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-
Tamil Poem in Purananuru, circa 500 B.C 

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India & the Struggle for Tamil Eelam

"LTTE is deservedly dying, but long live the Tamil cause"

B.Raman
Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi,
and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai.

22 April 2009 http://ramanstrategicanalysis.blogspot.com/

"...The remarkable victory of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces against the LTTE was partly due to their improved counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism capabilities made possible by Indian assistance in the form of training and sharing of intelligence and partly due to their emulating the Pakistani Armed forces in the brutal use of the Air Force against people whom they portray as their own. Just as the Balochs were defenceless against the brutal Pakistani air strikes, the Sri Lankan Tamils were defenceless against the Sri Lankan air strikes... Many Sri Lankan officers might have been trained in India, but their mindset and their attitude towards the minorities have more in common with those of their Pakistani counterparts than with those of their Indian counterparts. Therein lies the danger that after winning the war against the LTTE, the Government, strongly influenced by a victorious army, might trey to impose a dictated peace on the Tamils.  If the angry Tamils once again look up to India, there is no reason why we should not reciprocate provided a new leadership emerges in the Tamil community and it has drawn the right lessons from the brutalities of the LTTE."

Comment by tamilnation.org  Mr. Raman's remarks will not come as a surprise to many Tamils. We said it some three years ago -  

"...US and India may find common cause in weakening the LTTE - but they seek to weaken it in such a way that thereafter  ("post conflict") each of them may successfully secure their own strategic interests.  And herein lies the conflict - and the difficulty. New Delhi will not support a resolution of the conflict which secures US hegemony in the island. And so it will seek to create Tamil dissidents and build support among them as a way of keeping its foothold in the island. It sought to do so with TELO, it sought to do so with EPRLF and Varadarajah Perumal, it sought to do so with EROS, it sought to do so with Amirthalingam, and now it seeks to so so with Karuna and Anandasangaree." Sri Lanka - Tamil Eelam: Getting to Yes - Nadesan Satyendra, 26 October 2006

And so today in the year 2009,  Mr.Raman says -

 "If the angry Tamils once again look up to India, there is no reason why we should not reciprocate provided a new leadership emerges in the Tamil community.."

Mr.Raman is at pains to remind  us that 'the Tamils of Sri Lanka have been India�s natural allies' -

"...Let us not forget that ever since our independence in 1947... the Tamils of Sri Lanka have been India�s natural allies..."

Mr.Raman does not say whether he regards Sinhala Sri Lanka also as a natural ally. Or whether he takes the view that Sinhala Sri Lanka is a natural ally of China. Here, it seems that Mr.Raman would have us ignore the remarks of  Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee a few months ago -

" We have a very comprehensive relationship with Sri Lanka. In our anxiety to protect the civilians, we should not forget the strategic importance of this island to India's interests,... especially in view of attempts by countries like Pakistan and China to gain a strategic foothold in the island nation...Colombo had been told that India would 'look after your security requirements, provided you do not look around'. We cannot have a playground of international players in our backyard..."Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, 23 October 2008

Mr. Raman says -

"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..."

Mr.Raman would have us forget something which Jyotindra Nath Dixit, Indian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka 1985 /89, Foreign Secretary in 1991/94 and National Security Adviser to the Prime Minister of India 2004/05 said in 1998 -

"...Tamil militancy received (India's) support  ...as a response to (Sri Lanka's).. concrete and expanded military and intelligence cooperation with the United States, Israel and Pakistan. ...The assessment was that these presences would pose a strategic threat to India and they would encourage fissiparous movements in the southern states of India. .. a process which could have found encouragement from Pakistan and the US, given India's experience regarding their policies in relation to Kashmir and the Punjab.... Inter-state relations are not governed by the logic of morality. They were and they remain an amoral phenomenon....."

Mr. Raman  would have  us ignore India's duplicity as reported by M.R. Narayan Swamy who (significantly) worked at the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS), a New Delhi based wire service in his book Inside an Elusive Mind - Prabhakaran in 2003 -

"...Most Tamil separatists from Sri Lanka had accepted the Indian offer (to provide arms and training) at its face value, thinking that New Delhi was reaching out to them out of genuine concern for their condition. However, an extraordinary revelation began to unfold as the training started. Many guerrillas realized that the training was just a subterfuge for a larger strategic game that India was attempting to play, a game in which the Tamil rebels may end up being just expendable pawns.

The militants were surprised because besides just training them, some trainers asked leading questions that indicated India might one day do a Bangladesh in Sri Lanka. Indian troops had intervened militarily in the then eastern wing of Pakistan in 1971, leading to its secession from Pakistan's western wing and emergence as an independent nation called Bangladesh. The trainers wanted to know details about road bridges, railway tracks, landing fields, the depth of the sea and the coastline. Some Sri Lankans were asked to get photographs; when they refused, the Indians became angry. Some Tamils complained that they were taught conventional, and not guerrilla, warfare...

As the months went by, the training became sloppy and indifferent. Prabhakaran was quick on the uptake to see the warning signals...Once he looked at some weapons supplied by the Indian government. He remarked wryly to those standing around him: "See, they are giving us old stuff. They think we are stupid".."

Mr. Raman would have us forget Rajiv Gandhi's  war crimes in Tamil Eelam  including reprisal killings of non-combatants, looting of homes, rape, a murderous attack on the Jaffna hospital , and killing of a number of unarmed and disarmed guerrilla suspects without trial and in breach of the Laws of War.

"Over a period of about 20 days (in 1987) , the Indian Army's direct attack on LTTE positions, and defence from LTTE attacks, was coupled with the Indian Army's attack and storming of still unevacuated Jaffna - and many villages and settlements throughout the Peninsula - with widespread (insofar as territory), indiscriminate (insofar as targeting) and sustained (insofar as intensity) artillery shelling. Only less widespread, sustained and indiscriminate, there was air-strafing from helicopter as well. It was not "cross-fire" that incidentally killed thousands of civilians. The majority were killed unavoidably inside their houses and huts under shelling, or were shot at random by the roads and on the streets. A large number of people were "only" wounded - yet, many of them died in the absence of medical care, especially under the 24-hour curfew over a period of about one month, to mid-November...

... Indian Intelligence services in Tamil Nadu, and the IPKF in Sri Lanka, have been making use of the rivalry and violent bickering between the LTTE and the other Tamil militant groups. Moreover, India has obviously exacerbated the intra-Tamil militant conflict by rewarding materially - offering to do it politically in future as well - the assistance received from PLOTE, TELO and EPRLF to identify LTTE members living underground with the population, and also in the refugee camps - a process of identification that the recently arrived Indian soldiers cannot obviously do. This is one of the oldest classical tactics by occupation armies, and still another clear indication of the war fighting rather than peacekeeping nature of the current Indian campaign in Sri Lanka. .. the Tamil People by and large seem to resent such a fratricidal mercenarisation of their youngsters, which corrupts a situation already vile enough. Also, information-gathering tactics such as the use of relief and recourse to mercenarisation suggest that the population has not been volunteering information to the Indian Army which, in turn, may suggest either or both of two things : that by and large the Tamil population has turned, if only passively, against the Indian Army, and that popular support for the LTTE is more solid and widespread that anyone anywhere seems to want to acknowledge. " Eduardo Marino's report to International Alert, after a visit to the war zone in November 1987

Mr.Raman would have us forget something which Dr. T. Somasekaram, Retd. Surveyor General said in 2004 -

"The simple fact of the matter is that a foreign country, with designs of becoming a regional superpower, maneuvered to send its Army here as Peace Keepers but massacred thousands of innocent Tamil civilians, raped the women and plundered valuables.If memorials are to be erected, then it should be for innocent civilians massacred by the IPKF.

Let me provide a few samples from my personal knowledge. These represent but the tip of an iceberg. I write as an authentic son of Jaffna, born and bred there, educated at Jaffna Hindu College and the only house my wife and I own is in Jaffna.

..the Indian Army came here, massacred innocent Tamil civilians, raped our women and plundered our valuables. The acronym IPKF will always stand for Indian People Killing Force where we are concerned.We will one day erect a memorial in the heart of Jaffna town, in the centre of Hospital Road, in memory of all the innocent civilians � ranging in age from the very old past 80 to young children massacred by the IPKF and to the women who were raped..."

Mr.Raman says -

"President Mahinda Rajapakse has repeatedly promised that once the LTTE is defeated, he would be generous in meeting the political aspirations of the Tamils. He gives the impression of being a sincere man, but will the Sinhalese Army with its head bloated by its success against the LTTE allow him to do so?

The murderous President Rajapaksa who has overseen the genocide of Eelam Tamils, has given Mr.Raman 'the impression of being a sincere man' who is also inclined to be generous. It is simply the Sri Lankan army that will have to be watched - presumably US Green Card holders such as General Fonseka and Defence Secretary Gothabya Rajapaksa. After all, US Green Card holders cannot be trusted to advance New Delhi's interests in the Indian Ocean region.

Mr. Raman says -

" it is not in India�s interest that the Sri Lankan Government and Armed Forces proceed from the destruction of the LTTE to the destruction of the Tamil aspirations for greater political and economic rights in their traditional homeland and for greater human dignity... 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 by a brutal regime - whether in Islamabad or in Colombo."

But what are these legitimate aspirations which Mr.Raman is concerned to secure for the Tamil people?  What does 'greater political and economic rights' and 'greater human dignity' mean without an open recognition of the right to self determination of the Tamil Eelam nation?  Does Mr.Raman deny the legitimacy of the aspirations of the Tamil Eelam nation expressed by Tamil Eelam leader S.J.V.Chelvanayagam in 1975?

"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."

And if  Mr. Raman does not regard these aspirations as legitimate is it because he lacks lucidity in thinking? Or is it because he is simply concerned to use the Tamil Eelam lever to exert pressure on Sinhala Sri Lanka and prevent 'a playground of international players' in India's  backyard?

We cannot say of Mr. Raman what he has said of Prabhakaran. We cannot say that Mr.Raman displays  'irrationality and loss of lucidity in thinking' . Mr. Raman is  rational. And there is no loss of lucidity in his thinking.  He is being rational and lucid in his duplicitous  effort to use the Tamil Eelam lever to keep President Rajapaksa in line and secure India as the 'paramount power' in the Indian Ocean region.  And so Mr.Raman says that, on the one hand President Rajapaksa  'seems sincere' but  on the other hand 'the Colombo regime may be brutal'.  The message to President Rajapaksa is clear. Play ball or we will beat you with the Tamil stick even if the LTTE is no more. And Mr.Raman is engaged in the task of fashioning a new Tamil stick and is searching for Tamil quislings who will do New Delhi's bidding and  who may be passed off as credible Tamil leaders.

As for the Tamil Eelam nation,  there is an old adage: once bitten twice shy. The people of Tamil Eelam have been bitten by New Delhi's duplicity before and they are not about to put their lives on line again  to secure New Delhi's strategic interests in the Indian Ocean region and then be left with the comic opera reforms of the 13th Amendment.

"..There are some who may describe the 13th Amendment as a constitutional sleight of hand par excellence. But, that is to put too fine a point on the matter. The blunt reality is that those who proclaim that the 13th Amendment is intended to share power between the Tamil people and the Sinhala people, are, to use a colloquialism, 'trying to pull a fast one' on the Tamil people.

Under the 13th Amendment power will continue to reside in a Sinhala dominated Central government, within the frame of an unitary constitution. The 13th Amendment is intended to secure a constitutional frame which will enable a Sinhala majority to manage the Tamil people more effectively than before.

It has created Provincial Ministers who will not exercise executive power but who will have executive power exercised 'through' them!. At the same time it has created a Provincial Governor appointed by the Sinhala President who will exercise executive power in respect of provincial matters - a Provincial Governor who is also the administrative head of the provincial public service and who has control of the Provincial Finance Fund. And the 13th Amendment has created a Provincial Council without control of planning, without control of the provincial budget, without control of police and public order within the province, without control of disposition of state land within the province, without control of higher education and whose remaining meagre legislative powers are subject to the over riding will of the Central Parliament. Finally, the provisions of the Provincial Councils Act itself may be amended from time to time by a simple majority of members present and voting in Parliament" 13th Amendment to Sri Lanka Constitution - Devolution or Comic Opera?, Nadesan Satyendra 1988

It seems that Mr.Raman duplicitous though he may be, is also god fearing and he has found it necessary to make clear that it  'is in the common interest of India and Sri Lanka that Prabhakaran is finally able to make peace with his Maker by either being killed by the Armed Forces or by taking his own life'.

It is our hope that when the time comes, (as it will for all of us),  the god fearing  Mr.Raman will seek forgiveness and make peace with his Maker for his contribution to the pain and suffering visited by an amoral New Delhi on the people of Tamil Eelam during the past several decades. Mr. Raman may want to recognise that the Tamil people in Eelam (and in Australia , Bahrain  , Botswana , Canada , Denmark, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Guadelope & Martinique, Hong Kong , Indonesia , Italy Karnataka , Malaysia , Manipur , Mauritius , Myanmar, Netherlands , New Caledonia & Tahiti, New Zealand , Norway, Quatar, Reunion , Saudi Arabia , Seychelles , Singapore , South Africa   ,  Sweden Switzerland ,Tamil Nadu, Trinidad, United Arab Emirates , United Kingdom , and  USA)  may be angry but they are not stupid.


After the LTTE What?

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is in its death rattle. It was decisively defeated by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces weeks ago, but a handful of its leadership headed by Prabhakaran has cynically and cruelly prolonged the agony of the Tamil civilians by using them as a buffer and human-shield in order to delay the re-establishment of the writ of the Sri Lankan Government in a miniscule piece of territory (about 20 sq.kms), which has been declared by the Government as a no-fire zone to avoid collateral casualties among the civilians still under the control of the LTTE and to enable them to escape from the clutches of the LTTE.

2. Prabhakaran is a leader with a split personality. During the 26 years he has dominated the Tamil landscape in Sri Lanka, he had shown a remarkable organizing capacity and an ability to motivate his followers to perform virtual miracles. His motivating his cadres to acquire a capability for action by air and sea would go down in the history of insurgency and terrorism as indicating an organizing capability of a high order. The LTTE under his leadership managed to bring almost the entire Tamil-inhabited territory in the Northern and Eastern Provinces under its control. The determined manner in which the LTTE fought against the Indian-Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in the late 1980s and frustrated its efforts to defeat it spoke highly of its capabilities for a conventional warfare.

3.If Prabhakaran had the activities of the LTTE confined to conventional warfare and developed the LTTE as a purely insurgent force, which targeted only the armed forces and not innocent civilians, he would have acquired greater support from the international community for the Tamil cause. The rational side of his personality as illustrated by his organizing capabilities had to constantly contend with a highly irrational side, which drove him to simultaneously take to terrorism of a shockingly brutal kind.

4. The targeted killings by the LTTE of many Sri Lankan Tamil leaders, who were perceived by Prabhakaran as possible impediments to his rise as the unquestioned leader of the Tamil community, and its brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 were the outcome of the irrational side of his personality. No other Indian leader had done more to help the Sri Lankan Tamil cause than Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Only a sickly and sickening irrational mind could have ordered the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and Laxman Kadirgamar, a highly-respected Tamil leader, who was a senior adviser on foreign policy to former President Chandrika Kumaratunge. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi on Prabhakaran�s orders shocked Indian public opinion----including public opinion in Tamil Nadu--- and weakened Indian support for the Tamil cause. The assassination of Kadirgamar shocked the Western public opinion and led to the declaration of the LTTE as a terrorist organization by the Western world, thereby denying the last vestiges of Western support for the Tamil cause.

5.As the LTTE faced one defeat after another during the last three years from the Sri Lankan Armed Forces---initially in the Eastern Province and finally in the Northern Province---- the irrational side of Prabhakaran�s personality erased his rational side. His shocking use of the Tamil civilians in order to delay the final end of the counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism campaign undertaken by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces is driven by this irrational streak in him, which now dominates his personality.

6. The prolonged agony of the Sri Lankan Tamils caused by the final bout of Prabhakaran�s irrationality and loss of lucidity in thinking has to be ended. The Sri Lankan Armed Forces, which have shown patience till now and deliberately slowed down their operations, cannot be faulted if they have come to the conclusion that the time has come to liberate the no-fire zone too from the clutches of the LTTE by undertaking limited operations with small arms and ammunition even at the risk of some collateral casualties to the civilians.

7. The desperate attempt of Prabhakaran to use the civilians to protect himself from the advancing Sri Lankan Army can be attributed to the total loss of lucidity in his thinking and his consequent inability to face the bitter truth that he and his organization have been defeated decisively by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and that there is no chance of their staging a come-back. The Requiem for the LTTE could be written without fears of going wrong, should the LTTE stage a come-back as it had done on occasions in the past. It has been defeated beyond recovery. His conventional as well as terrorist capabilities are in shatters. Earlier conventional wisdom that small groups of the LTTE might still be able to keep indulging in sporadic acts of terrorism in different parts of Sri Lanks needs re-consideration. His desperate delaying action at the cost of immense suffering to the Tamils, whose cause he claims to espouse, is meant to give him an opportunity to seek safe sanctuary either in Tamil Nadu or elsewhere from where he could try to re-start his fight against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. It is in the common interest of India and Sri Lanka that Prabhakaran is finally able to make peace with his Maker by either being killed by the Armed Forces or by taking his own life. A defeated Prabhakaran, if left alive in India or elsewhere, would not be a threat, but could be a nuisance for both the countries.

8. After the final death of the LTTE, which is expected any day, what is the future of the Sri Lankan Tamil cause? Would a Requiem for the LTTE also mean a Requiem for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause? Hopefully not. It is in India�s interest that the LTTE as a terrorist organization is destroyed once and for all, but it is not in India�s interest that the Sri Lankan Government and Armed Forces proceed from the destruction of the LTTE to the destruction of the Tamil aspirations for greater political and economic rights in their traditional homeland and for greater human dignity.

9. 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. 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.

10.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 by a brutal regime--- whether in Islamabad or in Colombo.

11. Since 1947, the Balochs rose twice in revolt in favour of independence for their homeland. On both occasions, they were defeated by the Pakistani Armed Forces as decisively as the LTTE by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. The Pakistani leadership brutally used the Air Force against the Balochs to crush their freedom struggle. Undaunted by this, the Baloch people, under a new leadership, rose in revolt for a third time two years ago and their third war of independence is still going on.

12. The remarkable victory of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces against the LTTE was partly due to their improved counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism capabilities made possible by Indian assistance in the form of training and sharing of intelligence and partly due to their emulating the Pakistani Armed forces in the brutal use of the Air Force against people whom they portray as their own. Just as the Balochs were defenceless against the brutal Pakistani air strikes, the Sri Lankan Tamils were defenceless against the Sri Lankan air strikes.

13. The US has used air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan----but in foreign territory and against foreign nationals. Only three countries in the world have used air strikes in their own territory against their own people---- the Pakistanis against the Balochs, the Russians against the Chechens and the Sri Lankans against the Tamils.

14. President Mahinda Rajapakse has repeatedly promised that once the LTTE is defeated, he would be generous in meeting the political aspirations of the Tamils. He gives the impression of being a sincere man, but will the Sinhalese Army with its head bloated by its success against the LTTE allow him to do so? The indicators till now are not encouraging. Many Sri Lankan officers might have been trained in India, but their mindset and their attitude towards the minorities have more in common with those of their Pakistani counterparts than with those of their Indian counterparts. Therein lies the danger that after winning the war against the LTTE, the Government, strongly influenced by a victorious army, might try to impose a dictated peace on the Tamils.

15. If the angry Tamils once again look up to India, there is no reason why we should not reciprocate provided a new leadership emerges in the Tamil community and it has drawn the right lessons from the brutalities of the LTTE.

16. The LTTE is deservedly dying, but long live the Tamil cause.
 

 

 

 

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