It was Friday January 16. By the afternoon it had become clear that not only was Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh headed for major heart surgery but that he would no longer be able to handle the stressful Finance Ministry portfolio and present the interim budget slated for February.
After hectic consultations, Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi telephoned Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee: would you please handle the Finance portfolio till the PM got better?
The way the request was worded, Mukherjee had no option but to agree. One of the first things he did was to cancel all his foreign tours, obligatory as Foreign Minister: Mauritius, Moscow and some West Asian countries. The only engagement he elected to retain was an official visit to Bangladesh, his first after the election victory of Sheikh Hasina. A visit to Sri Lanka was nowhere on the horizon.
The PM was wheeled in for his operation which went off successfully. Even before that, the drumbeats of the war in North Sri Lanka had begun to have resonance in Tamil Nadu. Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi demanded that the government of India intervene to prevent the killing of civilian Tamils in Sri Lanka.
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| Karunanidhi: Politicising the Tamil issue |
It was the last warning to the centre, Karunanidhi thundered, fully mindful of the fact that the PM was going through serious surgery. Either the government acted; or it was curtains for the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's (DMK) support to the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition at the centre, he warned.
He also got the Tamil Nadu Asembly to pass a resolution condemning the killings of Tamils in Sri Lanka. He followed all this by calling UPA Chairman Sonia Gandhi to explain why something should be done.
The government seized upon it as a way to further Indian policy: 'exercising decisive influence without direct involvement' although they knew this was an empty threat because it was simply not tenable: if he had withdrawn support from the centre, the government would have gone into a minority; but if the Congress had withdrawn support to the DMK government in Tamil Nadu, it would have fallen, a risk the Chief Minister was obviously unprepared for.
Significantly, the government of India - and the government of Tamil Nadu - did not at any point voice the demand for a ceasefire in northern Sri Lanka. What they sought was an end to the killing of civilians.
One of the last consultations between Singh and Mukherjee before surgery was the issue of Sri Lanka. Mukherjee packed his bags and got ready to leave for Colombo, though he confessed to aides that he didn't know what he was going to do there, as "it is their internal matter".
But former Indian President R Venkatraman died of a brief illness the same day. As the seniormost minister in the government, Mukherjee quickly called a cabinet meeting to pass a condolence resolution and declare seven days' state mourning (only 10 ministers were present at the meeting). At 5 PM he was aboard a special plane for Colombo.
Mukherjee did only as much as was necessary. He met Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and other officials and returned to Delhi at 4 am the next morning. It was more important for him to be seen doing something than to actually do it. The India factor in the war in the North has to be seen in context. Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon on a visit to Colombo in January praised Sri Lanka's role in combating terrorism and characterized India-Sri Lanka relations as "having reached unprecedented level of depth and quality today" and "having withstood the test of time and adversity".
On another occasion during the same visit he described relations as "never so close, so warm and so deep". India's reaction to Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka's remark about "jokers" in Tamil nadu was just a thundering silence, followed by a quick apology by Lankan Defence Secretary Gothabaya Rajapakse.
But Karunanidhi has his own compulsions. These relate to the forthcoming general election. Although the DMK pulled off a stunning victory in a recent assembly by-election in the Thirumangalam constituency of Tamil Nadu (where the war was emphatically not on the agenda), he also told his party that unless the government intervened to stop Tamil killings in Sri Lanka, the DMK would lose the general election.
Thirumangalam, where the DMK candidate won by a margin of 39,000 votes - a massive margin for a provincial election - is nevertheless being viewed as a flash in the pan. Because voting out a party wholesale - lock, stock and barrel - is a kind of political tradition in successive general elections.
And this is not the only thing worrying the Chief Minister. The year 2006 marked Muthuvel Karunanidhi's fifth term as party leader and chief minister. Now 84, Karunanidhi, is in the process of creating a succession plan. The DMK he has created is a huge, well-oiled machinery with investments in television, cinema, newspapers, real estate etc. Who will inherit all this?
His two sons from two of his three wives are at loggerheads with each other. He has kissed and made up with his nephews, the two Maran brothers, Dayanidhi and Kalanidhi. But the peace is fragile. His daughter, his youngest child, Kanimozhi, is an MP, a feminist and a poetess, but also ambitious and keen to establish herself in Tamil Nadu politics.
The DMK came to power in the state forging together a complex coalition that has since broken down. The Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), while being an ally of the Congress, has walked out of the Democratic Front. So have the Left parties, for years, partners of the DMK and angry at the DMK's equivocation on the issue of the Indo-US Civil Nuclear agreement. They have tied up with Jayalalithaa's All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).
Though the Left parties might not win too many seats in Tamil Nadu, they have organization strength left, enough to swing a 60 percent victory into 100 percent victory in some parts of the state. If these alliances do not hold, it may be hard for the DMK to extrapolate its assembly victory in the general elections.
The AIADMK's performance in the state elections was nothing to sneer about. It got 61 seats out of a total 225. The assembly election also saw many new entrants on the political scene in Tamil Nadu - the Desiya Murpokku Dravidar Kazhagam (DMDK) led by actor Vijayakanth, and the All India Samathuva Makkal Katchi (AISMK) led by another actor Sarath Kumar. Both have since invoked the legacy of late the M G Ramachandran and are now expected to damage AIADMK.
Since then, in two byelections, the AIADMK has come a distant third
yielding to DMK and Vijayakanth's DMDK.
In other words, the electoral contest in Tamil Nadu is no longer what it used to be. Political actors in the state have been masters at coalition management. But in the Lok Sabha elections in 2009, Tamil Nadu is going to be the most unpredictable of all states.
Will the DMK still be around in the shape, size, and ideological composition that it is today? The DMK's record of governance has by no means been unmarred. The power situation in the state continues to be grim. In a time of slowdown, what used to be a force multiplier for Tamil Nadu - rapid industrialization - has become an albatross. Tamil Nadu is one of the most industrialized states in India. But workers are being laid off in large numbers. Sugarcane farmers are facing a rough time at a time there is a glut of the sweet commodity in the world.
If all this were to add up, it would spell crisis for Karunanidhi. To stave that off, he is raising the issue of Tamils in Lanka, but very much within the foreign policy parameters. Karunanidhi reckons that if he ensures his party occupies the space for ruling party as well as Tamil Opposition, he will have effectively sealed off any threats to his party in the general election. So far, there has been one self-immolation on the Tamil issue but no indication of widespread people's action. If that happens, the Indian as well as Sri Lankan governments are going to have a problem on their hands.
* General Ashok K. Mehta served in Sri Lanka with the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) from July 1988 until March 1990. He was one of the last generals to set sail from Sri Lanka in March 1990. After his retirement in 1991, he became a defence analyst and columnist for several publications. |
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