by Sachi Sri Kantha; published March 21, 2004
Tamil Cogs that Service the Harkara System of News Supply
Front Note
Following the appearance of my commentary on Col.Karuna [The Tamil Hero turned into a Zero] in the sangam website, one reader requested additional information on the harkara system prevalent in India – to which I have alluded to – and a reference for this system. I gladly provide this information in this commentary. I was also corrected on one of my assertions in my previous commentary, by a Tamil Nadu Tamil reader, who currently lives in mid-west USA. To quote excerpts from his email: “I read your article in Sangam [website] and I am happy to know that you have the first hand information about the recent crisis….I want to point out that the last line your article, ‘Raman is rather close to the stinking skunks of sewer diplomacy!’ is wrong because he was a prime skunk himself. He headed RAW during the IPKF days.” I stand corrected.
(1) What is the harkara system of news supply?
In his recent book, ‘Intelligence in War’ (2003), John Keegan, the defense editor of The Daily Telegraph (London), has provided essential information on the harkara system of news supply, endogenous to India. Three paragraphs from this book, on the functioning mode of this news-running system are reproduced below:
“The harkara system seems to have been unique to India. Because of the subcontinent’s enormous size, difficult terrain and –until the building of the railways and the trunk roads of the British raj – lack of long-distance routes, power tended to be local. Even when centralised under the Moghul conquerors of the sixteenth century, it remained quite diffuse. The Moghuls in Delhi ruled by devolution, either to mighty provincial officials or by arrangement with local princes, particularly in western and southern India. The system could be made to work only if the court was supplied with regular reports of events at the lesser courts. It came to be supplied by two groups of news-providers: writers, often scholars of high status in the Indian caste system, and runners, who carried verbal or written messages and reports over long distances at high speed.
Over time the system yielded a peculiarly Indian product: the newsletter, usually written in Persian, the language of the Moghul court, in a highly stylised form and on a regular, typically weekly, basis. The letters began as official documents but became, as writers and even runners acquired independence, a sort of private newspaper. Eventually not so private; to whom to distribute the newsletter became a decision of the harkara, who himself acquired a blurred identity, part intelligence-gatherer, part distributor. He also acquired odd rights, to be paid, of course, but also to be accepted as a sort of local correspondent at court, known to be working for other powers at a distant centre.
The harkaras survived because, through their indispensability to those at both ends of the system, they established their independent status. It was an uneasy independence; flogging or even execution could follow the provision of dubious or misleading news. The punishment, however, was personal; it was not intended to undermine the system itself. The system, by the time the British embarked on their progressive supersession of the Moghuls at the end of the eighteenth century, was deeply entrenched in the processes of Indian political and military life. Indian government could not work without it. The British, who were committed to re-establishing Moghul power on an efficient basis, ruling themselves while leaving the Moghuls nominally in charge, simply took it over. They ‘reconstituted under their [own] control the classic Indian intelligence system which allied the writing skills and knowledge of learned Brahmins with the hard bodies and running skills of tribal and low-caste people.’” [pp.16-17]
(2) Who are the writers working for the harkara system today?
One set belongs to those embedded to the Hindu news group of establishment, owned by the English-literate Brahmins.
(3) Who performs the news-running function?
The news-runners fall into at least four categories; (a) the retainers servicing the nominal executive power like Lakshman Kadirgamar, (b) status-emasculated, fence-sitting politicians like V.Ananthasangaree and Douglas Devananda, (c) logorrheous journalists (whose bodies may live in Canada, hearts lie in Chennai and heads float in Colombo) and self-anointed arbiters belonging to dubious human rights industry in Colombo.
(4) What are the recent activities for the harkara news peddlers?
Three activities are noticeable: (a) inflating the image of Col.Karuna and his cadres, (b) promoting the spin that Col.Karuna’s desertion from the LTTE was an ‘internal revolution’ and nothing to do with the stinking skunks and, (c) providing anti-LTTE script for Col.Karuna to parrot-mouth items which makes an Eelam Tamil wonder, where was he all these years. I comment on the productions of two harkaras of the Hindu news establishment below.
D.B.S.Jeyaraj, currently a regular contributor to the Sunday Leader (Colombo) and the Frontline (Chennai), is today a pioneer harkara embedder. According to this wordsmith, “The present crisis came to light after Karuna approached the Norwegians directly. Until then neither the Sri Lankan intelligence nor Indian intelligence were aware of the growing disenchantment among eastern Tiger cadres. Of course there is always the chance that the intelligence agencies of India and Sri Lanka or both combined could have clandestinely fomented the revolt and therefore pretend to be taken by surprise. That seems unlikely and all indicators are that it is a home grown ‘revolution’ fed by seething discontent and simmering tensions.” [The Sunday Leader, Colombo, March 7, 2004] Many astute Eelam Tamils are aware of Jeyaraj’s skill in playing hide and seek with English words and embellishing tid-bits of news-scraps he gathers from hearsay and telephone contacts into bloated commentaries.
Jeyaraj – depending on where he receives his paycheck from – can also duplicitously swing, granting sizeable credit for Karuna’s desertion to the stinking skunks, which he dares not to name openly. To quote from his Hindu (Chennai) version describing the same incident, “Karuna’s revolt seems essentially home-grown but with the passage of time extraneous forces could begin backing him.” [The Hindu, Chennai, March 15, 2004] Some kind of extraneous forces, like ET? Why this harkara cannot name who these extraneous forces are, while he has a penchant to name the village, pedigree and caste of quite a number of LTTE functionaries in his bloated commentaries?
One should not be harsh on a talented wordsmith Eelam Tamils have in English, in the person of Jeyaraj. But, he perfectly fits the bill of harkara, as described by John Keegan. To reiterate, “harkara, who himself acquired a blurred identity, part intelligence-gatherer, part distributor. He also acquired odd rights, to be paid, of course, but also to be accepted as a sort of local correspondent at court, known to be working for other powers at a distant centre.”
Here is the production of a second harkara, used by the Hindu news establishment. This harkara is currently stationed in Colombo. In “an exclusive interview to V.S.Sambandan, deep inside LTTE-controlled Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka”, Col.Karuna had been quoted as, “We should have stopped with fighting against the Indian Army. Going back and assassinating Rajiv Gandhi – killing him in Tamil Nadu – is not acceptable. I consider it the gravest mistake of our intelligence wing…” [The Hindu, Chennai, March 13, 2004]. Let me dissect this statement for the sake of argument. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in May 1991. If Col.Karuna was so troubled by the immorality of the Rajiv assassination – which itself is a separate issue if one discusses morality in terms of karmic retributions, considering the fact that nearly 6,000 innocent Eelam Tamils lost their lives during the IPKF operations between 1987 and 1989; and millions of Hindus believe in karmic retributions! -, why did he not leave the LTTE in 1991 itself? Why he has to wait for another 12 long years, during which he was promoted in the LTTE ranks and achieved his well-earned fame as an overt warrior. How come the Hindu harkaras find Col.Karuna a quotable source on the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, only after March 3, 2004?
By design, neither the interviewer nor the interviewee bothered to touch on the immorality of the loss of 6,000 Eelam Tamil lives between 1987 and 1989 due to the ill-advised deeds of Rajiv Gandhi. But this is understandable, since the whole ‘exclusive interview’ spin was nothing but a set-up for the high-caste N.Ram to bleat, in his editorial two days later, against the LTTE for umpteenth time – using his cliché phrases – that “Karuna’s confession, in an interview to The Hindu, is the first public acknowledgement by a leading Tiger of the LTTE’s authorship of the assassination and its consequences…” [‘Karuna’s Confessions’, The Hindu, Chennai, March 15, 2004]. The key-word here is confession. Hurray for the Hindu’s harkara system of news runners, who can produce confessions like a magician producing rabbit from his hat.
In the above-cited sentence, three important words which provide context are missing. Between the words ‘leading’ and ‘Tiger’, three words ‘disgraced and expelled’ should be added to comprehend the overall context of Col.Karuna’s 2004 confessions, about a 1991 assassination. Then, the sentiments expressed by Col.Karuna, after 12 years of the incident, can be assessed for what it is worth by non-partisan readers. But in the land of TADA and POTA, who cares for validity of confessions? Didn’t the confessions – taken under mental duress – of the accused who stood in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination ‘kangaroo court’ trial, become a matter of legal imbroglio? Behavioral scientists also identify a bias called ‘interviewer bias’; i.e., the effect of the interviewer’s opinions, values, expectations, and prejudices upon the process and interpretation of an interview. Nothing is revealed on the steps taken by hack V.S.Sambandan, the harkara man of the Hindu who interviewed Col.Karuna, to eliminate his interviewer bias.