Referee’s Count Of Ten

As the Sri Lankans somehow muster the will to foil the attacks of the LTTE on Jaffna, a policy of sorts is beginning to appear by default in India. New Delhi is not going to intervene militarily, but it clearly has no objection, in fact it may be eager, to have others intervene on Colombo’s behalf to slow down the LTTE advance. So far, vital fighter planes, helicopters, bombs and ammunition, tanks and artillery shells have been promised by Israel, Pakistan and China. Only the Israeli equipment, consisting of Kfir fighters and helicopter gunships, seems to have arrived and been deployed in battle, but they have served to halt the LTTE tide. This has given Indian politicians the breathing space they needed to work out the outlines of a strategy towards Sri Lanka.

This strategy seems to be as follows: India’s national interest would be best served if there were a negotiated settlement between the LTTE and Colombo on the vexed question of a homeland for the Tamils, for this would minimise the chance of Tamil chauvinism spilling over from Sri Lanka to Tamil Nadu. India would therefore be willing to lay aside its own antipathy towards the LTTE and act as a mediator, if the two parties want it to.

New Delhi is one with Colombo in the view that this solution must be found within the framework of a single country. This means that the LTTE must somehow be induced to give up its demand for a completely independent Tamil Eelam on the island. But at the same time, New Delhi does not see how this can be done so long as the two main Sinhala parties remain at loggerheads over the amount of devolution to be given to the various provincial units and on the unification of the northern and eastern provinces as demanded by the Tamils. Pressure from the UNP and the Buddhists has already forced President Chandrika Kumaratunga to dilute the original devolution package that she had offered five times. So long as there is no consensus over the quantum of devolution, there is little that India can do as a mediator.

The absence of a consensus among the Sinhala parties also explains and justifies India’s reluctance to get militarily involved. For, in those circumstances, the purpose of intervention would willy-nilly become to get Colombo off a hook that is partly of its own making. However, New Delhi has not ruled out some form and degree of intervention. In this respect its position has changed from the strident, knee-jerk initial refusal of a fortnight ago. India might be willing to intervene for strictly humanitarian purposes. This small opening can be enlarged to fit a number of scenarios, from providing food and medicines to protecting the civilian population of Jaffna or preventing a massacre of Sri Lankan troops. New Delhi’s studied silence, punctuated by veiled remarks, suggests that all such options are being kept open.

What the government needs to think through now is the purpose and limits of intervention, should the need for it arise. As in all good policy making, it needs to plan actively for the best outcome while preparing for the worst. The existence of a global consensus that Sri Lanka’s unity must be preserved and that India should play the main role in brokering a solution, makes it relatively easy to define the minimum purpose of intervention. This must be to avoid the humiliation, for Colombo, of a surrender by the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) in Jaffna. After 17 years of a war seemingly without end, morale has sunk abysmally low in the SLA. A blow of this nature now would destroy the government’s will to continue fighting the LTTE in the coming months. Since Sri Lanka is obtaining the military hardware it needs from other sources, all New Delhi needs to plan for is a possible evacuation of the SLA from Jaffna in good order, should the LTTE triumph against all the odds.

In the medium term, New Delhi needs to do whatever is necessary to bring both Colombo and the LTTE to the conference table. This will have to be a delicate balancing act. Sri Lanka needs enough assistance to convince the LTTE that it will gain its ends only through negotiation. Sri Lanka must not be given so much assistance that it absolves the two main political parties of the need to forge a devolution package that reasonable Tamil nationalists can accept.

But #is the LTTE a reasonable organisation? Is it capable of accepting a negotiated solution if it sees that it will not be allowed to score an outright military victory, or will it keep on fighting even when there is no hope of victory in the foreseeable future? For that matter, even if the LTTE is willing to accept a compromise solution, will it last? And will it be willing to subordinate itself to the democratic process, which could very easily throw up a moderate political party to challenge the LTTE’s dominance once peace returns? Unfortunately, nothing in its entire history suggests that the answer to even one of these questions is ‘yes’. Thus, in the longer run, New Delhi must make up its mind that if all else fails, it will come down unequivocally on Colombo’s side. This does not mean that it should send in an IPKF once more. But it must be willing to use its navy and, in extreme circumstances, its air force and enable Sri Lanka to procure the armaments it needs to defeat the LTTE. The fear that such actions could touch off a Tamil nationalist backlash in Tamil Nadu is vastly exaggerated. If three years of IPKF operations, in which the Indian army killed thousands of Tamil guerrillas and not a few civilians, could not spark secessionism in Tamil Nadu, then a far more limited intervention of the kind described above is hardly likely to do so.