India shouldn’t forget its part in Sri Lanka’s conflict

By Neville de Silva

Newly appointed foreign minister Rohitha Bogollagama walked a well-trodden path. His first port of call was New Delhi. In recent times Sri Lankan leaders of varying political hues have trekked their way to India before turning west which was the habitual direction during much of the post-independence period.

So much so that a local newspaper once called what it saw as an act of obeisance “paying pooja to the Delhi maligawa.”

At least it could be said that Mr. Bogollagama’s visit had some justification because Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake was visiting India at this time and was due to meet Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Moreover the developing situation in Sri Lanka with the four Co-Chairs and the international community advocating caution, the government under a shadow over alleged complicity in child recruitment and civilian casualties of war, the new foreign minister not only had to make initial contact with the Delhi wallahs but also present the government’s case cogently. Whatever justification there might be for the present visit, the regular trips to New Delhi in recent times are in contrast to the 1970s when Sirimavo Bandaranaike was prime minister and Felix Dias Bandaranaike was virtual foreign minister shaping Sri Lankan foreign policy.

The new partnership that Sri Lanka developed at the time looking to China and Pakistan - the traditional enemies of New Delhi - was largely because of India’s intransigence over the problem of the people of Indian origin, one million of them, living in Sri Lanka and to a much lesser degree the territorial dispute over the islet of Kachchativu lying between India and Sri Lanka which was claimed by both. This burgeoning relationship initially forged as a counter to the shadow of India’s over powering presence hovering over Sri Lanka, led Mrs. Bandaranaike to allow Pakistani aircraft to refuel in Colombo on their way to and from what was east Pakistan and now Bangladesh during that war of liberation that culminated in the creation of Bangladesh in December 1971.
That policy in a sense paid off. Mrs. Bandaranaike and Lal Bahadur Shastri reached agreement on the future of the persons of Indian origin despite efforts by Indian diplomats and bureaucrats to scuttle that before and after the event.

Later Mrs. Bandaranaike and Indira Gandhi reached agreement on Kachchativu, India conceding the virtually uninhabited islet which had as its only standing structure a church dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua, if my memory serves me correct. I remember the second issue quite well because I interviewed Mrs. Bandaranaike halfway down the tarmac at Ratmalana airport (an act that would have earned me a few bullets in the back today) when she was about to leave for New Delhi to discuss the issue. But that’s another story.

Thereafter relations with India improved considerably, the two countries collaborating on many international issues in the non-aligned movement (NAM) and at the UN on topics such as the Indian Ocean Peace Zone, the Law of the Sea and international trade and economics. The real dip in relations came with the advent to power of Junius Richard Jayewardene’s United National Party in 1977. On pre-election platforms the UNP had compared Mrs. Bandaranaike’s rule, mostly under emergency, to that of Indira Gandhi and claimed that what happened to the Indian leader who was defeated at the general elections, would also happen to her Sri Lankan friend.

In the UNP’s haste-both JR and Ranasinghe Premadasa were guilty of this - to decry Mrs. Gandhi and recall the symbol of the “cow and calf” of the Congress Party, tangentially comparing Sirima Bandaranaike and son Anura to that image - it forgot an elementary principle of the democratic process.

While the UNP preached democracy from the platforms, it forgot that both the UNP and SLFP had been returned to power at elections and that the same could happen in India. Mrs. Gandhi never really forgave the insults hurled at by the UNP when she was back in power in New Delhi shortly after JR began to rule supreme in Colombo. The personal insults were compounded by a typically UNP foreign policy shift that leant precipitously to the west and particularly to the US. This despite efforts by such foreign policy advisers as Esmond Wickremesinghe, father of Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had signalled a stronger relationship with China in the UNP election manifesto. JR’s flirtations with the west and his readiness to lease out the old oil tank farm in Trincomalee to a company with links to the US defence department and later developing relations with Israel raised Mrs. Gandhi’s hackles. It was she who instigated and later implemented the policy of arming, training and funding Tamil militant groups including the LTTE. Naturally when the Indian news media first broke the story of Indian complicity in allowing anti-Sri Lankan militants to operate from Indian soil, it was hotly denied by New Delhi.

Much later official sources and evidence before the commission that inquired into the Rajiv Gandhi assassination by the Tigers, established conclusively India’s role as well as that of Tamil Nadu state, in arming and training Tamil militants to cause chaos in Sri Lanka including the killing of Tamil political leaders and well as government security forces and civilians.

If I quote extensively from Indian sources to prove India’s complicity in compounding the Tamil problem in Sri Lanka to the point that it has become a major terrorism issue with international ramifications, it is because it might be more credible if the proof of such treachery and condemnation came from the mouths of Indian commentators and those who were in the frontlines of diplomatic and military policy making.

“From the beginning of India’s involvement with militant Sri Lankan Tamil groups in 1981 until late 1993, its intelligence agencies were actively involved with, and in the promotion of, the LTTE; and for most of this period, the Congress was the ruling party,” wrote commentator Manvendra Singh in The Indian Express. Note that he says 1981. This is important as India and its apologists have tried to suggest that all this started after the 1983 anti-Tamil riots in the country which JR’s government did little to defuse in the first couple of days.

Former Indian High Commissioner Jotyndra Nath Dixit, who was posted in Colombo during a critical period of the LTTE war, cites numerous instances in his book ‘Assignment Colombo’, of the contacts between Indian government agencies and the LTTE even after the IPKF started operating in Sri Lanka. He explicitly states that no Indian agency, apart from the armed forces, conducted itself with honour and integrity during the entire involvement with the Tamil question.

“As a result, what we had in Sri Lanka was a mess and Delhi was neck-deep in what it had created. So we didn’t even know whether, first, information about the IPKF was being passed on to the LTTE, and secondly, how much help is given to them after all that has happened,” Singh quotes a serving officer as saying.

These observations from those who were players in this convoluted drama of duplicity, treachery and insidious interference in internal affairs, often roundly condemned by the very country that hectors others on such moral matters, scratch only the surfac of Indian involvement. Once considered the moral voice of the developing world, India’s murky domestic politics and its big power ambitions have contaminated that voice with the virus of terrorism that it cultured on its own soil.

One could understand India’s unwillingness to become involved in the Sri Lankan conflict as an interlocutor or even an outside player. Both its messy past and the realities of Tamil Nadu politics which is central to staying in power at the centre, make India shy away from such a role. But that should not mean that New Delhi should try to appear to balance the imperatives of a democratically elected government fighting an armed enemy killing indiscriminately and assassinating leaders with the urgings of an unelected, despotic armed leadership that denies its own people the freedom of choice and self determination it demands for itself.

Is that moral equivalence the correct lesson that the inheritors of the Mahatma’s philosophy preach today to the world and its own people? India has learnt the bitter lesson that there are some who bite the hand that fed them. Recent arrests in India and developments in Tamil Nadu show that they are ready to bite again and again. What India needs to pursue is not that false moral equivalence. It now needs to correct the damage it did to a small neighbouring state in the 1980s and 90s due to the personal pique of an arrogant leader.

India cannot wash its hands off that moral duty. If it does it cannot claim a place as it aims to do, in the pantheon world leaders.