WHAT TO DO about a ‘rogue elephant’s’ traces

Susantha Goonatilake

Western observers at the time were appalled on the so-called Indian Accord which brought the 13th Amendment. The Wall Street Journal called India “A rogue elephant trampling upon its neighbours”. The British Guardian said: “India's pact with Sri Lanka is the most infamous contract imposed on a small country - short of military occupation - since the Munich Agreement of 1938”. The London Evening Standard fumed “India ... is the colonial power in the region today”. The New York Times editorialized about “Mr. Gandhi’s.... big-stick diplomacy in Sri Lanka”. By all accounts, it was one of the most dastardly impositions against this country.

Since the time of decolonisation after World War 2 of the West’s ill-gotten territories, it was one of the worst acts of brigandage. Indian warplanes flew overhead and Indian warships were outside the Colombo harbour. It was like a replay of Western piracy in a script from the previous 500 years’ barbaric West. In spontaneous anger, tens of thousands of all political parties marched against this so-called Indian Accord.

K.M. de Silva, JR Jayewardene’s sympathetic biographer called it the “largest, large-scale demonstration and uprising in Sri Lanka since Independence”. JR’s Prime Minister Premadasa and Defence Minister Lalith Athulathmudali were against it. And most JR’s MPs (whose letters of resignation he had conveniently pocketed) were against it. In addition was the SLFP, the majority parliamentary opposition.

The JVP had gone underground after the JR government had falsely accused it of the 1983 riots. And the JVP now emerged in open opposition, later as armed opposition. In the protests that ensued including the armed one by the JVP, over 60,000 people were killed - the majority probably being non-JVP as the JVP a revolutionary party knew how to run and hide. Today the JVP seems to be only marginally interested in the issue which killed most of their members. They are engaged in unsuccessful strikes with one leader quoting Lenin one of the few in the world referring to that long lost figure.

Tamil political parties

The racist Tamil political parties that came out of their suicidal Vaddukoddai Resolution of 1976, which called for a separate Tamil state, were for it. The 13 A affirmed their concocted history of an invented traditional Tamil Homeland. All the separatist groups which the Indians had armed and trained in an act of cross-border terrorism were for it, except the LTTE. The already dead old left, once great spokesman against imperialism was for this Indian sub imperialism.

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka	Vladmir Lenin
Indira Gandhi	Adolf Hitler

In the usual colonial policy of divide and rule, the majority Sinhalese especially the Buddhists were discriminated during colonialism and prominence given to ethnic and religious minorities. And the postcolonial period saw the Sinhalese regaining their natural majority. And now the spokesman of these minorities favoured by the colonialists, the Christians and the Muslims cheered for the 13th A.

Real local civil society was against it. The Bar Association among others passed a resolution against it. Those who were exultant for this naked foreign aggression were foreign funded NGOs. This NGO rump propped up by foreign money included the ICES, the Centre for Society and Religion, the National Peace Council NPC and Marga through its director Godfrey Gunatilleke.

Echoing Christian missionaries during the colonial period, Jehan Perera (a Christian himself) of the NPC warned that it was time “to tell Sri Lankans some hard truths about their Island… and its limitations...” He said that any government will now have “to confront the … presence of the Indian army in the north and east... (Our) governments have been presented with a fait accompli... (They have no) choice but to honor the Accord”. Godfrey Gunatilleke (another Christian) defending the Indian acts said that “we have had to awaken to the geopolitical realities within which we existed” and then castigated “the self-appointed custodians of our sovereignty who lament” the Indian incursion. He warned against a “Cyprus situation with India having to assume an enhanced role.” Translated, this implied Indians would carve up the country and annex the North and East. Gunatilleke was not only welcoming Indian overlordship of the country but also inculcating a mood of defeatism to accept it.

Armed groups

Dayan Jayatilleka in his father’s Lanka Guardian had continually advocated a separate Tamil state. He wrote praising the “solutions” of Stalin to the ethnic issues of the Soviet Union totally ignorant of the fact that Stalin had as solution deported entire nationalities thousands of miles. Dayan during the Indian Accord was in exile in India because of a court case against him. He was now flown down to become a Minister of the Indian puppet regime in the North East. In a recent publication, Jayatilleka, as his friend H.L.D. Mahindapala wrote, was even today “predicting that India will step in (through) its military might to divide Sri Lanka into two ethnic enclaves if the 13th Amendement — India’s baby — is not adopted by Sri Lanka”. Tigers, hidden or otherwise do not change their anti-national stripes.

But the Indian exercise on Sri Lanka by Indira Gandhi was similar to what she had attempted with the internal Punjab revolt by virtually creating and promoting the hardline Bhindranwale. There was a difference though. In the case of Sri Lanka, she let loose a whole alphabet soup of armed groups which she trained and armed in different parts of India. The tragedy was that both these decisions came to roost. Indira was killed by her Punjabi guards sympathetic to Bhindranwale and her son Rajiv was in turn killed by the LTTE. And India who extra judicially suppressed Punjabi (and today Kashmiri) independence had the gall to vote against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC – for winning a war started by her own machinations.

In the meantime, sites sacred to Buddhists around the world namely the Maha Bodhi and the Dalada Maligawa, commemorating India’s two greatest sons, namely the Buddha and Asoka were attacked.

It is suspected with the connivance of India’s RAW, her secret agency. In addition, in the Eastern Province praying Muslims were gunned down while young monks were stabbed to death. When the dust settled on this Indian colonial adventure, the Christian-led LTTE was in control of the North and East.

It turned the North into a mono-ethnic entity evicting 75,000 Muslims and around 25,000 Sinhalese giving them, on pain of death, just 48 hours to leave.

The LTTE held huge Pongu Tamil meetings in “its” areas with an ominous map of Sri Lanka showing a large part as belonging to its future Tamil Eelam state. In these meetings, the Catholic clergy was prominently in front. The future Tamil state shown in the map was only lesser in area than the larger Eelam map concocted by the anti-Sri Lanka NGO, International Alert (it still operates in Sri Lanka.)

The Hitler ideology was easy to see in the LTTE: there was Lebensraum (exclusive Tamil homelands), salute of party members with outstretched hand and total obedience to only one leader. After the phony ceasefire, the LTTE ran riot. Chandrika and Ranil, the worst post-independence leaders allowed police stations, courts and a whole gamut of an independent state to be established. To the newspapers and other media, Chandrika brought in well-known separatists as heads. Foreign funded NGOs were allowed to dictate and according to their then writings, bribe and influence politicians, government servants, academics and media personnel.

These bribes were given sometimes in cash, sometimes in kind through foreign trips and seminars in hotels. One such seminar in a hotel was to downsize the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. Foreign funded NGOs were also lecturing to defence academies giving the message that the war could not be won. These outfits were funded by the very Western powers that had fought against Hitler, the biggest war in history. But for their own strategic reasons, these Western proxies never wrote about the Hitler parallels with the LTTE. Sri Lanka had become a sieve for maggots to eat at will.

Future generations

The fallout of the anti-national politics gave us nearly 40 years of misery since 1973 when 20,000 detonators were smuggled into Jaffna from India. It was perhaps the longest war in the last century in any country. Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims all suffered perhaps the most, the Tamils who ran away from the LTTE Homeland and came to the Western province or went overseas. Finally the LTTE was defeated and the country liberated. But now, the very same groups that supported ideologically and physically the war are now once again vocal and crying for the outcome of the Indian incursion namely the 13th Amendment. We owe it to future generations to prevent another ethnic war which implementation of the 13th Amendment will create. The OPA calculated the provincial councils to be a great financial loss. And a few months ago, the OPA representing over 40,000 professionals rejected the 13th A. Not only must such provincial devolution be rescinded but also the provincial boundaries should be redrawn.

The current boundaries were arbitrarily drawn and changed by colonials, for example combining the bulk of the empty lands in the Northern Province with Jaffna Peninsula. The Norwegian Westborg who later as Ambassador smuggled communication equipment to the LTTE was once director of the Norwegian NGO Redd Barne. Through this NGO, the new colonial Westborg populated these empty lands with Indians being deported from the country under the Sirima-Shastri pact.

These empty lands should actually be reconnected to the region around Anuradhapura as was the arrangement in the 19th century. The Eastern province should be expanded eastwards to the boundaries in the 19thcentury. Only then will real harmony among ethnic and religious groups be realized. Already Western province and especially Colombo district is a peaceful melange of ethnicities. That should be the model for redrawn boundaries. And a fitting reply to the colonial 13th A.