Time to Leave

Akbar Krishna

WHY are we in Sri Lanka? To hear it from the glib avatars of realpolitik on the cocktail circuit of New Delhi, we are pursuing our strategic interests there. India had to decisively end the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka; otherwise Colombo would have been, indeed was, tempted to invite others in to help them to do it. We would have had Pakistan training the Sri Lankan army, American companies exploring for oil off the Lankan coast, and Trincomalee reduced to a western base. 'Indian interests' would have suffered.

So instead, we are busy annihilating the Tamil force we had helped create, arm and train, in order to force them by war to make peace with someone else. And in the process of frying this particular omelette we are breaking a number of eggs; reducing much of northern and eastern Sri Lanka to rubble; taking the lives of people our soldiers had gone there to protect; losing the hold we have always had on their hearts and minds. As our own country reels in the grip of one of the worst droughts of the century, our national exchequer rains five crores of rupees a day into the effort to establish a Pax Indica on the teardrop island off our shores.

What for? The explanations of the government's critics have ranged from the naive to the cynical. I do not believe our prime minister suffers from a chronic addiction to unworkable accords. as some suggest. Nor am I convinced he was grasping at a foreign straw to pull him out of the domestic quicksand into which he seemed to be sinking. No I think that New Delhi decided, no doubt reluctantly, to follow Kautilya rather than Rama; our incursion into Lankan affairs reflects South Block's view of the imperatives of statecraft rather than Racecourse Road's of the exigencies of politics.

Four-and-a-half years ago I suggested that Delhi was never likely to intervene militarily in favour of the Tamils; if anything, our calculations would place us, unlike in 1971, over Bangladesh, on Colombo's side of the argument. I feel no satisfaction in having been proved right.

But for all the cold logic of our position, there is no doubting that, to an increasing minority of thinking Indians, our intervention in pursuit of that position is indefensible. It was arguably time for us to wash our hands off the short-sighted intransigents of the LTTE and to wish Colombo luck and diplomatic support in its attempts to reassert Sri Lankan national unity—but not for Indian jawans to shed their blood to attain this end.

O.V. Vijayan, a fine and insightful observer of our times, suggested the Lankan venture was the last thrust of the Aryan incursion into the Dravidian South. But there was nothing Dravidian about the retired general I met in Delhi who bitterly described the IPKF as the Innocent People Killing Force; about the father who spoke to me of the anguish of his son, an army captain, at seeing his comrades hunting down people they had themselves trained; of the retired ambassador who told me he would have been ashamed to be defending this policy in an international forum today. These were all North Indians, scions of Aryavrata, and they were saddened and disillusioned by our hollow victories over Prabhakaran's rakshasas.

Make no mistake, these words are not intended to cast any aspersions on the courage and valour of the Indian soldiers who are so bravely fighting today in Sri Lanka. But they are meant to question the judgement and morality of the policy-makers who sent them there. There was a time, not so long ago, when India's foreign policy spokesmen boasted that our international role emerged from our national values and cultural traditions; that India's foreign policy was legacy of the Hindu precepts and Buddhist ethics which had given us the ahimsa and satyagraha of our freedom struggle. Nehru even attributed non-alignment to atavism; `there was no cold war', he explained, in Asoka's heart'.

Of course, all this probably had as much to do with the rhetorical flourishes of new orators of the world stage as with any real policy assumptions. But the assertion of an ethical international position did at least accord with the national self-image of Indians; it gave to the country's often ineffective external policies a moral legitimacy that guaranteed their acceptance. Foreign policy in India was elevated to an historically-sanctified expression of the country's innate genius, and it rapidly acquired an impressive political consensus.

The Sri Lankan adventure threatens that consensus as nothing before. It does so not merely because the killing of Tamils in Sri Lanka risks mortally offending the Tamils of India, a prospect made all the more likely by MGR's death. The campaign also imposes a strain on the national treasury that will become increasingly difficult to sustain.

The primary duty of an Indian government is to meet the needs of the Indian people. Instead, our military expenditure on Sri Lanka is soaring at a time when Colombo has cheerfully slashed (for the first time in ten years) its spending on the army by 37 per cent and its overall defence allocations by 13.5 per cent. While anti-Indian vitriol corrodes both Sinhalese and Tamil opinion, President Jayawardene proudly tells his compatriots that Indian soldiers are now dying instead of Sri Lankans.

No Indian government can indefinitely divert resources from development to war unless the broad mass of the people are convinced that the war is vital to their own survival. And this they will not be, because as the death-toll mounts and domestic inflation rises and the government seems to have less and less money and time to devote to the needs of the people, they will begin to question the war. And no amount of slick talk about strategic goals, or about Pakistanis or Americans, will convince them that India should be expending precious resources, lives and fraternal goodwill by intruding into somebody else's quarrel.

In Bangladesh we at least had the moral argument; we were intervening on behalf of the oppressed, the victims of exploitation and attempted intellectual genocide. In Sri Lanka we have placed expediency above ethics, and defined our national interest without reference to the interests of our nationals.

In the end, such a policy can never succeed. Let us pull out in honour before we are forced to do so in disgrace.