Lankan Tamils no more a poll plank in Tamil Nadu

KP Nayar

Strategic Analyst

Last week’s Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu were a turning point in freeing foreign policy from being held hostage to state politics and narrow ethnic chauvinism. These were the first elections in Tamil Nadu in 40 years in which Sri Lanka was not even a bit of any poll plank. The Tamil problem across the Palk Strait in Jaffna did not figure in any campaign speeches by the main aspirants to offices in Fort St George, the seat of the Tamil Nadu government.

This was a sea change from the time politicians in Tamil Nadu effectively undermined the India-Sri Lanka Agreement of July 29, 1987 reached between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lanka's President JR Jayewardene and undercut the Indian Army, which subsequently operated in Sri Lanka under the banner of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF).

Rajiv Gandhi had taken into confidence MG Ramachandran, then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu on the agreement with Jayewardene. Moreover, as an insurance against the agreement collapsing, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was persuaded to give commitments to MGR that the LTTE would fulfil its part of the bargain in that accord. As it turned out, Velupillai Prabhakaran, the founder of Tamil Tigers, had no intention of sticking to the accord. No sooner had the ink dried on the Rajiv-JRJ agreement that Prabhakaran resorted to large-scale violence and terrorism to achieve his objective of a separate Tamil state.

MGR’s death, five months after the India-Sri Lanka Agreement, led to free-for-all among Tamil Nadu politicians from all state parties in seeking control of India’s Sri Lanka policy. For the first time in independent India, the Central government surrendered to regional politicians on a matter of external affairs. Since then, it has been a downhill journey under successive governments.

When the UPA government was in power, the contortions it went through before a UN vote in Geneva on Sri Lanka’s human rights record was a mockery of the Central government’s prerogatives on foreign policy. The DMK effectively usurped that role. Similarly, the Central government surrendered to Mamata Banerjee on Teesta waters after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was all set to sign a water sharing agreement with Bangladesh during his visit to Dhaka. The signature had to be aborted.

In the same vein, Singh had to cancel a visit to the UAE after an Indian fisherman was fatally shot and three others injured off the UAE coast by an American naval ship, USNS Rappahannock in 2012. The US ship got away without taking any responsibility for the wanton killing. The most notorious case in this class was when India's relations with Italy were put in serious jeopardy by the total mishandling of a similar incident of an Italian oil tanker firing and killing two Kerala fishermen. The Central government surrendered to Kerala’s Congress-led government in this case.

Traditionally, even courts in India have acknowledged the authority of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to practice diplomacy in national interest without being hamstrung by regional considerations or narrow political exigencies. Until the Central government’s ham-handed approach to the Italian tanker Enrica Lexie incident, courts generally acceded to MEA requests which would help overcome roadblocks to its practice of diplomacy.

Such a scenario is not peculiar to India. In a landmark case in the US, the exclusive authority of the federal government in Washington to conduct foreign policy was challenged by Massachusetts through a 1996 state law prohibiting trade with Myanmar. In 2000, the US Supreme Court struck down the state legislation and upheld the federal government’s sole authority in such matters. No country can practice credible diplomacy if its external affairs are subject to parochial pulls and pressures to a point where meaningful foreign policy becomes redundant. That was the case in Tamil Nadu since Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka found fertile ground there in the 1980s.

It is now a distant memory that when the Indian forces wound up their Sri Lanka operations on March 31, 1990 and the last IPKF contingent came home to what was then Madras, it was insulted and there was no gratitude to the force which had sacrificed hundreds of its men in the Sri Lanka operation. Never mind the politics of the Rajiv-JRJ accord, these were members of the Indian Army. In popular descriptions, the IPKF had come to be known in Tamil Nadu as the “Indian Tamil Killing Force”.

By then, M Karunanidhi had become the Chief Minister. He continued MGR’s policy of providing financial and logistical support to the LTTE, even though the Indian Army was fighting the very

Tamil Tigers on the island nation. LTTE cadres who were injured in fighting Indians were freely smuggled into Tamil Nadu and offered free treatment in state hospitals. Tamil Nadu had become a state within the Indian state on matters of Sri Lanka policy.

How did a sweeping change come about that the Sri Lankan Tamil problem was not a campaign issue in the current elections to the Tamil Nadu Assembly? Like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, throughout his political career, Narendra Modi as Prime Minister has been firm that regional parties should not be permitted to meddle in matters which are solely the preserve of the Union government, such as foreign policy and defence. Second, unlike Manmohan Singh, Modi is not dependent on support from any Tamil party for his survival in office.

Besides, the Sinhala-dominated Sri Lankan government has decisively crushed Tamil separatism on the island, but in the long run, this can be a double-edged sword. That is obvious from the considerations which went into India’s abstention from the vote on a resolution on Sri Lanka in the UN Human Rights Council last month. With the poll campaign in Tamil Nadu in full swing, most people expected Modi to support the resolution which the Sinhalas rejected from the start.

But in an assertion of the MEA’s regained autonomy on policy choices, India opted for abstention. It is an acknowledgement that India is uniquely placed as an external factor in Sri Lankan affairs and that it must, therefore, stand aside from other international powers on Sri Lankan reconciliation, power sharing with Tamils and devolution for the island’s minorities.

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