28th December 1997

Sri Lankan Tamil problem is India’s

Here are excerpts of an interview over the phone with L. Ganesan, General Secretary of the Tamil Nadu unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the BJP’s current attitude towards the Eelam Tamil question and the LTTE.

Q: In Tamil Nadu today, a most incomprehensible electoral alliance has been struck, with hard core Dravidian parties like the AIADMK, PMK and the MDMK joining the “Hindu nationalist” BJP. Of these Dravidian parties the PMK and the MDMK are avowedly pro-LTTE. But the BJP, the leader of the pack has had little to do with the Lankan Tamil question and has never been known as being pro-LTTE. Is this an opportunistic line up to achieve a short term political goal, or is it a genuine ideological alliance?

A: The alliance is not opportunitic, meant to achieve a narrow political end. The only issue in the coming parliamentary elections is stability, which is a national necessity. The United Front minority government supported from the outside by the Congress (I) has been unstable..As a result, India’s image and its economy have taken a beating. The only remedy is to elect a government which will be stable. The BJP is the only party which can provide stability. The people of Tamil Nadu want stability and the alliance is a reflection of this.

Q: But the constituents of front have different views on key issues, including the Eelam and the LTTE. Will this not be an embarrassement? How can you close these gaps?

A: Differing on various issues is not an insurmountable barrier. The way out is not to raise the contentious issues. The alliance partners will avoid these issues in the campaign.

Q: What is the BJP’s stand on the Sri Lankan Tamil issue?

A: The BJP has not shut its eyes to the Sri Lankan Tamils issue, as many presume. The problem of the Sri Lankan Tamils is India’s problem also. We have thousands and thousands of Tamil refugees amidst us in Tamil Nadu.We share a culture with the Tamils there. And India and Sri Lanka are neighbours. We are interested in seeing that the Tamils there are not harassed and that they live happily and peacefully.

Q: What do you think the BJP can specifically do for the Sri Lankan Tamils?

A: Atal Behari Vajpayee is experienced in the conduct of foreign policy and knows the art of diplomacy. It was during his stewardship of the External Affairs Ministry during the Janata Party regime that relations with Pakistan improved. When Narasimha Rao was Prime Minister, he sent Mr. Vajpayee to Geneva to present India’s case on Kashmir, though he was in the opposition. We are confident that when he becomes Prime Minister, Mr. Vajpayee would be able to help solve the Lankan Tamil problem. He is well acquainted with the issues involved. In the eighties, he had attended the Madurai conference of the Tamil Eelam Supporters’ Organisation (TESO), organised by DMK leader M. Karunanidhi. Mr Vajpayee was one of the speakers at the conference.

Q: To be more specific, will the BJP support the armed struggle in Sri Lanka? Will it bring itself to support Tamil separatism there?

A: Let me make this very clear. The BJP does not believe in separatism and armed struggle. But we in India cannot tell the people of Sri Lanka how to solve their problem. The people of Sri Lanka are the best judges in so far as their problems are concerned.

Q: What is the BJP’s attitude towards the LTTE?

A: It is neither pro-LTTE nor anti-LTTE. It is for the Tamils of Sri Lanka to either support or reject the LTTE. Who are we to say no? As regards the role of the Indian government, it should be concerned about what is happening in Sri Lanka. But on no account should India get actively involved in Sri Lanka.

Q: The LTTE is demanding Eelam and it is the most powerful group among the Tamils in the island. What is the BJP’s stand on this?

A: The issue will have to be discussed later in Tamil Nadu, in detail, keeping in view all its ramifications.

Q: Will the Tamil separatist movement in Sri Lanka not trigger separatism in Tamil Nadu?

A: The BJP is committed to India’s unity and territorial integrity. But India is also a democratic country, in which people have the right to hold any view. We will oppose separatism politically, but at the same time, we will defend a person’s or group’s right to hold any view. We will fight separatism whether it is triggered by Eelam or any other influence.

Q: In the early nineties the PMK had organised conferences demanding that India’s ethnic groups be given the right to self-determination. How can you ally with such a dangerous group?

A: As I said, we will oppose separatism politically. National unity is the bedrock of the BJP’s ideology. But in a democracy, it is for the people to accept or reject a thesis. The PMK is a bonafide political party. It cannot be called dangerous. Our views differ, but they have rights to their views.

Hindu party aims at power, but way to go

By Sanjeev Miglani

BHUBANESHWAR, India, (Reuters) - India’s Hindu nationalists are looking good for next spring’s elections, but there still could be many a slip between cup and lip, political analysts said.

Perhaps closer to a secure mandate than ever before in its controversial history, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has backed a moderate leader, made deals with regional parties and struck a chord with the nationalism of corporate India.

“For four decades, we have been playing the game according to rules, but if we have to fight those who play foul, what are we supposed to do?” senior BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee said after a weekend election strategy session in the eastern city of Bhubaneshwar.

Vajpayee, a moderate in a party of not-a-few hardliners, is the BJP’s choice for prime minister.

Hindu nationalists demolishing Babri Mosjid

A string of alliances are being tied up with regional parties, including some with discredited leaders, to bolster the BJP’s presence in south and east India.

Along the way, the once-proud BJP has embraced political adversaries, opened doors to would-be defectors from rival parties and kept a tight leash on hardliners within.

“It’s not yet a home-run, far from it. In their heart of hearts, BJP leaders accept that without regional allies, they will fall far short,” said Mahesh Rangarajan, a fellow at New Delhi’s Centre for Contemporary Studies.

Eighteen months ago, the BJP ate humble pie after its first-ever government — a minority one — lasted 12 just days because no political group offered it support.

“We don’t want to be in a situation where, for lack of allies, we are prevented from power,” said Vajpayee, explaining his party’s new and almost frenzied pursuit of regional groups.

Early opinion polls suggest that the BJP will emerge ahead of the Congress and the 15-party United Front coalition, but still short of an outright majority.

The BJP rose from obscurity in the late 1980s by demanding the demolition of a controversial Moslem mosque in the holy Hindu town of Ayodhya. Since the mosque was razed in 1992, the BJP has become more of a secular force, but still has many opponents.

The Hindu nationalists still advocate an end to what they call a policy of appeasing minorities, a stand which fuels accusations of a bias against India’s roughly 120 million Moslems.

The BJP also advocates a militarily-strong India, including nuclear capabilities, and an end to special status for troubled Kashmir. The party opposes what it calls indiscriminate globalisation of the Indian economy.

BJP leaders made clear that while they would tone down the religious rhetoric because the agenda now was a stable and strong India, they were not about to give up their basic ideology.

“There is no question of surrender to minorities on Ayodhya, or Kashmir. We are not going to dilute our basic ideology,” said Uma Bharati, a hardline member of the party’s elite national executive.

“The BJP is working on two games. They will project a moderate pragmatism and keep the hardliners on a leash, but they have signalled to their basic constituency they will not compromise,” said analyst Rangarajan.

“The BJP’s tragedy is that it would like to dominate, but in the current fragmented political system, they have to deal with regional parties and interest groups, so there has to be some moderation,” he said.

The nationalists have also seized on India’s six-year-old economic reforms and said that such a programme would not continue as a “free-for-all”, once they got power.

The BJP would like internal reforms to move at a faster clip, but interests of domestic industry must be protected, particularly the smaller players.

Party leaders say that an economic blueprint, which is due to be formally released as part of an election manifesto next month, will attack what the BJP calls “one-way globalisation.”

Hardliners in the party say that so far, globalisation has meant India opening up its markets without winning reciprocal rights on markets abroad. - Reuters

Nuclear arms should have had their day

It’s almost exactly one year since General George Lee Butler made his confessional statement before the National Press Club in Washington that as commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Command which controls all navy and airforce nuclear weapons he’d had moral qualms and profound doubts about America’s possession of nuclear weapons. The speech triggered an avalanche of supportive phone calls and letters from all over the world. This led General Butler to conclude that he could “discern the makings of an emerging global consensus that the risks posed by nuclear weapons far outweigh the presumed benefits”.

Yet barely a month passed before General Butler realized that for all this initial enthusiasm the heavyweight critics in the political, military and journalistic establishments were not impressed. They had, he said later, “sniffed imperiously at the goal of elimination, aired their stock Cold War rhetoric, hurled a personal epithet or two and settled smugly back into their world of exaggerated threats and bygone enemies”. These were General Butler’s thoughts last Christmas.

Ms. Albright: "does not ask herself why the sauce that is good for the goose is not good for the gander"

To get them in perspective we need to cast back our thoughts to Christmas, 1950. President Harry Truman had just written in his diary that he feared World War III was imminent, as North Korean and Chinese troops threatened to plunge into South Korea. On Christmas Eve General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander of the UN force, sent Washington a list of targets for which he needed 34 atomic bombs.

Since then the world has come perilously close to nuclear war a number of times and the risk of accidental war has been drawn attention to not just by the peaceniks but by such illustrious Cold War warriors as senior Reagan arms advisors, Fred Ikle and Paul Nitze. The post Cold War era is even more dangerous than the actual one. It is increasingly evident that Russian missiles are ill-maintained and that the command and control system is not as secure as it was in Soviet times. Moreover, other countries, with less expertise and experience, are rapidly developing their nuclear arsenals. As General Butler has asked, “Will history judge that the Cold War was a sort of modern-day Trojan Horse, whereby nuclear weapons were smuggled into the life of the world and made an acceptable part of the way the world works?” We have been led, he says, to “think about the unthinkable, justify the unjustifiable and rationalize the irrational.”

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of our warped thinking is that nations cling to the impossible notion that at the same time they have the ability to threaten others with impunity they can tell the rest of the world that proliferation must be contained.

We saw this last week in Brussels when the American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright addressed her colleagues to the effect that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is “the most over-riding security interest of our time.” She went on to argue that the struggle to keep such weapons from falling into the wrong hands could be seen as the new “unifying threat” that binds the alliance in the twenty-first century.

But Ms. Albright does not ask herself why the sauce that is good for the goose is not good for the gander. What exactly is the U.S. doing, what exactly are its nuclear allies, Britain and France, doing to set a plausible example of the imperative to do away with weapons of mass destruction? The policeman has no moral authority if he is stealing and raping too.

President Bill Clinton loves to say at regular intervals, “for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there is not a single Russian missile pointed at America’s children.” This is an absurdly facile remark. Within minutes both Russia and the U.S. could program their missiles to aim at each other and could fire off 5,000 strategic missiles within half an hour. We live every day on a hair trigger and meanwhile negotiations about bringing these numbers down are stymied by and impasse in the Russian Duma whose parliamentarians refuse to ratify the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty (START 2), a political freeze that took hold when Senator Jesse Helms managed to delay ratification in the U.S. Senate.

The best ploy is to skate round this ice block. Clinton could start off a process of reciprocal unilateral action with President Boris Yeltsin - first, to take their nuclear missiles off their accident prone launch-on-warning posture. The U.S. should take the first step, since America’s second strike power is far superior to Russia’s - the U.S. has 2,000 invulnerable warheads on submarines at sea compared with Russia’s 200 mobile missiles.

Second, Washington should come to terms with the fact that Moscow is already engaged in a form of unilateral nuclear disarmament, albeit and unwilling one. Russian missiles almost literally are beginning to rust in their silos. Improperly mainta-ined,their condition is visibly deteriorating. Washington should offer to match this de facto unilateral disarmament with its own. These two initiatives would do much to loosen the deadlock in the Duma and get mainstream disarmament back on the fast track.

Until the process of U.S./Russian nuclear disarmament picks up speed it would be wiser if Washington shelved its rhetoric about nuclear proliferation. Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones - especially at Christmas.

(This column is syndicated to and appears today also in Bangkok Post, Boston Globe, Dawn, Japan Times, Los Angeles Times, Manila Chronicle, New Straits Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Statesman, Toronto Star and many other leading newspapers of the world.)

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