by Ana Pararajasingham, South Asia Analysis Group, Delhi, December 13, 2004
It is only natural that India, the regional power, should have an abiding interest in the manner in which the conflict in the Island of Sri Lanka is resolved. The Tamil National Alliance MP, Mr Gajendra kumar Ponnambalam’s declaration that the Tamil Nation has no intention of working to undermine the interests of any foreign power was primarily meant to reassure India of the Tamil nation’s foreign policy perspective. In this brief paper, the writer argues the case for the region’s dominant power to re-evaluate its foreign policy in respect of Sri Lanka.
It is no secret that foreign policies are subject to review from time to time to ensure that they continue to serve the country’s national interests in all circumstances. Policies, which might have served the country’s interests at some point in the past, may well prove to be counter-productive if pursued without reference to changes in ground realities. India’s foreign policy in respect to Sri Lanka has indeed been subject to such reviews and changes in the past. The policies have failed only when policymakers have misread ground realities.
Such a failure occurred when Rajiv Gandhi, mislead by a coterie of advisers, physically intervened in Sri Lanka. The consequence was horrendous for the Tamils (of whom around 8,000 were killed) and losses for the Indian army (which lost close to 1,000 soldiers). J.N Dixit, India’s High Commissioner in Sri Lanka during that ill-fated intervention, admits that this was a failure in his book “Assignment Colombo” published 10 years after the event. His assessment of ‘flaws’ in this policy, however, falls far short of identifying the real reasons for the disaster. Dixit attributes “over optimism on the part of the Indians re Jayawardene’s ‘change of mind’ ” and “lack of ‘reasonableness’ amongst the Sri Lankan Tamils” as the reasons for the failure. Elsewhere in the book, he acknowledges his underestimation of the LTTE’s resolve, the error in believing that the LTTE could be ‘isolated from the Sri Lankan Tamils’ and the ‘xenophobic’ mindset of the Sri Lanka Government. The book, however, is conspicuous by its failure to address the central cause for India’s foreign policy disaster.
Kadian, author of the aptly titled “India’s Sri Lanka Fiasco” comes closer to identifying the primary reason for the fiasco by stating that this rests with “the failure to carry the Tigers along with the Accord.” In Kadian’s opinion India’s leverage to influence events in the island (after its partisan role in intervening on behalf of the Sinhala Government) has been compromised by the ill-fated Accord.
Kadian regards Indian policymakers’ concern with India’s Southern neighbourhood to be misplaced and argues that India’s interest is better served by concentrating its resources in her own North. “It is the tiger from the north and not the Tamil Tiger in Sri Lanka that India must contend with.” According to Sankaran Krishna, Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii and author of “India’s Role in Sri Lanka’s Conflict,” Indian policy (ever since the 1990’s) has settled on “explicit commitment to the unity and integrity of Sri Lanka.” In other words, her policy is to support Colombo’s dominance of the entire Island.
This commitment to the “unity and integrity of Sri Lanka” is sometimes followed by a clause that proclaims “support to the legitimate aspirations of the Tamil people.” But then there is hardly any elaboration as to what these aspirations are. Hence this clause can only be interpreted as a sop to Tamil sentiments. These sentiments served an earlier generation of Indian foreign policymakers under the Prime Ministership of Indira Gandhi to counter the Sri Lankan regime’s inclination to look to the West, Pakistan and China and thus pose a challenge to India’s position as South Asia’s foremost regional power. As early as 1980, the Jayawardene regime in Sri Lanka was seen as adopting a provocative stance re India’s implicit role as the regional power. According Sankaran Krishna “on a variety of issues – the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, on declaring the Indian Ocean a zone of peace, on the issue of broadcast facilities for the Voice of America, on the use of Trincomalee harbour, on membership in ASEAN – she (Indira Gandhi) judged Jayawardene regime as striking too independent and provocative posture.… In looking for an appropriate issue to bring Jayawardene to heel, Mrs Gandhi inevitably hit upon the situation of the ethnic minority in Sri Lanka… Now the fate of the Tamil minority became an important issue for the national security and integrity of India.” Sankaran then concludes that this particular phase of India’s Foreign Policy was initiated by the “central government under Mrs Gandhi for reasons having to do with assertion of India’s hegemony over Sri Lanka.”
It is now known that, as part of this policy, India armed and trained Tamil militants, not in order to gain Tamil Eelam, but to complement the diplomatic pressures being exerted on Jayawardene.
There is no doubt that this policy served India well in bringing Colombo well under its influence. Unfortunately, when the Rajiv Gandhi administration sought to physically intervene in an attempt to exercise this influence and at the same time reverse the effects of its earlier policy of arming the Tamils, the policy simply failed. It failed because it ignored the fact of Tamil nationalism, which by then had grown into a formidable force. Rajiv Gandhi had underestimated the potency of this nationalism and believed that the LTTE, the vanguard of this nationalism, could be crushed.
In the words of Nadesan Satayendra, UK-based Tamil activist; “Reason tells us that the central failure of the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord was the refusal to recognise Tamil nationalism.”
Sumantra Bose, author of “States, Nations Sovereignty,” not only agrees, but also believes that the physical intervention further consolidated Tamil nationalism.
“It appears evident, then, that the Indian State failed to take the political force and mass appeal of Tamil nationalism seriously. If the violence and perfidy of the Sri Lankan State had given rise to Tamil nationalism in the first place, the popular commitment to Eelam was cemented and solidified by the Tamils bitter experience with the Indian State. “
The current policy of supporting the unity and integrity of Sri Lanka while not addressing the fact of Tamil nationalism wil, therefore, have to be construed as a policy not much different from that which resulted in the physical intervention by India in support of Colombo.
The question that needs to be asked is how realistic is it for the Indian Government to persist with such a policy when ground realities have changed significantly during the intervening period.
Indian policymakers now need to pay heed not only to the fact of Tamil nationalism, but deal with the reality that Tamils now exercise physical control over a substantial proportion of their land, have acquired military parity in respect to the Sri Lankan State and have established an effective mechanism to administer the land under their control. The net result is that today, in the island of Sri Lanka there are two-power centres – Colombo in the South and Kilinochchi in the NorthEast.
India’s foreign policy must reflect these realities to ensure that both power centres, while accommodating each other, do not undermine India’s interests in any way. Mr Ponnambalam’s declaration has signalled the Tamil perspective in plain and unequivocal terms.
Bibliography
Bose, Sumantra: States, Nations, Sovereignty, Sri Lanka, India and the Tamil Eelam Movement, Sage Publications, New Delhi, 1994.
Dixit, J.N: Assignment Colombo, Konark Publications, Delhi, 1998
Kadian R: India’s Sri Lanka Fiasco, Vision Books, New Delhi, 1980
Krishna, Sankaran: India’s Role in Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict, Marga Institute, Colombo, 2001
Seevaratnam, N: The Tamil National Question and the Indo Sri Lanka Peace Accord, Konark Publications, Delhi, 1989
(The views expressed are his own and not of SAAG – The writer is an Australia-based management consultant and secretary of the Australasian Tamil Associations.)
Source: South Asia Analysis Group