Among the many memories of covering wars in Sri Lanka over a decade, here is one that endures and comes back each time there is a new crisis and clamour for Indian intervention. In the summer of 1990 Lalith Athulathmuthali was a pale shadow of his towering presence in his years as Jayewardene’s national security minister. He also repeatedly said he would not live too long.
“The bastard (Premadasa) will have me killed. But before that happens, my friend, I want to give you some documents. You might find them useful,” he said. He retreated into his study and returned with a folder containing many photocopied official documents. These were neatly labelled and arranged and made one telling point. That even while the IPKF was fighting the LTTE, apparently at the invitation of the Sri Lankan government, Premadasa was supplying them arms and ammunition. One of the documents showed how these supplies were being sent to Batticaloa in Tata trucks gifted – not sold, gifted – by India to the Sri Lankan army.
Knowing Premadasa, you couldn’t rule out the possibility that he had chosen to do so deliberately, even if as prime minister in Jayewardene’s government he had himself been party to the signing of the accord inviting Indian intervention. Many of the players of that disastrous game in Sri Lanka are still around and it is unlikely that India will now be dragged into the fighting in Jaffna in a hurry. But can it also afford to stay out for ever? Is there indeed no choice other than either committing your armies or being indifferent and either allowing a small neighbour to break up or letting other foreign powers, from Pakistan to the US, insinuate a role for themselves within 25 miles of our shores?
But just because Rajiv Gandhi went so wrong in 1987, does it mean that we should do nothing now? What else can we do when our neighbours tend to be so ungrateful, pleading for our help when in distress and then harking back to sovereignty the moment the bad times are over?
Our national interest would demand that we show greater involvement in finding a way out of the current Sri Lankan crisis than we are doing right now. If we look at it purely in terms of India’s long-term interests, an ethnic vivisection of Sri Lanka, and that too at the hands of an armed minority, is a disastrous prospect in our neighbourhood. That the Tamils are our cousins is no argument. In this region it is difficult to find an ethnic group that is not our cousin. In fact, if you read the history of Sri Lanka cursorily, you would notice that the Tamils arrived some time before the Sinhalas made their way there from Orissa. So in a way, the Sinhalas are our most recent cousins. It is not ethnic affections that colour our judgement but the compulsions of Tamil Nadu politics. This was Rajiv’s great blunder.
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Contrary to what many western analysts have argued, Rajiv’s overriding motivation in getting so deeply involved in Sri Lanka was not in furtherance of any new Indian Monroe doctrine. It was in part, self-aggrandizement and in part, an effort to seal the Tamil votes for ever for the Congress and its ally, MGR. Not once did an Indian leader at that time say that the IPKF was crossing the Palk Straits to further India’s future interests. No one told a harried IPKF platoon commander ever that he wasn’t there wasting his time and his troops’ lives protecting Jayewardene’s backside but that he was fighting his own country’s battle, though in a foreign land. The Americans never told their troops they were fighting in Vietnam to save the South Vietnamese regime. They were told they were fighting the spread of communism, and thereby serving their own country’s interests. If neither Rajiv nor any of his key men ever said any such thing to the IPKF, it was simply because he had never believed in it himself.
The central flaw in the old interventionist policy therefore was that it was rooted in Tamil Nadu politics and not in our own national interest. Even today, not one Congressman is willing to speak the truth though it would be so flattering to their departed leader. The truth is that the IPKF, by sacrificing nearly 1,200 lives in that pointless war, built a sufficiently strong nationalistic constituency within India, and particularly in Tamil Nadu, that sees the LTTE and its brand of ethnic nationalism as forces hostile to India. Whatever little pro-LTTE sentiment remained in Tamil Nadu was destroyed by Rajiv dying in that state and in that manner. The Congressmen are shy of stating that fact because they still worry about Tamil votes. But that is no reason the Vajpayee Government should not learn the right lessons from that.
First of all, it has to separate the issue from Tamil Nadu politics. Would we, as a dominant regional power, allow the Nepalis to seize power at the point of the Kalashnikov in Bhutan even though they now vastly outnumber the native Bhutia-Lepchas? There is no way we will let a neighbour be broken up like that. Once we decide that some intervention in Sri Lanka is an exercise in self-interest rather than a photo-op for the prime minister, other possibilities open up.
The LTTE may be doing very well in the battlefield against a largely conscripted army. But internationally it has no friends. The world today simply won’t accept a group of bloodthirsty ethnic fighters no matter what their justification. The world will also not accept the break-up of a legitimate state like Sri Lanka. Why not make the world an ally then, just as we have done so successfully on the issue of state-sponsored terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere?
This may fly in the face of our devotion to the principles of bilateralism. But we tried that before, in 1987, and it did not work because nations, howsoever small and weak, find it difficult to swallow the loss of sovereignty to a much larger neighbour for too long. They might find it easier to accept a multilateral presence instead, or at least one that has multinational packaging. India now needs to take the lead in finding like-minded allies who will give India the central role in a new multinational initiative to find a fair final solution to the ethnic strife in Sri Lanka.
Embracing such multilateralism won’t diminish but enhance our status as a regional power. The other choices are trickier: you could either sit back and do nothing, or let the refugee build-up in Tamil Nadu, the nurturing of the new pro-LTTE sympathy wave, to continue and thus go back to square one, thereby negating all the sacrifices made by the IPKF jawans and Rajiv Gandhi himself.
Postscript. Lack of gratitude to the IPKF was not confined to Sri Lankans. Even Karunanidhi, then chief minister, had refused to receive the returning IPKF jawans. How could he, then, welcome the murderers of his own cousins?