Thoughts from London

Flawed perspectives and the road to talks
So President Rajapakse who hoped to step foot in Chennai to meet Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha Jayaram has had to abandon it. No surprise there.

A news report on President Rajapakse’s visit to New Delhi had an Indian spokesman saying that Chennai was out as the visiting president was going to be busy in the Indian capital and the Tamil Nadu boss was not available on that day.

Ha ha! I wonder whether the media at the briefing thought of asking the Indian official why Jayalalitha was suddenly not available. After all presidential programmes are not arranged overnight and are not changed at one’s whims and fancies – unless of course you were Chandrika Kumaratunga on a state visit to China.

The truth surely is that some Tamil Nadu parties, including those in India’s ruling coalition, were planning to demonstrate against the president’s visit to Chennai and whip up anti-Sri Lankan Government sentiments in a state that had provided overt and covert support to the LTTE and probably still does.

Jayalalitha, who had on more than one occasion urged New Delhi to act tougher against the Tigers, found herself in an embarrassing situation.
With the Tamil Nadu state elections due in about three months, she could not be seen entertaining the Sri Lankan president who has been characterised as a “hawk” and “hardliner” and not amenable to Tamil aspirations as perceived by some of the parties in that southern state.
Had she consented to a meeting, it would surely have been used on every platform between now and the elections.

Jayalalitha, who had been called by some as the Imelda Marcos of India, was not going to jeopardise her chances at the polls by hobnobbing with the President, if not with that meaninglessly large retinue that accompanied him to New Delhi.

Unlike politicians of old, many of today’s politicians and their close advisers are too busy feathering their nests and those of their kith and kin to read, listen and accumulate knowledge, particularly of the world outside.
Otherwise how could you have a president -- and parties and individuals backing him -- blithely saying publicly that they would ask India to play a much more pro-active role in furthering the peace process?

To ask India to do so in private talks or through diplomatic channels is one thing. To announce one’s intentions virtually from the rooftops is to show a stunning naiveté. Had President Rajapakse been blessed with advisers more skilful and endowed with a greater understanding of the art of diplomacy, we might have been saved the flawed perspectives on which foreign policy is now being shaped.

The first error is not to see the critical changes that Indian politics have undergone. If one might use the words of W. B. Yeats written on another occasion “Things fall apart: The centre cannot hold” to describe the political changes in India.For most of its 50-odd years of independence India had been ruled by the Congress Party that drew its sustenance from the independence struggle and such towering personalities as Jawaharlal Nehru who were at the centre of it.

The Congress Party had a nationwide appeal with nationally-accepted leaders. No other party in post-independence India commanded that national respect.

The trouble began with the second generation of the Nehru dynasty in the 1970s and 80s when under the imperious Indira Gandhi fissures emerged in the Congress leading to unbridgeable splits.

This led to a loosening of the centre’s grip on political power and the rise of regional parties from Telugu Desam to the DMK and ADMK in Tamil Nadu.
The result is that no ‘national’ party has been able to come to power without a coalition of political forces from the regions.

Former EROS leader V. Balakumar, now an LTTE frontliner, was correct when he referred in a recent interview to the changing political face of India.

So even the ruling Congress today is dependent on the political support of regional forces to retain power. Rajiv Gandhi, the husband of the Congress president Sonia Gandhi, might have been assassinated by the LTTE. But the days when Sri Lanka could expect the Congress Party to advocate a strong stance against the LTTE has been increasingly undermined by its dependence on Tamil Nadu support.

Just as much as Sri Lankan internal politics (heaven help us!) is determined by alignments and realignments merely in order to win or stay in power, Indian politics is also determined by domestic compulsions.

If that reality is recognised then it would be surely foolhardy to make the intention of urging India to play a more meaningful role (from a Sri Lanka perspective) in the peace process so very public-virtually at every turn.
On the one hand it places New Delhi in a very embarrassing situation, which is not what we should be doing. On the other, it exposes shortcomings in our own critical thinking.

If India is to be engaged in safeguarding Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity, then it would be more meaningful to do it through economic partnership. That is to say provide greater facilities for India in the northeast, principally Trincomalee and in the northwestern Gulf of Mannar for oil explorations.

Such economic interests would require India to provide greater naval surveillance and even induct additional naval craft to safeguard its interests from sabotage and perhaps help in controlling arms smuggling. But would Sri Lanka be ready to do that without being considered a vassal.

The other short-sighted approach was to try and eliminate Erik Solheim from the peace process. However, much one might dislike Norwegian facilitation and Solheim’s seemingly biased approach, to suggest to the Norwegian Government that he should be sidelined, was reckless.

The current Norwegian Government is also a coalition of political forces and Solheim is a part of that. No self-respecting government would agree to drop one of its own ministers simply to accommodate Sri Lanka.
Colombo should have tried to capitalise on the EU’s growing antagonism towards the LTTE to try and secure its ban. Right now the blocking moves in the EU are coming from two of Norway’s friends in the Union: Sweden and Denmark.

It would have been far more profitable and realistic to try and win over Norway, now that the LTTE has provided Colombo with a psychological advantage by thumbing its nose at the international community, than try to isolate one of its own ministers.

Norway would have realised by now that its offer of carrots to the Tigers has not been successful. Some other EU members and the co-chairs are increasingly becoming irritated by the LTTE’s recalcitrance.

In the circumstances, as the international image of the LTTE becomes more tarnished, the approach should be to help Norway realise that it was painfully wrong about the Tigers and to urge it to stop the blocking moves in the EU made through its friends in the Nordic Council.

The media and analysts could continue to expose the real role of Norway in this seemingly intractable conflict. But governments need to be far more diplomatic and far-sighted in their bilateral and multilateral dealings, especially if they are small countries that lack political and economic clout.
There is one other issue. President Rajapakse could checkmate the LTTE without squabbling over a venue. Let him agree to Oslo. But demand a quidpro quo so that he will not be seen to concede too much.

Ask the LTTE to reaffirm its commitment publicly to the Oslo Declaration — a statement, in which both sides undertook to look at a federal solution within a united Sri Lanka. So it could still be Oslo with the LTTE’s public avowal of the Oslo declaration.

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