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Painful history makes India sit out LTTE
talks
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - When the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE) sit down to talk peace with the Sri Lankan
government in Thailand on Monday, no Indian
representative will be present - a reflection of the
country's studied aloofness to the 19-year-old ethnic
conflict on the island nation off its southern tip.
"There is no change in our position - it's
between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE," Foreign
Ministry spokeswoman Nirupama Rao says. Her comments
underscore India's hands-off policy toward the conflict
since the 1991 assassination of former prime minister
Rajiv Gandhi by a Tiger suicide bomber.
Gandhi's
assassination was believed to have been ordered by LTTE
supremo Vellupillai Prabhakaran in revenge for the
military intervention he ordered in Jaffna peninsula as
guarantor of the 1987 Indo-Sri Lankan accord. That
agreement, with India as guarantor because it was the
region's political heavyweight, sought to resolve the
Tamil-Sinhala ethnic divide while easing tensions
between the two countries arising out of Cold War
alignments.
New Delhi had found the ethnic
conflict a convenient bargaining chip for furthering its
strategic interests in the Indian Ocean, where it saw
itself as a major sea power. At one point, Gandhi
ordered the dropping of food and other supplies over Sri
Lanka's Jaffna peninsula to relieve an economic blockade
that Colombo had ordered on the Tamil stronghold to
weaken the Tigers' control over it.
Also as part
of the accord, Colombo was to ensure that the strategic
deepwater port of Trincomalee on the east - one of the
world's finest deepwater ports under the LTTE's
influence - would not be allowed to be used for military
purposes by third countries "in a manner prejudicial to
India's interests".
Post September 11, the
United States has shown renewed interest in Trincomalee
harbor and the visit to Jaffna on March 15 by US
Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca,
accompanied by a marine general, is considered
significant.
But according to Professor P
Sadasivan, a Sri Lanka expert at the prestigious School
of International Studies, those days of mutual suspicion
between Colombo and New Delhi are now far behind. He
adds that India, whose experience in playing a role in
the Sri Lankan conflict has been painful, is now
confident of leaving mediation efforts to Norway.
Sadasivan says that relations between Colombo
and New Delhi are currently at a high point, and
progress on the talks are regularly conveyed to India at
the topmost levels, including briefings by the Norwegian
mediators.
Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil
Wickremasinghe was in India in June, his second visit in
six months and one that followed a visit by President
Chandrika Kumaratunga in April. While in the country, he
said that there was no plan to develop Trincomalee as a
military base. A memorandum allowing India to develop
oil facilities at the port was signed during his visit.
There is a sense that any direct intervention by
India in the current peace initiative could prove
counter-productive. For instance, Sadasivan pointed to
how New Delhi's provision of "humanitarian assistance"
in rescuing some 30,000 Sri Lankan troops trapped by
LTTE fighters when it overran the Elephant Pass garrison
two years ago proved embarrassing for Colombo.
"For New Delhi it is still a tightrope act,
staying in touch with developments but not actually
intervening directly," Sadasivan told Inter Press
Service. India's military intervention in Jaffna in 1987
not only earned it the wrath of the LTTE, but gained it
no friends in Colombo. It also proved to be a military
disaster - more than a thousand men of the specially
constituted Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) lost their
lives in a guerrilla war with the Tigers between 1987
and 1990.
It seemed that India could please
nobody. Gandhi was himself was clubbed with a rifle by a
Sinhalese member of a Sri Lankan naval guard of honor
soon after he formally signed the accord in July 1987.
Gandhi was to meet his death in 1991 at the hands of a
woman member of the LTTE's suicide squad, who garlanded
him at an election rally in the southern Tamil Nadu
state before setting off an explosive strapped to her
body.
That assassination was to cost the Tigers
dearly not only in terms of the bases it had in Tamil
Nadu, but also popular support among the 60 million
Tamil ethnic kin who live across the narrow Palk Straits
between India and Sri Lanka. Sympathy for the LTTE in
Tamil Nadu came not only because of close ethnic
affinity, but because of the periodic influx of refugees
from Jaffna, who fled to safety every time the Sri
Lankan armed forces launched offensives on the
peninsula.
The group that made immediate gains
from the assassination was the All-India Anna Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) party led by Jayalalitha
Jayaraman, which swept the polls in a wave of public
anger that went against the LTTE's close ally in Tamil
Nadu, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Party. Both parties
claim to support the cause of Tamils (Dravidians).
Jayalalitha lost the next elections in 1996, but
returned to power last year and resumed a campaign to
weed out political supporters of the LTTE who seek
dividends in the cause of Tamil nationalism.
"The LTTE now wants to rebuild its strategic
bridges in Tamil Nadu and regain its solid support base
there," says Sadasivan, explaining that the conciliatory
noises made by Prabhakaran at an April press conference.
"We want to engage the government of India. Our people
love India and the people of India. We are culturally
and ethnically linked to the Indian subcontinent. India
is our fatherland," Prabhakaran said, even appealing for
the talks to be held in Tamil Nadu.
But
Prabhakaran's appeal left New Delhi unmoved, and it
certainly did not prevent Jayalalitha from arresting
pro-Tiger leaders under stiff anti-terrorist laws.
Sadasivan says that at this point, the LTTE is so bereft
of support in Tamil Nadu that the only way for it to
regain the popular sympathy it earlier enjoyed there is
if there is extreme violence by the Sinhalese against
the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka, such as the 1983 pogrom
that left 3,000 people dead and more than 50,000 others
homeless.
But nothing like that is about to
happen, Sadasivan explains. He adds that it is evident
that what engendered the LTTE and the havoc it created
was that pogrom, Sinhalese chauvinism and the
declaration of the Sinhala language as the sole official
language in 1956. Both the Sinhalese and the Tamils
trace their origins to the Indian subcontinent.
Historically, they have interfered in each other's
internecine wars both on the island and in Tamil Nadu
since the fifth century.
(Inter Press
Service)
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