Extract from the book At the height of the Sri Lankan crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, all the major players in that country accused India of attempting to destabilize its smaller neighbour by arming Tamil separatists. And they continued to hold on to this belief through all the finger-pointing and accusations that followed. So [...]

Sunday Times 2

The Tamil Card—Strategy or Blunder?

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Extract from the book
At the height of the Sri Lankan crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, all the major players in that country accused India of attempting to destabilize its smaller neighbour by arming Tamil separatists. And they continued to hold on to this belief through all the finger-pointing and accusations that followed. So the central question that must be addressed is this: Why did India under Indira Gandhi prepare for a covert intervention, only for her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, to abandon the Tamil card and, by accident or design, turn a strategic asset into an enemy?

Was India’s Sri Lanka policy driven by these two Indian leaders personally? Or was it their advisers who altered their thinking on this unquiet island and, once that happened, sent relations between the two countries into a downward spiral?

Clearly, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi lived in different times and were governed by vastly differing strategic imperatives. They were also two individuals who looked at foreign policy through different prisms. Either way, history would show that neither of the paths chosen by the two leaders fully served Indian interests.

One talked war but never waged it; the other talked peace but went to war.
In the long run, arming the Tamil insurgents would prove to be counter-productive as it gave angry young Tamil men and women who had an axe to grind against the Sinhalas access to arms and weaponry they would not have had otherwise.
India failed to factor in that even if it shut off the arms tap, the Tamils had enough middlemen—Sri Lankan Tamil, Indian and foreign—to procure weapons through alternative sources.

Leaving the Tamil insurgents stranded, without the promised Tamil Eelam and with a province instead of a nation, alienated not just the Tamils—whose cause Delhi claimed it was espousing—but the Sri Lankan majoritarian polity as well. The overt Indian military intervention only served to reinforce the suspicions of an already wary Sinhala community that India was not there to play honest broker, but was preparing to midwife a de facto Tamil state.

Today, India–Sri Lanka relations are picking up after nearly forty years of mutual suspicion fuelled by one self-inflicted wound after another. But even six years after the LTTE was annihilated by the Mahinda Rajapaksa government in May 2009, Colombo was unable to fully embrace Delhi, at least not until the present government’s new power trio—President Maithripala Sirisena, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga—recognized the perils of not having India fight their corner, especially when they were facing an international community more than ready to try them for war crimes.

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