International Crisis Group’s Executive Summary:
Come on - get real
Bi-polar world a thing in the past:
Get rid of tooting - shooting cowboy mentality:
Prof Rajiva WIJESINHA MP
The executive summary of the latest effusion from the International
Crisis Group makes interesting reading. It is supposed to be about
‘India and Sri Lanka after the LTTE’, but is rather a clarion call to
India to become a tool of the international manoeuvring in which the ICG
engages.
Prof Rajiva Wijesinha |
The essential Western bias of the ICG is apparent in its failure to
understand the basic principles which govern India’s relationships with
its neighbours. First and foremost India does not want its neighbours to
be used by other countries as a tool against India. Second, India has
now established itself as the leading country in South Asia and, while
it obviously will work together with all countries that do not try to
weaken it, it will not become a catspaw of those countries and those
interests that succeeded for so long in depriving it of its legitimate
place on the world stage. Thirdly - and this is I think the most
important legacy of the long, principled struggle it engaged in to gain
independence - it values democracy and diversity.
The first recommendation of the ICG is that ‘India needs to work more
closely with the United States, the European Union and Japan’.
I make no criticism of Japan, given that in the salient period it did
not really have an independent foreign policy, and I understand too that
the European Union did not have a monolithic foreign policy at that
stage, and the attitude of individual countries was not always
unfavourable. But India is not likely to forget the concerted efforts of
the West to keep it under control in the past, beginning with the
cynical determination to ensure partition.
It is ironic that this was due, according to British papers at the
time, to distrust of Hindu Socialists, whereas Muslims could be depended
on to support Western interests loyally.
The demonization of Pakistan now is yet another example of chickens
coming home to roost, when cynical use of religion to achieve political
ends - as with the Taliban in Afghanistan - leads to disastrous
consequences, since obviously for many people religion will be an end in
itself rather than the handmaiden of international politicking. But it
is precisely because India has suffered from this type of power play
that it will never put all its eggs into one basket.
While obviously it wants a stable - and unified - Sri Lanka, and
while it will not want Sri Lanka to tilt in any other direction, and
while it will necessarily have to ensure that internal difficulties do
not spill over to its own shores, it will not blindly follow other
dictates.
It saw what happened to both Pakistan and Sri Lanka when they took
that path during the Cold War.
The ICG blithely refers to India’s ‘history of counter-productive
interventions in Sri Lanka’ without recording that its ‘misguided policy
of arming Tamil militants in 1980s’ was largely because of worries about
President Jayewardene’s efforts not just to ally himself, but indeed to
sell the country, to interests implacably opposed in those days to
India.
The annexures to the Indo-Lankan Accord, which provide safeguards to
India against foreign broadcasts and the giving out of Trincomalee to
other countries makes clear its primary concerns.
It is true that India suffered as a result, in that as the ICG baldly
puts it, ‘the LTTE fought them to a standstill and later took revenge by
assassinating former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.’ But
this was because, once it had got Sri Lanka to acknowledge that it
should not be a tool of the West in international power politics, India
stood firmly by the obligations it had incurred.
It did so for two difficult decades, and even someone excessively
critical of Indian action in the eighties, Prof Rohan Guneratne,
declares emphatically that ‘Sri Lanka must remain grateful to India’ for
what he terms its ‘non role in the final phase’.
I would go much further, and say that Indian support, based on a
principled approach to terrorism as well as its own interests, ensured
that our struggle was successful.
That is why we too must have a similar sense of obligation and
ensure, also because it is in our own interests, that we work towards a
just settlement, which includes not just ‘economic opportunities as well
as social rights’ to use the odious David Miliband’s phrase, but also
political equity, security and dignity.
We must also make it clear that we will never engage in the
adventurism of the eighties and attempt to play India off against other
countries. China has made it clear that, while it welcomes good
relations with Sri Lanka, it will not be a party to that sort of game.
We must be grateful to China for making that position clear, unlike
the West in the eighties, which seemed to lead President Jayewardene on,
as happened with regard to Pakistan earlier on, and then let him down
with a bang when India intervened. Of course it is possible that
Jayewardene was led astray by his own delusions of grandeur, as Pakistan
had been in thinking that the West would intervene with regard to
Bangladesh, but we have no excuse for such delusions.
Instead of trying to play games and falling into the trap some
Western commentators are setting by suggesting that we are a bone of
contention between India and China, we should use our good offices to
promote understanding between them too, and see the present century as
an opportunity for Asia as a whole, if it recognizes that this is a
win-win situation, not a zero sum game.
That after all is what our traditional foreign policy was, in the
days when we were taken seriously, when Sirimavo Bandaranaike led the
Non-Aligned Movement.
The world has obviously moved on since then, but we should see the
disappearance of a bipolar world as an opportunity to develop a more
creative vision of the world, free of the oppositions and smothering
endemic in Western philosophy.
Rather, a world of concentric circles, in which obviously our
interests our most important to ourselves, but where we address these in
the light of the interests of our neighbours, moving outward but
excluding no one, is the perspective we should encourage in the coming
generations.
ICG on the contrary goes on with outdated perspectives and old
shibboleths. I patronizing approach to India, references to ‘its desire
to counter the growing influence of China’ and its ‘traditional
reluctance to work through multilateral bodies or in close coordination
with other governments - due in part to its fear of international
scrutiny of its own conflicts, particularly in Kashmir’ are capped by
the claim that ‘it seeks recognition as a rising global power with hopes
of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council’. If the ICG does not
recognize that the one country which should unquestionably be included
as a permanent member of the Security Council is India, and that this
should have been realized in 1948, and perhaps would have been had it
not been with Western adventurism with regard to Pakistan, it can hardly
expect India to take it seriously.
Indeed, it seems to invite contempt by suggesting, as part of its
efforts to place Sri Lanka in the dock and request Indian support for
this, that India ‘should also work towards the establishment of a truth
commission that would examine the injustices and crimes suffered by all
communities, including those committed by all parties during the Indian
army’s presence in northern Sri Lanka in the late 1980s.’
So the Indian army too needs to beat its breast, since ‘Acknowledging
the suffering of all communities will be necessary for lasting peace’.
This is not necessary it would seem in Palestine, in Iraq, in
Afghanistan or anywhere where the funders of the ICG function. But India
must take its place amongst the victims of Western righteousness on
behalf of those they can claim they did not harm.
In short, in sitting in judgment on Sri Lanka, and inviting India to
join them, the panjandrums of the ICG cannot help going back to the
rhetoric of an earlier age, when the world had to be kept safe from
Socialists Hindus. |