How Tamil chauvinism cramps India's influence in Sri Lanka

After a year of abject political disgrace, much of which was spent in Tihar jail as an undertrial in the 2G scam case, there aren’t many political issues on which DMK leader M Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi can legitimately claim a high-profile moral high ground. But on Tuesday, she was back in Parliament, along with her party MPs, all full of moral outrage and grandstanding, to press the Indian government to vote on a US-backed UN Human Rights Council resolution that targets Sri Lanka over alleged human rights violations directed at the island’s Tamils. In particular, the allegations relate to large-scale Tamil civilian casualties during the last stages of the Sri Lankan army’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009. These allegations have been amplified in recent days by the emergence of a video film purporting to show the killing at point-blank range of LTTE leader V Prabhakaran’s 12-year-old son. Such is the emotive power of Tamil political sentiments that even AIADMK MPs, who go to elaborate lengths to not be seen to be standing alongside the DMK on any issue, were up on their feet in Parliament to demand that India vote in favour of the resolution to damn Sri Lanka. [caption id=“attachment_243937” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“On Tuesday, Kani was back in Parliament, along with her party MPs, all full of moral outrage and grandstanding. PTI”]  [/caption] At the State level, a whole host of other parties, each given to more extreme articulation of Tamil chauvinistic sentiments than the other, are raising much the same demand. Even the Tamil Nadu unit of the Congress, a mere rump of a party unit, is unwilling to swim against the tide of perceived popular opinion in the State or empathise with the Central government’s dilemma as it seeks to find the right balance between doing the right thing by Sri Lankan Tamils and defending India’s strategic interests in the region. Therein lies a problem, one that is wilfully ignored, thereby rendering any discussion on the Sri Lankan Tamil ethnic issue more than a little dishonest. The focus of the discussion, centred around the UNHRC resolution, has thus far been exclusively on the Sri Lankan government’s failure to account for the actions of the Sri Lankan military in the final days of the 30-plus-year-old war. On the one hand, the Sri Lankan army deserves a fair share of the blame for blurring the lines between the LTTE terrorists and civilian Tamil populations, particularly during the final adrenaline-driven offensive. And over the past three years since the end of the war, the Colombo government has been reluctant to initiate credible investigations into repeated allegations of human rights violation or to move towards a meaningful political resolution of the ethnic conflict within a unitary Sri Lanka. As Firstpost had noted ( here ), President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s unwillingness to seek a political solution holds Sri Lanka captive to its own history and hostage to the excesses of Sinhala chauvinism. On the other hand, any attempt at reconciling that particular moment in the tortured history of the Sri Lankan Tamils is incomplete if it doesn’t adequately address the events that preceded and led up to it. In particular, any honest attempt at introspection must also confront the role of Tamil ethn0-linguistic chauvinism in Tamil Nadu in feeding one of the world’s most brutal terrorist movements for decades, with disastrous consequences for Sri Lanka — and for India. This is particularly important because the same chauvinistic forces are alive and well in Tamil Nadu to this day and continue to cramp the space for rational policymaking on the foreign policy front with their emotive appeal to Tamil sentiments that parties find so hard to go against. For instance, it finds expression in incendiary fashion in the articulations of Vaiko, a famed LTTE sympathiser in Tamil Nadu, who has warned that Tamil Nadu would “secede from the Union of India” if the three persons convicted (and sentenced to death) for the LTTE-organised assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi were executed. Karunanidhi himself has repeatedly played around with incendiary Tamil chauvinist sentiments that valorised LTTE fighters – even when he was Chief Minister. And although his invocations of these sentiments have been exposed as politically opportunistic, the repeated dog-whistles about Tamil “nationalism” that resonate within the Tamil political spectrum are a disquieting pointer to the extent of political brinkmanship that mainstream political leaders will indulge in. It is particularly duplicitous for India, which is itself a victim of terrorism sponsored from overseas, to fail to acknowledge its own shameful role in vitiating the Sri Lankan ethnic dispute by its extension of moral, material and martial support for Sri Lankan terrorist groups – until they bit the hand that fed them. And it is particularly venomous that there are still elements on Tamil Nadu’s political landscape that are stoking the embers of Tamil ethno-linguistic chauvinism with incendiary possibilities. In the same way that Sinhala chauvinist politics over decades has dragged the Sri Lankan government into disrepute and in the dock today, Tamil chauvinist politics, which goes unchallenged in the parallel universe of Tamil Nadu politics, has for years positioned the Indian government on the wrong side of history (in the context of the Sri Lankan Tamil dispute). It has, if anything, cramped the space for the Indian government to influence the Sri Lankan government in a way that could have done the Sri Lankan Tamils some good. And by the latest thunderous noises in Parliament over the UNHRC vote, it continues to play a disruptive, borderline dangerous, role to this day.