HITLER, POL-POT, JAYALALITHAA?

There isn’t the slightest shadow of doubt that the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa has plunged the lowest of the low depths along with her comrade in arms in buffoonery, Karunanidhi the Terrible. Their pantomime is creating history.

Next to Hutu upon Tutsi tribal violence and Hitler’s and Pol Pot’s genocide, short of actual physical violence perpetrated against the Sinhalese people, the Jayalalithaa-Karunanidhi combine has plunged a new nadir in demonizing an entire race of people.

It is beyond certain that Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi are aggressively demonizing the Sinhala people as a whole, and not aiming their vitriol against the Sri Lankan government per se.

Sri Lankan cricketers cannot play the IPL. Sri Lankan pilgrims are not welcome in Tamil Nadu. There is a comprehensive deliberate demonization here, and this is the level of propagating hatred that would want Charles Taylor’s Sierra Leonean paramilitaries want to blush.

What makes all of this spill-over hate patently worse is the fact that all this is in aid of partisan political contestation -- in other words, the Jeyaram/Karunanidhi slogan reduced to its basics, is ‘The Sinhalalse people are sub-human because I want to win the election for Chief Minister.’

At one level this makes Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa worse than Prabhakaran the arch fascist ghoul. Sub-human and monstrously cruel though he was, Prabhakaran harboured at least a veneer of a notion that he had a Tamil liberation campaign going on, though there wasn’t one. Prabhakaran’s campaign was one of fascist terror, couched in the garb of a freedom struggle.

But the monster seemed to believe in his own fiction, to some extent at least, as he was so immersed in the tragic narrative that he had created for himself that the Tamils were in need of some kind of liberation of the sort that required the decapitation of the Tamil leadership, and atrocities such as the butchering of Sinhala children in cold blood.

Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi believe on the other hand in one kind of salvation, and one kind only. That is salvation at the polling booth.

The utterly cynical nature of the duo’s blatant race baiting and hating for the sake of blatant electoral politicking is reflective of a new depth, certainly in regional politics and perhaps global politics as well.

Though the Indian centre, particularly in the form of Salman Kurshid the very urbane and affable Indian External Affairs Minister has scoffed at the duo as best as he is able to do, couching his statements in diplomatic-speak, it is inevitable that the whole of India will in some way be seen through the prism of Tamil Nadu histrionics, as far as Sri Lankans are concerned.

Yesterday, Attorney S. L. Gunasekera had written to a national daily suggesting that there be a moratorium on imports of Maruti cars from India etc., and a ban on Sri Lankan player-participation in the IPL.

Such reactions are hawkish and misplaced particularly under the circumstances that the Indian centre, though walking the tight-rope, has made it certain that one state cannot determine the foreign policy for the whole of India.

It’s true that these sentiments are small consolation after everything that happened in Geneva this March.

The point that has to be made is that SLG’s kind of reaction becomes an inevitability after a certain point in time when Tami Nadu notwithstanding, India’s treatment of this country is seen as being continually cavalier, big-brotherly and arrogant.

The fact that these days the Indian centre is dictated to by the Tami Nadu political calculus more than any other factor is also small consolation, particularly from the less sophisticated vision of the S.L. Gunasekera types.

But having stated that, it is worth adding that these reactions are inevitable. This is why the new depths of Jayalalithaa and co., are making them increasingly look as if they are the odious villains of the piece that need to be globally ostracized for their conduct. Well, a UNHRC resolution cannot be passed against Tamil Nadu, but there must be something that will send a strong global message of disapproval against the conduct of Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi, now recognizable anywhere instantly as regional race-baiting opportunistic bigots.