By N Sathiya Moorthy
Singh leadership did not yield to the DMK partner withdrawing support to the coalition government. It did not see Colombo through Chennai.
To the point, and again while condemning those attacks on the innocent inside Tamil Nadu, the episodes has brought out the ‘India links’ of the Sinhala-Buddhists in Sri Lanka as none over the past centuries has done. Whatever the reason, the Sri Lankan Governments over the past decades had not thought it fit or even necessary to underline the linkage, which could well have been as old as the time Emperor Ashoka’s children, Mahinda and Sangamitta, brought the religion to the island-nation, before Christendom.
For Indians, too, Buddhist pilgrimage to Bodygaya, for instance, could be next only to pilgrimage to Benares in its antiquity. Together, they might have been among the oldest of all periodic pilgrimages across the world. Sure enough, none in Tamil Nadu other than the railway porters and airline staff noticed such a huge pilgrim-traffic between the two countries. Time used to be when the ‘Boat Mail’ linked Colombo and Chennai (then Madras), with a ferry-service thrown in between, on a single ticket. A land-bridge between the two nations could do wonders, connecting not only the Tamils of Sri Lanka to Tamil Nadu, and the Sinhala-Buddhist pilgrims to Bodhgaya and the rest. It could link Sri Lanka not just to India or the rest of South Asia. It would link Sri Lanka to the entire Eurasian land-mass with its opportunities in trade and economic terms in particular.
The March 2013 UNHRC vote has proved that a Prime Minister in India (Manmohan Singh, in this case) was ready to put his job at stake to sustain bilateral relations with the southern neighbour. Much as the Indian vote at Geneva in two successive years may have been misunderstood in and by Colombo, the Singh leadership did not yield to the DMK partner withdrawing support to the coalition Government at one of the worst periods in its nine-year-long career, spread over two terms. It did not see Colombo through Chennai.
The complaint in Tamil Nadu is that New Delhi has always looked at Chennai thru Colombo, or had jumped Chennai to reach Colombo.
Truth be told, despite expressing anguish at the state of ‘war victims’ in the North during the run-up to the Geneva vote, Indian parliamentarians stopped with seeking a political solution to the ethnic issue, and for the Sri Lankan Government to stand by its war-time commitments to India on that count. Later, when it came to Indian Parliament passing a resolution that was harsher in its words and intent than the softened US resolution in Geneva, they stood as one in denying the Tamil Nadu polity the pleasure. The CPI, whose State unit sings a different tune, for instance, was among the parties that vetoed the move, along with the BJP and the spectrum of regional parties of which there is no dearth in India now.
It is thus for Sri Lankans to see India through Chennai. India’s foreign and security policies continue to be made in Delhi, nor Chennai. Given the complexities that India had avoided during nation-building – there was no war or violence at the time, just as there was none at Independence – the evolutionary process provides, justifiably, for the Centre considering the sentiments and sensitivities of the States ‘affected’ by such policies.
It is not just about political views and electoral possibilities. Under the Indian scheme, any problem at the ground-level, flowing from any unthinking policy of the Centre on such counts would still have to be borne by the State and the State Government concerned. The scheme thus provides for an accepted level of consultations and understanding, which is not in law but has become a meaningful tradition – just as it is there in the Centre informally consulting the State Governments before the President appoints Governors.
‘Tamil Nadu experience’
It is wrong for Sri Lankans to assume that Provincial Council polls in the Northern Province could be a stepping stone for ‘separation’. They can learn from the ‘Tamil Nadu experience’, where the DMK was a ‘separatist political party’ under the democratic scheme up to 1962. Attributed to the ban on separatist tendencies at the time of the ‘China War’, but actually smelling power after the more-than-modest achievements in the State Assembly elections that year, the DMK gave up separatism in favour of mainstreaming. The party and the breakaway AIADMK have not turned their back on that wise decision, since.
]The 21st century is not 20th century and the ghosts of the Eighties needed to be left behind, if Sri Lanka has to progress, and bilateral relations with India has to be on an even keel. Even on a matter as sensitive in Tamil Nadu as the ‘ethnic issue’ today, India ‘ceded’ Kachchativu to Sri Lanka in 1974, only three years after Colombo went back on the IAF help in putting down the ‘First JVP insurgency’ and allowed re-fuelling facilities for the Pakistan Air Force at the height of the ‘Bangladesh War’, only six months later in 1971. Nations need to think about the future. They need to think big. Sri Lanka needs to think of India beyond Tamil Nadu.
(The writer is Director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, the multi-disciplinary Indian public-policy think-tank for headquartered in New Delhi. gmail: sathiyam54@gmail.com )
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