India’s 'LTTE'-worries

There are certain things that just won’t stay under.  Like rubber balls.  In water.  They pop up.  It has to do with the properties of matter.  Laws of physics.  Like nationalist sentiments, i.e. sentiments associated with identity, let’s say. 

No, it’s not about the LTTE.  Certain things die and are not reborn.  Like the JVP.  The name can survive and can be used as flag, but the politics can never be the same, except as farce (as Karl Marx famously put it in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’).  The JVP of 1971 was not recognizable in 88-89 and that JVP is not what we have now.  It’s the same with the LTTE.  ‘That’ LTTE ended its adventure in the Nandikadaal Lagoon three years ago.  If any LTTE lover entertains illusions about a resurrection, then he/she could envisage the second death of that second coming; Nandikadaal is the name to remember.

Delhi has raised concerns about an ‘LTTE-Regrouping’ in Tamil Nadu.  That’s mis-naming.  Tamil Nadu is the logical and most visible residence or, let’s say, headquarters of Tamil Nationalism.  Delhi deftly off-shored a problem that had the potential to hasten what many feel is the inevitable, i.e. the eventual breakup of the Indian union.  To that end, Delhi funded, trained and armed what developed into one of the most ruthless terrorist outfits the world has known in recent times.  Then Delhi feigned to sort out the problem (that’s the Indo-Lanka Accord) and sent a peacekeeping force to Sri Lanka.  Someone’s behind got bitten really badly and it was not that of a Tiger or a Lion. 

Now Delhi finds, we are told, a re-grouping of old friends.  Delhi, by raising concerns, is not sending a warning to a friendly neighbor about a possible threat somewhere down the line.  Delhi is inadvertently articulating an old fear, that of losing Tamil Nadu and then, following the Domino Principle the rest of the country.  It happens.  Just look at what happened to the Soviet Union.  Fictional aggregates are not sustainable and Delhi probably knows this and wants to postpone D-Day. 

Well, Delhi got a breather, if one can call it that, of close to three decades.  Sri Lanka in 2012 is not the Sri Lanka of the early 1980s.  Off-shoring would not be easy, because 30 years of that kind of operation leaves communities exhausted.  Tamils have problems (as do Sinhalese and Muslims, Buddhists and Christians, working class people and unemployed graduates) but gun and bullet is not the way to go.  That every Sri Lanka knows.  Delhi cannot convince otherwise.   

What this ‘re-grouping’ is about then is mis-residenced Tamil Nationalism (should be called ‘chauvinism’, but let’s be generous) re-discovering traditional homeland.  The likes of Vaiko, Jayalalithaa, Karunanidhi and others who rant and rave about Tamil brethren across the Palk Straits while ignoring the real, tangible and terrible grievances of Tamils at home (abject poverty, ill-education, lack of proper healthcare and so on), will need a new ‘Other’ to divert away ‘regime-fatigue’. 

Tamil Nadu is a fertile soil for Tamil Nationalism for reasons of geography, demography, chronic ill-treatment and history (compared to which the ‘suffering’ of Tamils in Sri Lanka are not worth mentioning).  

One could say something about birds coming home to roost, but it’s probably deeper than that.  Delhi’s backyard is dry.  That’s tinder.  Ready to crackle. 

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Delhi sows some seeds…

India has made a promise.  Apparently, India ‘will continue to take all measures to ensure the safety, security and well-being of Sri Lankan dignitaries and visitors to India, including to Tamil Nadu’.  No outright condemnation.  No indignation.  India has finally broken silence on the issue of Sri Lankan pilgrims being attacked by thugs in Tamil Nadu.  The Times of India opines that ‘local politics, including sensitivities in Tamil Nadu’ had prevented Delhi from responding earlier.  Indeed, these ‘sensitivities’ constrained Delhi to limit statement to a guarded response to the travel advisory issued by Sri Lanka.  

Times of India suggests that the ‘sensitivity-driven’ response has a legal foundation: ‘The Central Government could not react since law and order is a state subject’. 

Good. 

If Delhi takes a hands-off approach on account of what’s not its official business, then Delhi should not get upset about anything that happens in other countries (to people who didn’t elect the Central Government by others who likewise don’t have Indian citizenship).  Law and order in Botswana, for instance, is none of the Indian Central Government’s business, for example. 

In reality, though, India actually picks and chooses its business, whether it is law and order or anything else. 

On Tuesday night, an NDTV panel discussion on the issue of Sri Lanka pilgrims being attacked several prominent Tamil Nadu politicians got quite fidgety, bending over backwards to ‘explain’ the thuggery by referring to what their ‘Tamil brethren’ across the Palk Straits suffer and the righteous anger this provokes among Tamil Nadu Tamils.   While much of the allegations were mere repetition of lies crafted by backers of the very terrorism that these very same politicians nurtured (with both overt and covert support by successive Indian Governments, none of which referred to the niceties of state subjects such as ‘Law and Order’), the ignorance about Sri Lanka and the said ‘Tamil brethren’ was astounding. 

First of all, there was absolutely no mention of the kind of ‘righteous anger’ that Sri Lankans could have about Tamil terrorists and what they did.  There was no mention of LTTE atrocities against all communities, Tamils included.  No mention of the fact that the LTTE held close to 300,000 people hostage and that the Sri Lankan security forces suffered massive casualties in carrying out the greatest hostage rescue operation in history. No mention of the fact that even in the camps for the displaced, people enjoyed 3 full meals a day and had access to adequate healthcare and in general they enjoyed even in those restricted circumstances facilities that many in Tamil Nadu don’t have.

Much was made of Tamil Nadu fishermen being harassed by the Sri Lankan Army (yes, not ‘Navy’).  Nothing about Tamil Nadu fishermen poaching in Sri Lankan waters. Nothing about the fact that the fishing rights battle pits Indian fishermen against Sri Lankan TAMIL fishermen. 

The quality of life that Tamils enjoy in Sri Lanka is something that the vast majority of Tamil Nadu citizens can only dream of.  Every Tamil child in Sri Lanka is a beneficiary of free education. Indeed, the State pays for the midwife who visits the mother of every Tamil child the moment he or she enters the mother’s womb.  Every Tamil child who qualifies to enter university has his or her education paid for by the State.  Tamil Nadu, in comparison, is contemplating paying for the university education of just the first child of any family that qualifies to enter an institution of higher education. 

Bankrupt Tamil Nadu politicians will continue to rant and rave.  Can Delhi afford to look away, though? 

Delhi in effect pussyfooted around the issue. That’s Delhi’s prerogative.  Delhi would do well to understand that the true address of Tamil Nationalism in Chennai and that the longtime strategy of deflecting the uncomfortable to its neighbor in the South will only buy time.  Sooner, rather than later, considering that the ‘Sri Lankan Option’ of Tamil Chauvinism has run its course and proved impossible, Tamil Nationalism will plant its flag on its true traditional homeland, Tamil Nadu.  Delhi will not, one can be certain, say ‘law and order is a state subject’.  The Kashmiri Option will be employed in Tamil Nadu, most likely.  At great cost.  Indeed, Tamil Nadu might be harder to contain given the historical antipathies between India’s North and South, than Kashmir. 

Rubbing Sri Lanka the wrong way won’t matter to Delhi now, but that particular rubbing will embolden many a ‘rubber’ who will seek to give Delhi a rubbing it might not forget. 

Wait a minute.  Did we hear someone say that Tamil Nadu is constructing a Great Wall of China around Sri Lanka?  We might have heard wrong of course, but then again, you never know!

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We are waiting for you Mahendra Singh Dhoni!

On March 3, 2009, the Sri Lankan cricket team went through something that no other national cricket team had to suffer. The only other comparison, which of course surpassed this in terms of the horrific and tragic, was the attack on the Israel Olympic team in Munich in 1972.  On March 3, 2009, a group of gunmen opened fire on the bus carrying the cricketers.  This was in Lahore, Pakistan.  Some were injured and put out of action for a long time.  Thilan Samaraweera sustained shrapnel wounds to this thigh and Tharanga Paranavithana to his chest.  

Sri Lanka did not cut off diplomatic ties with Pakistan.  For two reasons: first, the need to have a sense of proportion, i.e. to maintain sanity and err on the side of reason as opposed to emotion, and secondly, because Pakistan is a friendly country, in word and deed.  The actions of a few do not indicate unanimous approval and coaxing by the collective.  Pakistan and Pakistanis are not to be blamed for the actions of a few deranged individuals.

Two days ago, on September 4, 2012, five buses were attacked by mobs using sticks and stones, this time in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.  These buses were carrying Sri Lankan pilgrims to the Trichy Airport.  These same pilgrims had been harassed and threatened earlier in the day by mobs of the same insane political persuasion, according to reports.

Cricketers are not pilgrims, strictly speaking.  Sticks are not guns and stones are not bullets.  The name of the weapon and the tag of the victim, however, are but of academic concerns when considering context.  Fear is fear. Wound in wound.  Objection is objection. 

Sri Lanka Cricket did not cancel all cricket fixtures with Pakistan following the 2009 attack.  Now had it been a bus carrying the Indian team that was attacked in Lahore and had Sachin Tendulkar and not Thilan Samaraweera, let us say, who was injured, it might have been a different story.  But India is India and Sri Lanka is Sri Lanka.  Sri Lanka is not India. 

The point is that sanity demands the separation of villainy from ethnic or religious identity.  The assailants were of the Islamic faith in Lahore, but what they did was neither expression of Islamic religious or philosophical tenet nor sanctioned by the same.  Similarly, the attack in Tamil Nadu, although instigated and carried out by Tamil persons, cannot and should not be read as some kind of cultural trait ingrained in the Tamil psyche.  To extend the argument further, Tamils should not be seen as a monolithic ethnicity.  Neither should Tamil Nadu be seen as a political monolith.  Nor India, for that matter. 

Sri Lanka is not India and for all its errors of the past, Sri Lanka has refused to go the Gujarat way of extracting eye for extracted eye.  Whatever reservations Sri Lankans may have about the bona fides of the Indian Government (and many of them amenable to easy substantiation too, one might add), the rulers of India should not be confused with the people of India.  India is a massive country and those dimensions (size, population etc) naturally make for unimaginable differentiation across region, religious faith, ethnicity, caste, class and philosophical bent.  This should be appreciated. 

No, what is being suggested is not the under-the-carpet-shoving that lip-service to ‘long standing historical, cultural and friendly relations’ mouthed by leaders in times like this amount to.  It is about making the effort to recognize commonalities, the shared human fear of death and the shared will to live.  What is being suggested is to see self in one’s Indian counterpart, whether or not the Indian returns the favor. 

Less than two weeks from today, the Indian cricket team will arrive in Sri Lanka for the T-20 Cricket World Cup.  Sri Lanka is cricket mad, but not to the point of stoning the houses of heroes who turned into zeroes in the course of a single game or series.  Sri Lankans are enthusiastic about politics but not to the point that they confuse politics with sport.  In any event it is advisable to resist the baser urges that all humankind is endowed with to a greater or lesser degree. 

Not a single Indian who happens to be in Sri Lanka or who has for whatever reason visited or intends to visit Sri Lanka should be treated to anything less than the highest hospitality that Sri Lankans are known to extend to strangers.  Not because any of us owe India or Indians a favor (we do not), but because we are Sri Lankans and we are all capable (again on account of our humanity) to rise above those baser instincts.  That is the best answer to the thugs, their approvers and their apologists.  Anything less would be a disservice done to ourselves, not to India.   

Dhoni does not belong to India.  He belongs to the entire cricketing world.   The random, unnamed Indian you encounter is not Indian, he is a human being.  That’s all that needs to be remembered.

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Offer clemency to Gandhi’s killers!

  

Posters calling for Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan
to be hanged



The execution of three persons convicted over the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi  has been stayed for eight weeks by the Madras High Court. Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan, currently at the Vellore Jail, were to be hanged on September 9, 2011. The bench, offering interim relief, had observed a 11 year delay in the delay of mercy petitions filed by the convicts to the President.

In the meantime, arch Tamil chauvinist and long-time choir-boy of Tamil terrorism, MDMK leader Vaiko had thundered that if the three were executed, then Tamil Nadu would secede from the Indian union: ‘If Santhan, Murugan and Perarivalan, the accused in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case are executed as per the court order, it will jeopardise Indian unity. When the 100th anniversary of the Independence Day will be celebrated on 2047, Tamil Nadu would not be a part of India.’  

I doubt that Manmohan Singh or Sonia Gandhi would take Vaiko’s threats seriously. Indeed, if Vaiko was a serious Tamil nationalist, then there are probably other and more compelling reasons to threaten secession.  Tamil Nadu probably has the best case for secession and this is why successive Indian governments have consistently shifted the address of Tamil nationalism from its traditional homeland to the absolutely-no-case place off the Southern tip of India, namely Sri Lanka. 

The sentencing of the three persons mentioned above has upset pro-LTTE groups. All three were members of the terrorist outfit and therefore this is to be expected.  Some object because they are against capital punishment. In Sri Lanka there’s been a deafening silence. The LTTE-loving TNA and other groups with eyes so ready to tear on account of debacles suffered by the terrorists have all kept their silence. How about the rest of us? What are we supposed to think?



Rajiv Gandhi



Rajiv Gandhi was no friend of Sri Lanka.  He wanted to ‘Bhutanize’ us.  He bulldozed into Sri Lanka to save the terrorists who his mother funded, armed and trained.  The LTTE did more than bite the hand that fed it, sure, but that’s not something that those who suffered at the hands of the LTTE would find cause to be sad about. 

When Rajiv Gandhi arrived in Sri Lanka on July 29, 1987 to ink the ‘agreement’ he had arm-twisted J.R. Jayewardene to sign (‘Can’t do uncle!’ was his dismissal of the Sri Lankan President’s plea to let Sri Lanka handle her own affairs), a Naval Rating, Vijithamuni Rohana De Silva, part of the ‘Guard of Honour’, lifted his rifle and brought it down on the Indian Prime Minister’s head. I remember that day. I was  trying to get from Gampola to Kurunegala after receiving a call from my mother, saying her father was seriously ill, but had got trapped in Kandy because a citizenry livid and frustrated at how Indian hegemony walked in and robbed our sovereignty, bailed out a terrorist and gave legitimacy to Eelam myth-making (Dayan Jayatillake called it ‘Geo-political realities’ then) had attacked and burnt some buses. I was forced to stay with friends and we watched the news.  We saw that attack.  We all felt sorry for Rajiv and at the same time empathized with his attacker. 

The three sentenced to be hanged, one can argue, did what Vijithamuni Rohana could not do that day.  If we can empathize with one, we can empathize with the other and that does not make either ‘right’.  Perhaps this is why Sri Lanka has been silent about the sentence.  We never cared much for the Nehrus (not for Rajiv, his mother or her father, the last having the gumption to complain that Sir John had not shown him the speech he delivered at the Bandung Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement) and also have very little patience or pity for terrorists. 

Still, if we can forgive V. Muralitharan aka ‘Karuna’, if we can forgive Prabhakaran’s notorious global arms procurement chief, ‘KP’, if we could have send food, medicine and other essential items to the people held hostage by the LTTE knowing very well that Prabhakaran’s thugs would rob left and right, if we could pay salaries to doctors, nurses, teachers, clerks and others in the Vanni and thereby allow Prabhakaran to claim he was running a de facto state, then we can and should forgive these three Gandhi-killers.



These three have erred.  Yes, there are erring degrees and their crime is pretty much up there among the most horrendous. Worse was done by their victim and his successors.  All that is irrelevant. They have not harmed anyone since they were arrested. They cannot harm anyone if they spent the rest of their lives in jail. Society needs to be protected from such people and if the containing facilities exist, then they should be used.



Nalini serving a life sentence at
Tamila Nadu Jail for her
part in the Gandhi assassination

It is 20 years since Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated (did someone say ‘got his just desserts’?).  A lot has happened since.  ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,’ Mahatma Gandhi once said. I’ve argued against capital punishment elsewhere and will not get into that discussion here.  If, as Vaiko claims, the hanging of these three individuals provokes a full blown secessionist struggle in Tamil Nadu, I will not stop cheering.   That’s not reason enough to want them hanged, though. 

The world would not become any safer or more dangerous the day after if they were executed.  Rajiv Gandhi will not be resurrected.  If India doesn’t know how to deal with them, send them over here, that’s what I say.

A lot of blood has been shed.  A lot of anger has been expressed.  A long time has passed.  There is a time to be wary, and a time to drop guard.  If India is scared about what these three individuals would do, then India can repatriate them back to Sri Lanka. 

I am not sure what their nationality is, but if they were LTTE cadres and were Indians, then they can be extradited to Sri Lanka.  We have rehabilitated and reintegrated into society close to 8000 ex-combatants, some trained to carry out suicide attacks, some trained to toss grenades and spray bullets on civilian cadres.  We can handle these three prisoners.  Not because we condone what they did, but because we know that more deaths will not change things and because we know that this is healing time and execution is not unguent. 

Courtesy: Daily News - Monday 5 September, 2011

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