Passage to India

President Mahinda Rajapaksa left for India yesterday, ostensibly to chair the meeting of the South Asian local government councillors, but more significantly for another round of talks with Indian leaders on the prevailing situation in Sri Lanka due to the northern insurgency.

It's not the same warm welcome he would be getting this time. The last time, he was viewed as a 'hard-line' President, but still, due to the fact that he was wearing the crown of a fresh mandate from the people of Sri Lanka, he was well received. At the time, in fact, even sections of the Tamil Nadu polity seemed to prefer him to his defeated opponent Ranil Wickremesinghe, exactly for the reason that they believed he would put the LTTE in its place.

A year later, however, tables have turned. The Tamil Nadu Establishment has changed hands -- a humanitarian crisis in northern Sri Lanka has overflowed into southern India -- and Tamil Nadu leaders have prevailed upon the Central Government headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to give the President a knock on his head for being a bad boy, while local councillors are threatening to keep away in protest, from the meeting he will chair at Dehradun tomorrow.

On the eve of his departure, New Delhi despatched its new Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon just to give the President a gentle reminder of what message awaits him in the Indian capital. Not to be outdone, the President has briefed the media of what he had told Mr. Menon in return.

His message seems to have been that India too has a major role to play in bringing this two decade and continuing insurgency to an amicable end. Also, that they must help in minimising cross-border terrorism and that the complete breakdown in the distribution of food in the northern Jaffna Peninsula is not entirely due to the Government's fault, but due to the LTTE demanding that private traders put up shutters, so that they can engineer a food shortage and trigger a larger exodus to Tamil Nadu -- thereby getting the Tamil Nadu political lobby to apply greater pressure on the Prime Minister whose Government depends quite heavily on Tamil Nadu support just to survive.

There is no purpose in labouring over the fact that India in general and Tamil Nadu in particular were the culprits behind nurturing the Tamil secession movement in Sri Lanka. It was meant to be a limited exercise, just to keep Sri Lanka simmering and suffering -- not that it was meant to ensure the Tamil secessionist movement succeeded, for that would have revived pan-Tamil sentiments in Tamil Nadu, causing irreparable damage to India's own sovereignty.

What is amazing is the fact that real-politik has so enveloped New Delhi, that not even the fact that the LTTE has been found guilty of murdering the husband of India's power-behind-the-throne is sufficient for India to be moved to wipe out terrorism in Sri Lanka.

Under intense pressure last week by these same Tamil Nadu politicians, Mr. Singh has said that India's support to Sri Lanka is only by way of "non-lethal weapons", so that the much maligned Sri Lankan military cannot kill Tamils with whatever India has given. Does Mr. Singh know how many Tamils have been killed by the LTTE? The Tamil Nadu politicians surely cannot be unaware. Their own soil has seen Sri Lankan Tamils being killed by Sri Lankan Tamils.

Undoubtedly, President Rajapaksa has been unable to literally 'deliver the goods' to the unfortunate Jaffna people, who are faced with terrible shortages. If you want to have One Country, you cannot starve any one geographic area -- and then simply put the blame on the LTTE.

The Indian Government is also shedding crocodile tears without taking any really meaningful measures to alleviate the sufferings of these people trapped in a situation such as they are in -- and we don't think dropping lentils from aircraft would be the answer. Giving lectures on devolution knowing jolly well that the secessionists are not one bit interested in any devolution, also serves little purpose in this climate.

India forced a devolution package down Sri Lanka's throat in 1987, and the country is still living with something stuck in its throat. President Rajapaksa must not go to New Delhi to get a dressing down from a nation that is so mixed-up that they themselves don't know how to handle the situation they created in Sri Lanka. Even in the height of their involvement in Sri Lanka, while the poor jawans of the IPKF were hunting the Tiger, its Intelligence arm, RAW, was running with the Tiger. While he has so many matters he himself must sort out, he must tell India to make up its own mind and say clearly if they want terrorism eliminated or they don't mind a little bit of it as long as it is in their neighbourhood destabilising "Them not Us".