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.