Srilanka - News And Discussion

[Guest]

<span style='color:blue'><b>SRI LANKA POST-LTTE</b>
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Subramanian Swamy

(fmr. Union Law Minister)



The outcome of the recent elections in Tamil Nadu has been the defeat of the most faithful of the LTTE touts in India. These financial orphans of the LTTE have been thoroughly exposed because Tamilians do not care for the LTTE, contrary to media projections. The common joke today is that ‘Puligal’ (Tigers) have been reduced to ‘Eligal’ (Rats) because they (the LTTE) have had to hide in holes in the ground to try save themselves.

But the end of LTTE does mean the end of Sri Lanka’s human rights crisis. The Sri Lanka crisis is the consequence of a festering wound from the past, which however fortunately, is neither malignant nor cancerous. The wound that has festered had been originally inflicted by the tactics of the British imperialists when to administer the colony that Sri Lanka had become, they relied on the Tamils of the island for the purpose, and also brought to the plantations indentured Tamil labourers to exploit the fields.


But, instead of sincerely brokering peace between the Tamils and Sinhalas to rectify justified grievances , the Indian government under the leadership of Mrs.Indira Gandhi decided to train the Tamil militants including the LTTE in various camps in India.


But the LTTE was a disloyal renegade from the very first day. The irrationally jealous Prabhakaran leading the LTTE snared in the Jaffna jungles and got assassinated the leaders of other militant Tamil outfits, and soon in the vacuum, the LTTE emerged as the main and dominant militant organization. In the classic pattern of guerilla organizations, the LTTE began to spread using the weapons of narco-terror and by buying influence using monetary means. The LTTE ferried Saddam Hussein’s illegal shipments of crude oil in their tankers using Panamanian and other dubious flags, drug-running for Afghans and Thais, weapons trade for the Sicilian mafia from Palermo in Italy and even antique smuggling for the highly placed in India. It became, through the ill-gotten funds, a purchaser of weapons in the grey and clandestine markets. The Tamil diaspora whose families were in Jaffna were subject to extortion, while some others romanticized their proximity to the ‘leader’ and paid handsomely for it later. Indian politicians, academicians, journalists, lawyers, and retired diplomats began receiving donations for speaking up for the LTTE and for denouncing the opponents of the LTTE.

Rajiv Gandhi tried to rectify that. The Indian government dispatched a 100,000 troops to the northern areas of Sri Lanka to safeguard the Tamils and get implemented on the ground the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord signed by Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister and Jayewardene as President of Sri Lanka. The LTTE disinformation machine by now well established went on an over drive with salacious stories of the atrocities of the Indian army. Their Indian stooges held rallies and published booklets within India to discredit the IPKF. Rajiv Gandhi, by now beleagured by the Bofors scandal and the betrayal of the new President of Sri Lanka, Premadasa who had entered into a pact to fund the LTTE, agreed to withdraw the IPKF in a phased manner. However, RG lost his party’s majority in the elections to Parliament in 1989, and his successor V.P.Singh whose allies openly supported the LTTE, immediately withdrew the IPKF. The LTTE, thus was portrayed in the anti-India media as having “defeated” the world’s third largest army, and thus acquired a larger than life image. It used it’s hero status with a vocal minority in Tamil Nadu who were LTTE’s large financial beneficiaries to build a network of supply chains within the Tamil Nadu state. They had access to hospitals for their injured cadre, supply of diesel, kerosene, and medicines for the Jaffna supporters, small arms manufacture units in Coimbatore, uniform stitching factory in Erode, and a modern wireless communication centre in Trichy. The second rank leaders of the LTTE traveled freely within the state in cars using the ruling DMK party flags to evade the police.

But the situation changed soon enough. The V.P.Singh government got toppled in 1990, and a government headed by Chandrashekhar took office. This author was the senior most Minister in that government and also perceived as the architect of the new government formation. Rajiv Gandhi extended his party’s support to the government. Within two months in office and under my supervision, the DMK government in the state was dismissed on the ground that there was collusion of the Chief Minister with the LTTE. The LTTE supply chain was thereafter destroyed.

The problem worsened for the LTTE with the declaration of mid-term elections to Parliament. The media hype, whether it was genuine, misinformed, or contrived disinformation, made out that Rajiv Gandhi would return with a majority in the elections, and become Prime Minister again. Having learnt of Rajiv Gandhi’s unguarded remarks that he would “fix” the LTTE once he returned to office, Prabhakaran set into motion a plan to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi.


But Prabhakaran needed two things to obtain, to carry out his assassination plan successfully. First was to ensure that RG came to Tamil Nadu to be accessible to the LTTE assassins, and second, some people (as allies) highly placed in India, and so powerful that the blame for the assassination would not be pinned on the LTTE.


These two pre-conditions were understandable since trusted Tamil speaking LTTE cadres could not move around secretly and freely anywhere in India except in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. Hence the assassination had to take place in Tamil Nadu.


But more importantly, seeing the popularity amongst Tamils of Chandrashekar government’s decision dismiss Karunanidhi’s state government, the LTTE could ill-afford the stigma of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. They had to have a powerful clique in India that could divert the investigative agencies from pursuing the LTTE as the suspects in the assassination.


The LTTE did succeed in getting Rajiv Gandhi to come to a convenient spot in Tamil Nadu on May 21, 1991 to be able to assassinate him. How that was arranged is known, even though during his earlier visit in April 1991 it was decided by Rajiv Gandhi not to return to campaign in Tamil Nadu. His tour programme, after it was decided and drawn up, was also not kept secret. What has not been investigated so far is whether there is a nexus between the LTTE wanting him in Tamil Nadu and those in Rajiv Gandhi’s close circle insisting on his going there. This is a matter that normally should have been investigated, but D.R. Kartikeyan of the Special Investigation Team [SIT] terms of reference was just to determine who or which agency killed Rajiv Gandhi. On that question he did a brilliant job, and merits the highest national award for it. But investigation of the conspiracy angle was outside his scope of inquiry.

The Commission, set up before I had demitted office as Union Law Minister, under a sitting senior judge of the Supreme Court, Justice J.S.Verma (later CJI) to go into the security lapses, came to the conclusion that the security arrangements were adequate, but that the Congress Party local leaders wantonly disrupted and broke these arrangements. The Commission urged further in-depth inquiry into it. The successor Narasimha Rao government declined to accept the recommendation, and the Report was shelved. Instead the pro-LTTE circle in India began to lobby for a new Commission to go into the conspiracy angle in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination. A Commission was indeed set up under Justice M.C.Jain, a retired former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court. The Commission soon became a circus and a platform for nefarious propaganda. The attempts to frame others became ridiculous. Recently the Madras High Court had to impose a fine of Rs.1 lakh on a Congress Party worker for filing a scurrilous PIL to demand a re-investigation into the assassination, holding that LTTE did not carry out the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi! But the motive then behind the inquisition by the Jain Commission was obvious—exonerate the LTTE by throwing up bogus leads and new accusations to unsettle the SIT probe being led by Kartikeyan, which probe was at an advanced stage of clinching the case against the LTTE. But the Supreme Court put an end to such mischievous attempts by holding in a 400 page judgment that the LTTE was the agency that killed Rajiv Gandhi on the direction of Prabhakaran. The assassin in chief is dead in the most demeaning of circumstances, the question of a wider conspiracy to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi is still open. The CBI-led body Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency[MDMA] is still investigating that aspect. But CBI's reputation today is in tattters.

Indeed the matter gets very intriguing when all the circumstantial evidences are put together. These are:

[1] Why and how was Rajiv Gandhi prevailed upon and by whom, to go back to Tamil Nadu to campaign when the then TNCC President, Vazhapadi Ramamurthy, the AIADMK leader and ally Ms.Jayalalitha, the TN Governor Bhisma Narayan Singh, and the Chandrashekhar government were all against it?

[2] How is it that not one Congress leader was in close enough proximity to Rajiv Gandhi [Verma Commission puts it as a circle within a diameter of 12 feet] to be killed or seriously injured at the detonation spot along with him ?

[3] On whose authority was the NSG restrained for 14 hours after reaching the site, from storming the hideout of the assassination mastermind Sivarasan and others in Bangalore till this murderous gang had committed suicide and could not sing for the authorities about the assassination?

[4] Why Ms.Sonia Gandhi wrote to President of India seeking setting aside the death sentence imposed by the Supreme Court on LTTE conspirators in the assassination, when Nehru did not for Godse and Rajiv Gandhi refused the pleas for Satwant Singh ?

[5] How is it defensible for the widow of Rajiv Gandhi to have an open political alliance with those who have acted at the behest of the LTTE such as the DMK, PMK, MDMK and the Dalit Panthers? The last three justify the assassination ! How can the awarding of one acre of land next to the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi and a donation of a lakh of rupees be justified for the Dravida Kazhagam (DK), which DK does have any presence in the Delhi area? Of the 26 convicted by the Trial Court in the assassination case, nine belong to the DK.

The Rajiv Gandhi assassination is an important question of national security for Indians because the LTTE was a foreign terrorist organization that killed our leader in our country, merely stating that because his policies were not to the LTTE's liking he had to be killed. Can we be safe if we allow such a terrorist organization to strike roots in our neighbourhood and have a terror infrastructure than can vitiate the democratic politics of India with money, narcotics, and plain murder?

The LTTE from day one has been part of the problem of the Tamil-Sinhala conflict, and not a part of the solution. Part of the problem is the inability of the Sinhala majority to share power with the Tamil minority. Such a sharing can be best done in a Constitution with sufficient devolution---by replacing the present unitary Sri Lankan one with a quasi-federal Indian type or fully federal US type.

Tamils and Sinhalas are one people. They have the same DNA structure. There is thus no ethnic difference between them. They all had originated in the Indian mainland and today speak sister languages, Sinhala and Tamil, with a large vocabulary in common with Sanskrit and Pali, both Indian languages. Their scripts have both evolved from the Brahmi script. Thus, there is no fundamental linguistic difference either. Their religions, Hinduism and Buddhism believe in the same distinguishing and fundamental theology of darshan, re-incarnation and karma. In fact, Buddhism began as a reform movement of Hinduism and these reforms have been absorbed by Hinduism. Hence, there is also fundamentally no religious difference between a Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Hindu.

The two communities grew apart during the colonial period because the Tamils had access to the British imperialist invaders, due to their earlier contacts with them on the Indian mainland. This gave the Tamils professional and educational advantages. The Sinhala majority upon getting Independence used their brute majority to try and close the gap by undemocratic equalization procedures and denying power to the Tamils by adopting a unitary constitution that had no safeguards for the Tamil minority. This of course backfired, in fact has landed Sri Lanka in to spiraling crisis.

The way out today, consistent with India’s national security aims, is for Sri Lanka to immediately adopt a Resolution in their Parliament to implement a devolved Constitution, and for India to assist liberally Sri Lanka since the LTTE insurgency menace is nowfinished off. The US, China and Israel, nations which can contribute for the implementation of this solution, must back India in this intervention. A word of praise for the resoluteness of President Rajapakse would also not be out of place. India must formally honour him for putting an end to the organisation that killed Rajiv Gandhi and so many democratic minded leaders. At this hour I remember also Gamini Dissanayake who was murdered by the LTTE merely for promising Indians Prabhakaran's extradition,