Wednesday, 23 March 2011 00:00 After the Indo- Lanka peace accord was signed, a very interesting and intriguing cartoon made
a splash in the Indian media. The cartoon carried a drawing where the then Indian Prime Minister (P.M.) Rajiv Gandhi was shown as panting and running holding the tail of a tiger around a tree while the then Sri Lanka (SL) President J R Jayewardene was relaxing seated in a chair. The idea conveyed by the cartoon was the SL President after signing the accord had entrusted the entire task of destroying the Tamil Tigers to Rajiv Gandhi and the Indian peace keeping Force (IPKF) while he was sitting pretty.
Today , exactly 14 years have elapsed since that event occurred , and the Tamil Tiger menace had been liquidated. Sonia the wife of Rajiv Gandhi however is now holding the tail of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ‘Lion’ and running in circles around the tree. Sonia Gandhi and her Govt. have to hold the tail of the ‘lion’ and run round perhaps because of the assurance given by her Govt. to America including the western countries during the tail end of the SL war. The assurance being , no sooner the Tamil Tigers are devastated than a political solution shall be found for the Tamil people of SL. When America and the international community came forward to halt the war during the final phase, India gave this assurance to them. This came to light when ‘The Hindu’ newspaper recently revealed the messages contained in the ‘Wikileaks cables’. The US Embassy Wikileaks cables accessed by ‘The Hindu’ newspaper expressed thus : ‘ the cables reveal that while India conveyed its concern to Sri Lanka several times about the perilous situation that civilians caught in the fighting faced , it was not opposed to the anti LTTE operation. They also show that India worried about the Sri Lankan President’s “post conflict intentions”, though it believed that there was a better chance of persuading him to offer Sri Lankan Tamils an inclusive political settlement after the fighting ended. After its efforts to halt the operation failed, the International community resigned itself to playing a post -conflict role by using its economic leverage , acknowledging that it had to rope in India for this….
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