The Hardest Of Options

The dramatic victories of the LTTE against the Sri Lankan Army (SLA), when its heavily outnumbered cadres captured Elephant Pass on April 27, the Palai military camp on April 30 and raced towards the Pennaly airbase and the Killaly naval base in the first days of May, has confronted the Indian government with the most difficult foreign policy choice in the country’s 52-year history. This is whether to help the Sri Lankan government turn back the LTTE tide or to keep its hands off and allow events to take their own course in that country. Elephant Pass controls the only access to the rest of Sri Lanka from the Jaffna peninsula. The Killaly naval base has radar that is essential for Sri Lanka to control movement on the lagoon that separates Jaffna from southern Sri Lanka. As of May 5, the LTTE had taken over Nager Kovil on the way to Pallaly. If Pallaly falls, Point Pedro and the small naval port of Kankesanthurai will become indefensible. Two divisions of the Sri Lankan army and sundry detachments will then get bottled in Jaffna. If they were to decide to fight it out they could hold on easily for another three to four months. But morale among the soldiers is abysmally low-so low that at Elephant Pass two entire divisions of the SLA simply melted away when attacked by around 5,000 LTTE soldiers, leaving an entire unit of field artillery to the LTTE for use against themselves. Thus, the alternative of a negotiated surrender to the LTTE has suddenly become very real.

So far, the Indian government’s response has been an essay in confusion. It has reaffirmed its support for the unity of Sri Lanka but publicly and categorically ruled out any kind of military help whatever, a decision recently endorsed by an all-party meeting called by the prime minister. It has also ruled out supplying weapons and offered only humanitarian assistance. Newspapers in Colombo have been reporting that India is prepared to offer logistical support, presumably a reference to help in pulling out Sri Lankan troops from Jaffna should the need arise. But the Indian High Commission in Colombo is denying even this. However, India has felt no compunction in telling Colombo that it would look with disfavour on any attempt to bring parties from outside the region into the conflict. In the event that Jaffna falls to the LTTE, it has counselled the Sri Lankan government, tacitly if not explicitly, that it should treat this as a lost battle and not a lost war. At the same time, it has offered its services as a mediator to find a negotiated peace between Colombo and Prabhakaran.

The absurdity of this position has not struck either Atal Behari Vajpayee or Jaswant Singh. If India will not help Sri Lanka and if Sri Lanka does not get any help from outside, why should the LTTE, which is on the verge of a victory in Jaffna anyway, agree to negotiate a peace which falls short of the Eelam for which it has fought for the last 20 years? It also does not seem to have struck New Delhi that the position it has taken implicitly favours the LTTE, an organisation even the US has branded as terrorist; that planned and carried out the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and whose leaders have arrest warrants out for them in India. Lastly, while New Delhi’s desire to be accepted as the regional power is not new, it does not seem to have crossed Singh’s mind that power can’t be divorced from responsibility. If it ignores Sri Lanka’s call for help in a cause just and vital to India’s own interest, it will forfeit all claim to regional power status.

New Delhi’s confusion, not only over its interests but also over the values it ought to espouse, raises serious questions about the capacity of the Indian political system to throw up governments that are capable of facing the challenges before a modern nation state. The LTTE’s ‘Operation Unceasing Wave III’, which is on the verge of success, did not start on April 27 but five months earlier in November. In that month itself, the SLA at Elephant Pass suffered important reverses that forced it to cede control of some 2,000 sq km of territory to the LTTE. What is more important, there was abundant evidence of the deteriorating morale of the SLA, if not with the Indian media then surely with foreign office analysts and intelligence agencies. Why then were no contingency plans drawn up to cope with a possible Sri Lankan defeat? More to the point, why did New Delhi not carry out a simulation exercise to ascertain the effect of an LTTE victory on India-not only in Tamil Nadu but also in Kashmir, Assam, the northeastern states and Punjab? This is not the only occasion when not just the government but the entire Indian state has been found wanting. The Kargil intrusion revealed that its intelligence apparatus had simply ceased to exist in the whole of PoK and that accountability in the Indian army had all but vanished behind a cloud of fudged reports. The hijacking of IC 814 in December revealed that the machinery for dealing with such a contingency, which had been functioning well till 1993-94, had been allowed to fall into disrepair. The death of millions of cattle-the wealth of the poor of Gujarat-reflects the extent to which every level of the state was able to ignore the consequences of a drought that began eight months earlier. And Sri Lanka shows how even an eventuality that could mean the difference between life and death to the Indian state had not even crossed the government’s mind for five whole months.

All this has happened not before but after the government set up its much-advertised National Security Council. The conclusion is inescapable: behind an ever more elaborate facade of modern institutions, India has failed to evolve into a modern nation-state. It may be the LTTE’s historic destiny to tear the veil of pretence off the face of the Indian state and reveal its shortcomings to the world at large.