Despite appearances to the contrary, Chief Minister Muthuvel
Karunanidhi's policies in relation to the struggle for Tamil Eelam have
always been within the frame work of New Delhi's policies - and therefore
Mr.Karunanidhi has not said anything new.
In the early1980s, Mr.Karunanidhi voiced
concern about the Tamil struggle within the frame of
Indira Gandhi's interventionist role. At that time he
built relations with New Delhi's favoured militant group,
TELO. Later when
New Delhi's approach changed, Mr.Karunanidhi also
changed. At a meeting with a Gandhian organisation in New
Delhi in 1984, a north Indian peace activist bitingly
remarked to a Tamil lobbying group - "Do not imagine that
you have the support of Mr.Karunanidhi. Please remember that
when Indira Gandhi tells Mr.Karunanidhi to stop, the barking
will stop." He added, "Indira Gandhi has enough ammunition
to make Mr.Karunanidhi stop." And, Mr.Karunanidhi's
interventions with New Delhi during the period of the IPKF
must be considered in the context of the relations that New
Delhi sought to maintain with the LTTE even as the conflict
between the LTTE and the IPKF raged in Tamil Eelam.
J.N.Dixit (who served as Indian High Commissioner in Colombo
during the period of the IPKF in Tamil Eelam) reports in
Assignment Colombo -
"... (Though) Rajiv Gandhi wanted to be firm with the LTTE,
he had an equally greater concern to see that he does not have a completely
antagonistic government in Tamil Nadu. It is in this context that he agreed
to the suggestion made by Anand Verma of the Cabinet Secretariat that he
should be allowed to keep in touch with the LTTE leadership as well as with
Jayewardene through back channels to see if LTTE could not be
persuaded to abide by the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement..."
Mr.Karunanidhi
has not been slow to
reinstate the Kannagi statute in the Chennai Marina but he is unwilling to
give voice -
குரல் (leave alone act) in
support of the
struggle of the people of Tamil
Eelam
to be free from alien Sinhala rule. It was after all, about
Cilapathikaram and Kannagi that Professor A.L. Basham wrote many years ago
that it has '' a grim force and splendour unparalleled elsewhere in Indian
literature- that it is imbued with both the ferocity of the early Tamils and
their stern respect for justice, and incidentally, it throws light on early
Tamil political ideas.'' It appears, however, that Mr.Karunanidhi is ready
and willing to sacrifice
the
justice of the struggle for Tamil Eelam in the altar of New Delhi's
strategic interests in the Indian region.
It was the same Mr.Karunanidhi who declared in 1983, at the Marina
beach, not far from Kannagi's statute, that if he was asked whether
he was a Tamil or an Indian, he would reply that he was both a Tamil
and an Indian. But he went on to add, to the tumultuous cheers of
his audience, if the questioner persisted and insisted that he
choose and repeated the question again - are you a Tamil
or an Indian, he would reply that he was a Tamil
first and only then an Indian.
But
today Chief Minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi, who claimed that he was a
Tamil first and then an Indian, is content to be silent whilst
those he often describes, from public platforms, as his
'udanpirapukal' are
raped,
murdered,
executed,
abducted,
attacked in their homes and shops,
bombed,
massacred, and
displaced in their thousands from their homes.
And here let us be clear. The struggle of the people of
Tamil Eelam to be free from
alien Sinhala rule is not about what the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam may have done or may not have done. It is not about the
assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and not even about the
war crimes
committed by the Indian Peace Keeping Force. The struggle for an
independent Tamil Eelam is about that which the Gandhian Tamil leader
S.J.V.Chelvanayagam declared more than thirty years ago -
"Throughout the ages the Sinhalese and Tamils in the country lived as
distinct sovereign people till they were brought under foreign
domination. It should be remembered that the Tamils were in the vanguard
of the struggle for independence in the full confidence that they also
will regain their freedom.
We have for the last 25 years made every effort to secure our political
rights on the basis of equality with the Sinhalese in a united Ceylon.
It is a regrettable fact that successive Sinhalese governments have used
the power that flows from independence
to deny us our
fundamental rights and reduce us to the position of a subject people.
These governments have been able to do so only by using against the
Tamils the sovereignty common to the Sinhalese and the Tamils. I wish to
announce to my people and to the country that I consider the verdict at
this election as a mandate that the
Tamil Eelam nation should exercise the sovereignty already vested in the
Tamil people and become free."
The armed resistance of the people of Tamil Eelam (warts and
all) arose as the inevitable response to Sri Lankan
state
terror
- a state terror which Paul Sieghart Q.C. described in his Report of a
Mission to Sri Lanka on behalf of the International Commission of Jurists in
March1984, in the following terms -
".. Communal riots in which Tamils are
killed, maimed, robbed and rendered homeless are no longer isolated
episodes; they are beginning to become a pernicious habit."
It was a state terror which was
described by Deanna Hodgin, Staff Writer/Foreign Correspondent, Insight
Magazine in 1991 -
"Last summer (1990),
I spent five weeks in Sri Lanka reporting on the civil war in the North
and East. I am not a scholar of Sub continental politics or history, nor
am I a think tank or development agency intellectual -- my work is more
a glorified form of visiting with people than anything so respectable.
When in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Amritsar and the Middle East, my job
description has been amended to visiting with people who are fighting
for independence. In my work, I have seen horrific torture, beatings,
bombings and shootings,
but nothing so terrible as I witnessed in Sri Lanka last year.
And Professor Margaret Trawick from New Zealand
wrote in 1996
-
"..I have been struggling in my mind against the
conclusion that the Sri Lanka government is trying to kill or terrorize
as many Tamil people as possible; that the government is trying to keep
the conditions of the war unreported internationally, because if those
conditions were reported, the actions of the military would be perceived
as so deplorable that foreign nations would have no choice but to
condemn them. And this would be embarrassing to everybody. But it
seems now that no other conclusion is possible..."
The genocidal attacks launched by Sri Lanka on the people of
Tamil Eelam should be
self evident
except to those who would prefer to close their eyes. When the history of
Tamil Eelam comes to be written (as surely it will), the question will be
asked: where was the Dravidian leader,
Muthuvel Karunanidhi? And history will, no doubt, provide a
fair answer - he was minding his own business.