TAMIL NADU POLITICS

BEHIND INDIA’S NEW HARDLINE ON LANKA

- Ameen Izzadeen

Early this month, when India intervened in what was Sri Lanka’s internal security matter to end a protest campaign outside the Jaffna University main gate, it evoked the memories of the tumultuous phase of India-Sri Lanka relations and New Delhi’s arm-twisting diplomacy in the early years of the separatist war in Sri Lanka.

Those were the days when India’s then High Commissioner J.N. Dixit was acting like a viceroy and India was regarded as Sri Lanka’s public enemy number one, for it sympathized with the separatist cause and covertly and overtly trained, armed and funded the separatist rebels. Given the truism that there is no altruism in politics, India’s interference in Sri Lanka then was essentially national-interest driven and was everything do with geopolitics of the Cold War era and the ruling party’s domestic political exigencies, especially with regard to India’s Tamil Nadu state where there was overwhelming public support for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause. However, India was wary about an independent Tamil state being carved out of Sri Lanka, because it did not want to give a new lease of life to the Dravidian separatist movement of the 1950s and early 1960s in Tamil Nadu.

With Sri Lanka’s then President J.R. Jayewardene accommodating India’s geopolitical concerns in the 1987 Indo-Lanka agreement, India changed its stance and turned its guns against the very rebels it once nurtured. The Rajiv Gandhi assassination in 1991 at Sriperumpudur in Tamil Nadu by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) also enabled India to gradually effect a course correction in its relations with Sri Lanka and fully back the Sri Lankan government’s military campaign against the rebels.