Two new challenges on the foreign policy front await the newly elected government of India to be installed soon – in heaven-turned-hell Sri Lanka and the Himalayan state of Nepal.
BY J. SRI RAMAN
Truthout
INTERNATIONAL
Posted by Bulatlat
Two new challenges on the foreign policy front await the newly elected government of India to be installed soon – in heaven-turned-hell Sri Lanka and the Himalayan state of Nepal.
How India meets the challenges will depend on how its people vote in the five-phase, month-long general elections to end on May 13. It will depend on the share of power that the political camp of militarism will manage to acquire in the government to be formed by the first week of June.
Clear signals have already been sent out from this camp, with its friends in the foreign policy bureaucracy and beyond, about possible post-election moves. In neither of the cases can such New Delhi moves ease or improve situations involving the armed forces of neighboring nations in the wake of inordinately long and often savagely fought civil wars.
Sri Lanka, where traditionally the tourist is “welcome to Paradise,” is currently witness to an inferno of refuge camps on a coastal strip in the country’s north. While tens of thousands of internally displaced Tamils face an agonizing fate and an indefinite future of homelessness, we are being repeatedly assured that the war is almost at an end. Voices raised in India, however, hardly warrant hopes that peace is returning to “Paradise” at last.
Sri Lanka figures as an election issue in India, though only in the southern state of Tamilnadu. Pan-Tamil solidarity, however, played only a small part in the poll campaigns until the other day, as only minor political parties made a pitch for Eelam, as the Tamil rebels of Sri Lanka call the separate homeland they seek. The issue has acquired a less dismissible dimension after the surprising support for the separatist demand from a major state-level party.
The larger surprise is for the support coming from the party’s leader, known until then for staunch opposition to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the formidable rebel force reportedly facing a rout in the latest phase of the 25-year-old war that has seen many twists and turns.
J. Jayalalitha, one of the strong women of Indian politics, and her All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagan (AIADMK), a regional party despite its ambitious prefix, had thus far stood for a solution to the Tamil problem within a united Sri Lanka, while terming and treating the LTTE as a “terrorist” outfit and little more.
Addressing an election meeting on April 29, however, the same Jayalalitha said, “If a central (federal) government of my choice is formed, I will take steps to send our troops to Sri Lanka to form separate Eelam.” The statement cannot be dismissed as totally inconsequential because she and her party cannot be. Coalition rule has come to stay in New Delhi, giving regional parties and leaders a greater say in national policy formulation than some decades ago.
Expectedly, the statement drew flak, especially from the Congress Party heading the current ruling coalition in New Delhi. Party spokespersons saw ignorance of international law behind the “irresponsible” statement. She reacted by recalling that two former prime ministers of India, who had sent India’s army personnel into neighboring countries. Indira Gandhi sent the Indian army into erstwhile East Pakistan in a war that ended in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Rajiv Gandhi, Indira’s son, also sent an Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka in 1987.
While the creation of Bangladesh was widely welcomed as “national liberation,” India’s far right was ready even to deify Indira for dismembering Pakistan. As for the apparently more relevant example of the IPKF, it was formed and sent on its mission under an Indo-Sri Lankan accord with the stated aim of ending the civil war. While trying to enforce the terms of the accord, the force became embroiled in three-year-long hostilities with the LTTE. That broke forever the bonds between New Delhi and the Tigers led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, whom eminent members of India’s foreign policy establishment once used to call “our boys.”
Is Jayalalitha indulging in mere electoral claptrap? Or is she also speaking for a section of India’s security establishment extending beyond mandarins in the external affairs ministry?
The second possibility would appear to be quite strong, considering the observations of one of such semi-official security experts on India’s post-LTTE and post-Prabhakaran options, B. Raman, former head of the counterterrorism division of the famous and regionally feared Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s external espionage agency. He has argued for resumed Indian intervention in Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict. He makes no bones that he is pleading for a “Big Brother” role for India in regional affairs.
Writes he, “Let us not forget that ever since our independence in 1947, the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan, the Balochs and Sindhis of Pakistan and the Tamils of Sri Lanka have been India’s natural allies. It was this reality which persuaded Indira Gandhi to assist the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan to achieve their independence. Even though successive governments in New Delhi refrained from supporting the causes of the Sindhis and the Balochs, Indian public opinion sympathized and continues to sympathise with their cause.”
Raman continues, “It was sympathy for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause at New Delhi when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister and in Tamil Nadu, which induced India to take up their cause in the 1980s.”
He adds, “There is no reason why India should not pride itself and seek to be the paramount power of the region. To emerge and remain as the paramount power, we need natural allies in the region around us. We should not let the legitimate aspirations of our natural allies – whether they be the Sindhis and Balochs of Pakistan or the Sri Lankan Tamils – be crushed….”
Exploitation of ethnic conflicts around India’s empowerment is a line that a leader like Jayalalitha can be expected to pursue – if she comes to share power in New Delhi, especially with her known friends in the far right.
The political front of the far right, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is more forthright about its eagerness for intervention in Nepal in order to serve India’s interests as a regional superpower.
Recent events in Nepal – culminating in the resignation of Maoist Prime Minister Pushpa Kumar Dahal (better known by his nom de guerre of Prachanda) and threatening resumption of the Maoist-military confrontation – may be no matter of rejoicing to others. To the BJP, however, this would appear to present the perfect opportunity for the reversal of history made in the Himalayan nation over the past three years.
The extended far-right “family” (“parivar”), of which the party is a part, was disconsolate at the dethronement of hated monarch Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev. The BJP, which always had a special place in its heart for the world’s only “Hindu kingdom,” could not stomach the idea of Nepal as a “secular republic” either. And the party has entirely disapproved of the Maoists being given any place in a democracy.
It is no surprise that the security establishment of democratic India, along with the far right, is siding with sacked Nepal army chief Gen. Rookmangud Katawal in his confrontation with Prachanda. Just as it is natural for the vast majority of the people of Nepal, who struggled for democracy for over decade, to oppose the moves of a discredited army leadership as shown by the reported series of street protests in Kathmandu.
Katawal, too closely allied with Gyanandra to inspire popular confidence, has defied civilian authority on several counts. He violated a commitment made to parliamentary parties and the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) by ordering recruitment of new soldiers. He also went out of his way to pull the army out of the national games held last month in Kathmandu as the Maoist-affiliated People’s Liberation Army (PLA), awaiting integration into the army under UN supervision, participated in them.
Maoists have spoken of a “foreign hand” behind the events, and few Nepalese take this as anything but an allusion to India. The local media has reported a series of meetings in recent days between India’s Ambassador Rakesh Sood and Prachanda, in which the former reportedly counseled against Katawal’s removal. The close association with New Delhi of Katawal – a graduate of the Indian National Defence Academy and the Indian Military Academy, on whom the honorary title of a general of the Indian army was conferred in New Delhi in December 2007 – has also come in for much comment in this context.
New Delhi has denied any involvement in the affair, insisting that its only interest was in Nepal’s “peace process” through a consensus among the participants. India’s parliamentary left, which has played a role in this process, has stressed that Nepal should find a solution to the problem without any “external interference.”
The far right, however, could not disagree more furiously. The BJP said the events provided evidence of “the abject failure” of New Delhi’s “neighborhood policy.” Yashwant Sinha, external affairs minister in the party-led government of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, asserted that the official Nepal policy had been “outsourced” to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPI (M). Sinha has left little doubt that the policy will undergo a change if his party returned to shared power again.
Sri Lanka and Nepal do add to the stakes in India’s general elections for South Asian peace. (Posted by Bulatlat)
A freelance journalist and a peace activist in India, J. Sri Raman is the author of “Flashpoint” (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to Truthout.
