millions of civilians in Iraq. The chances are that the Labour may have lost a few votes because of their Tiger politics.

Hidden agendas

Come to think of it, it is on the piggy back of these forces that the Tigers prowled all these years. The UNP used ‘peace with the LTTE’ for its own political ends: Tamil Nadu patronized the LTTE to exploit tribal sentiments at election times and Britain has been white washing and patronizing Tamil violence because they could not betray their colonial legacy in former colony Ceylon. Thus all these politicians were driven by hidden agendas and they were all using the so-called ‘ethnic issue’ in Sri Lanka to justify their political indulgences.

The present position however is that the state of Sri Lanka is experiencing peace while these patrons of the LTTE are increasingly finding themselves in difficult situations. It appears that they are reaping what they saw.

Therefore the Government of Sri Lanka should stand firm at this crucial hour of the country. Karu Js, Karunanidis, Milibands can come and go and even political theories like ‘democracy’ can come and go but we should not give in to their tendentious demands and act in a way that endangers the state of Sri Lanka because Sri Lanka has to go on for ever. Let the UNP, Tamil Nadu and the British Labour seek out their own political future without using Sri Lanka as a launching pad for their political indulgences.

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