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India’s election fever, Sri Lanka’s headache
View(s):From the sidelines By Lasanda Kurukulasuriya
With one year to go for a general election expected to be held in May 2014,political parties in India seem to be gearing up into campaign mode already.
The stakes are high for the ruling Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), which has been shaken in recent months by the exit of two important coalition partners. The Trina mool Congress (TMC) led by Mamata Bannerjee, Chief Minister of West Bengal, abandoned them in September last year. More recently Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Khazhagam(DMK) of M. Karunanidhi,with its usual theatrics, left the coalition ostensibly over human rights issues of Tamils in Sri Lanka. The exit of these two parties reduced the UPA’s numbers in the Lok Sabha by 19 (TMC) and 18 (DMK) MPs respectively.
Reports say the UPA is now heavily dependent on 22 MPs of the Samajwad Party (SP) and 21 MPs of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) for ‘outside’ support to keep the alliance alive.The UPA majority in the 540 member Lok Sabha is described as ‘paper thin.’ The TMC and DMK, meanwhile,have been sendingout ambiguous and at times contradictory signals regarding the possible trajectory of their loyalties. ‘Catch-me-if-you-can’ seems to be the name of the game in the capricious and unpredictable world of Indian coalition politics.
In the run-up to his dramatic exit, Karunanidhi had ratcheted up the rhetoric over India’s stance on the US-sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka in the UN Human Rights Council. Insisting that it was not sufficiently condemnatory,he wanted India to push for the terminology of ‘genocide’ to be included in the resolution’s text. He also demanded that a resolution against Sri Lanka be adopted in the Indian Lok Sabha as a condition for continued DMK support in the UPA.On this side of the Palk Strait, Sri Lankans looked on in dismay as the pitch of the anti Sri Lanka rhetoricand demonstrations rose to hysterical levels. Sri Lankan nationals including Buddhist monks were attacked in Tamil Nadu.
Sri Lankans following these developments would have noticed a ‘disconnect’ between ground realities and the horrific scenes conjured up by Tamil Nadu politicians. The paroxysms of emotion displayed by DMK’s T.M. Selvaganapathy over what he called ‘genocide’ in Sri Lanka, during an edition of NDTV’s ‘India Decides’programme, was one example. An all-party meeting convened to ascertain the views of other political parties revealed that in actual fact there was no appetite for the adoption of a resolution against Sri Lanka in the Lok Sabha.All but the Tamil Nadu political parties were opposed to such a move and were of the view that foreign policy decisions should be left to the central government.
The view has been expressed in the media that the real reason for the DMK’s exit was not the Sri Lankan issue. The DMK sensed that the Congress Party was weakening and felt that it was better off outside the alliance when facing the next election, according to this view. Sri Lanka was merely the excuse for dumping the UPA. One columnist even speculated that the DMK’s departure was influenced by the imminent re-arrest of Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi over the 2G telecom scam:
“The DMK, which demanded a tough resolution against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council, was posturing. It had done nothing to help the Lankan Tamils for years” wrote Praful Bidwai in the ‘Daily Star.’
“The DMK’s real grouse was that its MPs, including its President M. Karunanidhi’s daughter K. Kanimozhi, were long detained for the telecom scam corruption. A new charge-sheet against Kanimozhi, soon expected, could lead to her re-arrest and attachment of her property.”
Be that as it may the competition between Tamil Nadu’s AIADMK and DMK parties continues apace, each trying to outdo the other with emotionally charged demonstrations of support for Sri Lanka’s Tamils. In a recent development, AIADMK leader and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha has expertly upstaged Karunanidhi, and at the same time hogged the media spotlight, with her decree banning Sri Lankan cricketers from taking part in any IPL tournament matches to be played in Tamil Nadu. The IPL attracts the kind of media attention that can be expected from India’s biggest sporting event. With its estimated audience of over a hundred million spectators and TV viewers, Jayalalithaa knew she couldn’t go wrong with such an attention-grabbing move.
It appears now that the UPA is not the only contender for alliance partners or for Tamil support at the 2014 general election. At a meeting in Chennai on Wednesday, a speech by a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) Yashwant Sinha signalled that issues of Tamils in Sri Lanka were no longer confined to Tamil Nadu but had now become fair game in a national election campaign as well.
The Rajya Sabha member in his address had praised the Tamil Nadu state unit of his party for spearheading a movement for Lankan Tamils. “If a BJP-led government comes to power, we will implement our policy,” he was reported as saying, in the Indian Express. In its tone and content this speech seemed to mimic the anti-Sri Lanka diatribes regularly delivered by the DMK and AIADMK.The BJP leader also picked up on the loose talk of ‘genocide’ that the Tamil Nadu parties have been propagating of late.This is in spite of his party having categorically refused to support a proposal to adopt a Lok Sabha resolution condemning Sri Lanka for ‘genocide,’ just two weeks ago.
The BJP is the biggest party in the opposition National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that will challenge the Congress-led UPA in the 2014 election. The emergence of Sri Lanka in the campaign rhetoric of a party such as the BJP would seem to take the Sri Lanka-bashing trend in India to a new level. The year ahead during the run up to the Indian election will, in all likelihood, produce more such rhetoric unpalatable to Colombo.
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