By

N Sathiya Moorthy

If the Indian position on Sri Lanka’s ethnic issue under the post-poll Narendra Modi leadership has deviated from those of predecessor governments, including the immediate-past Manmohan Singh dispensation, it is here. Or, so would it seem. “The Prime Minister urged all stake-holders in Sri Lanka to engage constructively, in a spirit of partnership and mutual accommodation towards finding a political solution” an Indian official statement said after the visiting TNA delegation had met the host leadership, including PM Modi.

It was the first visit by a TNA delegation, under party chief Sampanthan, after the Modi-led BJP Government had assumed office in Delhi. It was also their first meeting, not only with the Prime Minister but also the new National Security Advisor (NSA), A K Doval. It was also the first meeting that any Sri Lankan delegation has had with NSA Doval. Sri Lankan Government leaders will get to interact with him later in the year. Doval is said to have been slated to address the annual ‘Galle Dialogue’, hosted by the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development.

The TNA had met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj when she led a cross-party delegation at the behest of then Congress-led UPA Government at the Centre, to study the post-war ground situation when she was still the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, the more powerful Lower House of the Indian Parliament. With Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh, who took over about a year ago, the TNA delegation had interacted when she visited Sri Lanka. The TNA’s Delhi visit was thus a mixture of old and the new, in terms of personalities. In terms of emotional quotient, however, the new Prime Minister got to hear the TNA and the Tamils of Sri Lanka for the first time, possibly. There again, the content could not have been much different from what Modi’s predecessors too had heard, at times from some of the same Tamil leaders. But for the Modi Government and the PM personally, it was the first taste of the human experience – whether from Sri Lanka or anywhere else.

Where content mattered, the TNA did not have much to offer than what the PM might have been briefed by his officials and diplomats already, from past interactions with predecessor-governments. From the Indian side, too, much of what was said seemed to have been a repeat or in continuation of what the TNA had always heard from India: that India wanted a political solution, based on or deriving from 13-A, and within a united Sri Lanka.

With the result, what mattered in context was the new addition to the Indian position. Mouthed by none other than the Prime Minister himself, and to the TNA directly, it implied that political negotiations in Sri Lanka, on the ethnic issue had to be a two-way street, and both sides would have to make adjustments, make sacrifices. Over the past decades, the Tamils had always been demanding – not, conceding a wee bit – from the Sri Lankan State, the Indian Government or whoever. Or that’s the impression they have had left behind.

In a way, the Indian position here too has been evolving over a period. The usage of phrases like spirit of partnership and mutual accommodation should hence be construed as a progression in that direction. Through the war years and later, too, the predecessor government in Delhi had expanded India’s perception of the scope of a political solution in Sri Lanka, from a weightage for the Tamils to a minorities-focussed approach, and later to a more broad-based proposal where the concerns of all communities are addressed.

The Modi dispensation, if anything, has improved upon it – as much possibly the content as the phraseology. The earlier Indian position implied that the onus of finding a solution rested almost entirely on the Sri Lankan Government. While giving his TNA guests a patient hearing, and also sympathising and empathising with them, PM Modi seemed to have also implied more. India now seems to think that the onus of finding a political solution rests equitably, if not equally, with the Tamils/TNA, too. Spirit of partnership and mutual accommodation are phrases not used in isolation. In calling for the stake-holders in Sri Lanka to engage constructively, in a spirit of partnership and mutual accommodation, India has underlined its prognosis-based diagnosis on what may have gone wrong in the past, hiding them all behind the prescription. In doing so, India has not resorted to one-sided blame-game, as some other members of the international community have been doing, both during and after Eelam War-IV.

Keeping TNA and sovereignty apart

In doing so, India also seems to have kept the TNA and the Tamils out of the more focussed diplomatic issue revolving around the UNHRC probe into allegations of war crimes and accountability issues in Sri Lanka. Through the past years too, India did not involve the TNA in this issue, keeping all consultations only at the governmental-level, if at all. Having taken a position based on the sovereignty of Sri Lanka on the UNHRC probe, it could not have done otherwise without changing that tack. The Modi dispensation did not seem to have considered that option even for a moment, it would seem. Truth to be recalled, even at the height of the March 2013 UNHRC resolution, the BJP, then led by Sushma Swaraj as the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, took the firm position that they would not allow even the tabling of a parliamentary resolution on the subject. Other non-Tamil regional parties took the cue from the Congress, then heading the ruling coalition at the Centre, and also the BJP, then the government-in-waiting.

They would not want India to interfere in matters of sovereignty involving a neighbourhood nation. Nor would they want India to do so. In a way, it all has come to mean a majority consensus of a kind in the matter, leaving out the political parties and their parliamentary representatives from southern Tamil Nadu. That position has not changed.

Throughout that particular session of Parliament, and on earlier and later occasions, all these parties and more have joined hands, seeking a political solution that addresses the aspirations of the Tamil community for equality, dignity, justice and self-respect within the framework of a united Sri Lanka, as the official statement on the Modi-TNA meeting has now put it. This position too has not changed, since, as the proceedings of the Modi Government’s maiden budget session have shown since.

Helping to help…

India’s need for a negotiated political settlement just at the moment is not without reason to help Sri Lanka help itself. With the UNHRC seized of the matter more than what Sri Lanka had thought it could handle at the outset, a pro-active India would require more than promises for the future to convince much of the rest of the world that the Government in Colombo meant business, and that it did not consider development and democracy a sure substitute for devolution, which still remains the core-issue. Having walked the UNHRC talk, these other nations too would require some visible signs of improvement on the socio-political side for them to go slow, if not take a U-turn, on the probe, when the issue comes up for vote-based review by March next. India’s experience in the matter was not much to go by. Hence, also this urgent Indian need to convince itself that it too is on the right track on the political solution, so as to try and help Sri Lanka keep the UNHRC probe at bay. Rather, India too needs to convince itself that the home-spun Sri Lankan probe on accountability issues would be as effective as the political solution that should precede it. Or, so it would seem.

TNA’s travails & troubles

The TNA’s troubles do not stop with having to yield some and take some, if and when the Sri Lankan Government were to re-commence political negotiations that were aborted, after making some substantive progress, both in form and content. The way the politics of the TNA is being played out in the party-controlled Northern Provincial Council (NPC) and of the Tamils in and by the Diaspora, the leadership is actually under unacknowledged pressure to prove that it can deliver on the commitments made.

One of the problems to finding a lasting solution to the ethnic issue is the fact that the Government in Colombo is seen as representing all Sinhalese, especially including the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist constituency. The TNA now, and the TULF, earlier as Tamil moderate groups were likewise seen as representing all Tamils. This was/is not to be.

No Government in Sri Lanka has actually claimed that it represented the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist constituency. Where it was seen as doing so, the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa, for instance, did exactly the opposite thing that was expected of him at the time. In the case of the non-State, Tamil moderate political leadership, all militants first, and the LTTE later, upstaged him. The TNA has to be cautious that it did not go this way. It has to prove to the world that it is still calling the shots in the Tamil politics in and about the country, particularly of the North.

Things on the ground do not seem that pretty, either for the TNA or for all those who want to continue swearing by it, as the sole representative of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, even if not all of their Diaspora brethren. While the NPC polls of November last proved it up to a point, the TNA leadership is yet to prove that it word counts on all matters that matter for and within the Tamil community and polity in Sri Lanka.

Media reports have recently mentioned 33 of the total 41 TNA members of the Provincial Council in the North and the East had signed a memorandum for back-dating the UNHRC probe to 1974. It may include the LTTE killing of the then Tamil Mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duraiappah, in 1975, as some would want the world to believe. But it also includes the period in which the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) was engaged in Sri Lanka. It’s not the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinists who have formally demanded a UNHRC probe into the IPKF days (1987-89) but the Tamils, that too elected TNA representatives – that too when their leadership was waiting for an invite to meet with the new Indian PM.

Yet, it is not about the UNHRC probe and the IPKF. Instead, it is about the TNA members going to the UNHRC after Northern Province Chief Minister C V Wigneswaran had thwarted party colleagues’ attempts to have a similar motion moved in the Provincial Council. It is unclear if the new approach to the UNHRC, when the controversial Navi Pillay was still heading it – rather, they were her last days in office – was/is aimed at circumventing political embarrassment for the TNA inside the country and neighbourhood, or if it was done over the head of the Chief Minister and the larger party leadership.

Among the 33 TNA signatories to the memo for the UNHRC, five were from among the 11 party councillors in the North. The remaining 28 were all from the Northern Province, where the party has 30 of the total 38 PC members on its side. Indications are that barring CM Wigneswaran and Council Chairman C V K Sivagnanam, all TNA members of the House had signed the memorandum to the UNHRC.

“Where does it all leave the TNA?” is the question that the friends and well-wishers of the party and the people that it represents would be asking themselves. Considering that those behind this and such other moves, both inside and outside the NPC, have often acted independent and without reference to the acknowledged party leadership, both inside and outside the House, questions about the ability of the TNA to deliver on the commitments it would make as a part of any negotiations process would always be in the back of their mind. Indians, if not India, could not be an exception, either.

For, they all had known in the past what such a course had led Sri Lanka, and also some of them, into the waiting hands of the LTTE, more often than not! Just when there is an emerging realisation that the Sri Lankan Government of any day does not really have to represent Sinhala hard-liners, there is also an increasing realisation that it may also continue to be true of the Tamils, too. When the leadership could mass-direct the Tamils to fall in line, the LTTE as the leader faltered itself, more often than the other stake-holder(s)!

Courtesy:The Sunday Leader