The militant Tamil movement in Sri Lanka had gathered momentum with each passing year. Mrs Gandhi herself met some of its leaders and by July 1983, the ambush on a night patrol of the Sri Lankan Army resulted in an anti-Tamil backlash in Colombo and elsewhere. The stage was set to take Sri Lanka from an economic miracle to economic shambles.
In India, Tamil Nadu politicians demanded military intervention in Sri Lanka. And when the defence minister of the day R. Venkataraman (later President of India) and a Tamilian himself, rejected the case, DMK legislators said his tongue should be cut off.
In Tamil Nadu, cheques were given in the glare of publicity to these groups that were raiding villages and killing farmer peasants and their families, landmining governments troops, bombing civilian aircraft, bus terminals and telegraph offices in Colombo.Tamil Nadu had become a sanctuary and a safe haven for the hit-and-swim guerrillas. How do you think the Sri Lankan public felt?
Despite all this, by June 1987 the Sri Lankan Army was steam-rolling into the guerrilla-held Jaffna peninsula. The RAW-trained guerrillas were reeling, gasping for breath. In came the saviour—India, now under Rajiv Gandhi. If the 1983 communal riots was a watershed, so too was the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord. The arrival of the IPKF meant Indian guns were trained against the Tigers (LTTE). The minority Tamils turned against India and, paradoxically, all of Sri Lanka hated India for different reasons. When India played cricket with Pakistan, not only the Sri Lankan Muslims hoped Pakistan would win.
RAW, meanwhile, kept its options open. It would be funny if it was not so tragic, for India's sake, how the contradictions of the defence ministry and RAW came into play. I visited Madras in May 1988, mainly to see the LTTE deputy leader Kittu (later killed by the Indian Navy in a ship carrying arms to Sri Lanka). Kittu was under house-arrest, for the IPKF was after all fighting the LTTE across the Palk Strait. An LTTE operative was to take me to Kittu's house. Pray, in what was I taken? A Government of India jeep, driven by an LTTE member. After meeting Kittu, and LTTE spokesman Raheem, I went to see 'Castro' at the LTTE's propaganda office nearby, where the LTTE's red and orange flag was flying. They gave me a Cola and 200 photos to pick from, of the return of two IPKF POWs at Vavuniya the previous day. These photos had been sent to the LTTE office in Madras in the same IAF plane that brought the POWs.All this, while the LTTE was blowing up Indian jawans sky-high. Amazing, I thought to myself. The prime minister at the time was none other than Rajiv Gandhi.
What I couldn't understand, and still cannot, is how and why India, her politicians, her media, her intelligentsia and her ordinary folk could have accepted these strange happenings. Here is your Army getting a bloody nose from a guerrilla group whose flag is flying in your own country. To say that the politics of Tamil Nadu compelled these contradictions is bad. To say, as Mr Jain does, that the DMK permitted the LTTE to use Tamil Nadu as a launching pad against the IPKF is worse. By 1991, Prabhakaran, once hailed as a hero, had been finger-printed by the Tamil Nadu Police, and forced in talks with Rajiv Gandhi into accepting the Indo-Lanka Accord. When Indian elections were pending, Prabhakaran realised Rajiv would win, and pressure Sri Lanka into implementing the accord that had all but been abandoned. An accord the LTTE had also rejected. They gravitated towards the DMK again. The next we knew, Rajiv was assassinated by a human bomb.
The Jain Commission is critical of the then president R. Premad-asa, saying he created conditions for the LTTE to recover from the grievous wounds it suffered from the IPKF. But there is a silence on the many times the IPKF circled Prabhakaran's hide-out only to be asked to hold off—on the orders of RAW, also under the control of the 'charismatic leader' Rajiv Gandhi. The commission refers to Pre-madasa's 'unholy' alliance with the LTTE. We have our own disagreements with Premadasa's LTTE policy, but by Jain! How do you describe the alliances of the Gandhis, MGRs and RAWs with the LTTE?
There are gaping holes in the Jain report. Its silence on RAW activities is deafening. And there is something rotten in India's politics if,according to Jain, RAW had to warn (the then PM) Chandra Shekhar about threats to Rajiv's life from the Frankenstein monsters they themselves created—the LTTE, and Sikh and Assam militants. The commission, after much deliberation and expectation has, alas, produced more omissions. It whitewashes Rajiv's own meddling in Sri Lanka's conflict; his about turn with the LTTE; and his bitter exchanges with Premadasa who felt he could kill two birds (LTTE and the JVP insurgency in the South) with one stone (evicting the IPKF from the scene). It glosses over the Congress, and Congress-AIADMK, alliance with the LTTE in a bid to spotlight the DMK. It reveals little of RAW's hidden hand.
Indian judges usually like to delve into philosophy. One would have liked Mr Jain to have gone into the Asokan image of non-violent co-existence with neighbours. Or of Nehru's enunciation of Pancha Seela and the doctrine of co-exist or co-perish. When IPKF jawans were shedding blood on Sri Lankan soil, Sri Lankans felt sorry for them, but also felt India was getting hoisted on its own petard. Likewise, many now believe that the commission has told only part of the story. A commission into the Jain Commission, or better still, into RAW,would reveal the entire truth.
Historians will chronicle this chapter as one where Sri Lanka suffered immensely, but India lost its self-respect as the moral nation the world was called to look upon when it gained Independence 50 years ago. By adopting a Big Brother-Big Bully attitude, India was a non-friend with each of her neighbours in the 1980s.
Let it not be said that the Sri Lankans have forgotten. But they have probably forgiven. And the day might well come, very soon, when Sri Lankans can hope like they did before, that India wins at cricket, against all nations, except Sri Lanka.
(The author is the Editor Of Sunday Times, Colombo)
