The bloody mosaic of Sri Lanka

 

 

Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera will be in Delhi on May 7 to meet with the top Indian leadership in the wake of the dastardly suicide-bomber attack on the island nation’s Army Chief, General Sarath Fonseka in Colombo on April 25. The fact that a pregnant woman carried out the attack in Sri Lanka’s highly protected and fortified Army HQ provides an indication of the determined ruthlessness with which the cadres of the LTTE—suspected to be behind the attack–are pursuing their objective.

 

The tenuous ceasefire agreement arrived at between the government in Colombo and the LTTE in February 2002 is clearly under strain and the limited military response by the Sri Lankan government has been perceived as “a clear violation of the ceasefire agreement” by the  international Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM).

 

The Sri Lankan imbroglio that pitted the government against the LTTE has a complex genesis that goes back to the colonial history of the island. In the aftermath of independence, the emergence of assertive Sinhala majoritarianism threatened the Tamil minority and this ethno-lingual divide festered and has now acquired a malignant character.

 

The LTTE, led by their supremo Prabhakaran has become the symbol of one faction of militant Sri Lankan Tamil aspirations since the 1980s. Initially committed to protecting the rights of the Tamils, the objective later was to carve out Eelam—a separate state —and subsequent to internal differences among the Sri Lankan Tamils themselves, the current objective of the LTTE leader remains opaque.

 

India which has provided various forms of advice and assistance to Colombo over the years got directly involved in an aborted peace keeping effort in the late 1980’s. During the Rajiv Gandhi years, Delhi sent an Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to the island to help the two sides to arrive at a consensus that would address the legitimate grievances of the Tamils and yet respect the unitary character of Sri Lanka.

 

The Indian military sustained about 1,000 casualties in this well-meaning initiative and it also led to a political backlash that soured the bi-lateral relationship and also played out negatively in the context of India’s domestic politics—in Tamil Nadu particularly. The LTTE’s impact on the Indian political canvas was most tragically illustrated in the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, and the turbulence generated, whose fall-out we are still witnessing.

 

The LTTE was designated a terrorist organisation by India and in the decade that followed, Delhi prudently stayed in the background as the international community led by Norway sought to broker a peace. This Scandinavian effort resulted in the nebulous Oslo decision of December 5, 2002, wherein it was agreed that the Sri Lankan government (SLG) and the LTTE would seek to “explore a solution founded on the principle of internal self-determination, based on a federal structure within a united Sri Lanka.” (Italics mine.)

 

India’s options at this stage are limited. On one hand it has designated the LTTE as a terrorist group and has no direct links with it. Hence, the possibility of being an honest broker is ruled out. More substantively, the suggestion that India can embark upon a muscular regional foreign policy where it can directly intervene is fraught with uncertainties. While the post 9-11 global consensus has identified terrorism as the major security challenge to the nation-state and civil society, Southern Asia and its terrorism matrix has deep complexities that elude arriving at neat solutions.

 

Perceived Indian support to the Sri Lankan government or a determined attempt by Delhi to deal with the LTTE as a terrorist organisation arouse all kinds of passions and sentiments in Tamil Nadu and this would be most acute when the state is poised to go to polls. Thus, Delhi would have to proceed with due caution. As a major neighbour, India has a range of political, diplomatic, security and economic tools in its quiver and having burnt its fingers once, a calibrated long-term Sri  Lankan policy would have to be evolved.

 

Currently the Rajapakse government in Colombo appears to have an empathy deficit with the principal interlocutors in the global comity and Delhi could facilitate a greater understanding of the bloody mosaic that Sri Lanka has now become. The conceptual issue is the manner in which sub-nationalism that takes recourse to terrorism, and cancerous militancy as tools, can erode the credibility of the post colonial state in South Asia. This is a challenge that has the potential to affect the extended region.