Singh doing a Cameron!

Editorial-December 1, 2013, 

All indications are that the Congress-led government in New Delhi is scraping the barrel with a few moons to go for a general election. The BJP is emerging very powerful and the scandal-ridden Congress is desperate for votes to avert an electoral disaster. Else, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would not have evinced so keen an interest in Sri Lanka. He needs Tamil Nadu backing more than ever.

Congress stalwart and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has gone on record as saying that PM Singh may visit Jaffna to hold talks with Northern Chief Minister C. V. Wigneswaran. He has also said that India wouldn’t rest until the 13th Amendment is fully implemented.

It looks as if India were trying to manipulate Wigneswaran in the same way as the first (and last) Chief Minister of the merged North and East and notorious Indian lackey, Vartharaja Perumal, who took on the Premadasa government and went so far as to resort to UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) before running away. It is not in the interest of the northern Sri Lankans struggling to rebuild their lives for India to pit the Northern PC against the government. Such a course of action may serve only India’s purpose.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who, we are afraid, behaved like an overgrown schoolboy while in Colombo skipping as he did a part of the recently concluded CHOGM to play cricket, succeeded in boosting the morale of some LTTE activists so much so that they crawled out of the woodwork to praise Prabhakaran in Parliament the other day. Prime Minister Singh’s planned visit to Jaffna is likely to have a similar effect.

Economic Development Minister Basil Rajapaksa, in Parliament on Friday, took a swipe at those who, he said, were now weeping buckets for the northern people of Sri Lanka, having encouraged the Sri Lankan government to go the whole hog and eliminate Prabhakaran. He stopped short of naming names, but he was presumably referring to India.

Had India really wanted to stop the Vanni war, it could have resorted to gunboat or parippu diplomacy the way it had done in 1987 to coerce Colombo into suspending or even calling off the final offensive. Indian satellites remained focused on the northern theatre of war and New Delhi even had its intelligence operatives on the ground, and, therefore, it should have intervened to stop the war if it had had any reliable information that war crimes were being perpetrated by the Sri Lankan army. The conflagration that led to the elimination of Prabhakaran and his trusted lieutenants had the trappings of a proxy war of sorts; the Congress-led government wanted Sri Lanka to get rid of New Delhi’s headache—Prabhakaran—so that it could have a puppet administration installed in the North like Perumal’s.

India has called for a credible investigation into Sri Lanka’s alleged war crimes and even voted for a resolution to that effect in Geneva. Sri Lanka, no doubt, has to fully implement the recommendations by its own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), which has dealt with accountability issues to some extent and proposed a way out. Why India does not order an investigation into the allegations of war crimes against the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) during its operations in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s is the question. Charity, as they say, begins at home and example is better than precept.

PM Singh will be left with no moral right to campaign against war crimes if he comes here and pays a floral tribute to the IPKF memorial in Colombo without ordering a probe into the alleged atrocities such as murder, rape, torture and involuntary disappearances the Indian military is accused of having perpetrated in Sri Lanka.

An apology from the Indian premier to the people of the North and the East for the crimes committed by the IPKF troops may be in order even if he does not visit Sri Lanka.

Another issue that needs to be taken up with the Indian leader is illegal fishing by the Tamil Nadu fleet in Sri Lankan waters. Poaching carried out with the help of banned methods such as bottom trawling has threatened the livelihood of Sri Lanka’s northern fishermen who have been staging protests, but in vain.