Our schizoid view of our neighbourhood

Two ongoing conflicts in India’s immediate neighbourhood — in Sri Lanka and Pakistan — are both close to a tipping point. In Sri Lanka, the army is on the brink of a momentous military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), having boxed the Tigers into a small area in their erstwhile stronghold. And in Pakistan, jihadi forces, who had gained control of the Swat Valley under a deal with the Pakistani government, are expanding their base of operations and are within striking distance of Islamabad. 

Even given the vast dissimilarities in the two countries and contexts, there are enough common elements in them to merit a discussion of the two in the same breath. There is, in addition, one overriding common element: India’s strategic interest in how the two conflicts play out. Given India’s experiences of terrorism originating from both Pakistan and Sri Lanka, one would have expected a certain congruence in the political responses to both these conflicts. But curiously, there’s been a striking dissonance in the responses, which reflects either a schizoid view of our neighbourhood or, worse, cynical duplicity. 

In Pakistan, for instance, India is justifiably concerned by the Taliban’s territorial advances and the Pakistan government’s unwillingness to dismantle jihadi terrorism infrastructure, including in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, from where most of the terrorism directed at India originates. Much of India’s coercive diplomacy is focused on getting Pakistani leaders to crack down harder on terrorism outfits, and there is widespread support even for US military operations against jihadis in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Even when, on occasion, excessive force is used, as happens when US drones fire rockets into civilian areas harbouring suspected terrorists, you never hear calls for a “humanitarian” way of conducting anti-terror operations. Nor do you see the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid going on an “indefinite fast” calling for an end to the military operations in a neighbouring country. That is the right response. 

But when Sri Lanka wages its own “war on terror” against a ruthless terrorist force that, at one stage, India shamefully supported and armed, our political responses get a lot more muddled. On the threshold of a military victory for Sri Lanka in this  bloody history of over 25 years, chauvinistic ethno-linguistic politics in Tamil Nadu is threatening to hijack India’s foreign policy position that had, after a long time, found the right balance between defending India’s strategic interests and doing the right thing. 

Tamil politics has always marched to the beat of a different drum, even positioning the Lankan king Ravana as a “Tamil hero” who stood up against the “Aryan invader Ram”. There’s even a Ravana Kavyam, a Tamil literary work that narrates the Ramayana from a Dravidian perspective. But whereas such explorations may challenge widely accepted mainstream perspectives, the political embrace by Tamil politicians, even today, of the LTTE and its leader V Prabhakaran as “Tamil heroes” represents a perverse understanding of history. 

It’s true that the LTTE once legitimately represented Sri Lankan Tamils’ aspirations for a “homeland”. But over time, they have  changed their stripes and become one of the world’s most dreaded terrorist groups. By assassinating moderate Tamil leaders in Sri Lanka, and a former Indian prime minister who drew up a template for a political solution  of the ethnic conflict, the LTTE has shown itself to be the worst enemy of  Sri Lankan Tamils.   With the LTTE on the brink of being wiped out, India  should guard against domestic chauvinistic Tamil sentiments throwing the LTTE a lifeline. A zero-tolerance policy against terrorism — the same that we demand of Pakistan — is the best defence of India’s strategic interests and the right thing to do.