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Foreign Policy

Options in Sri Lanka - And the risk of Sri Lanka falling sway to outside powers

By T S GOPI RETHINARAJ

THE OVERARCHING goal of India’s policy toward Sri Lanka since the 1950s was to prevent any hostile power getting a foothold in the neighbourhood. In line with this objective India pursued various policies some of them at the expense of Sri Lankan Tamil interests over the years to placate the Sinhalese leadership. This includes bartering away the citizenship rights of over 600,000 Tamils who had settled there during colonial times and acquiescence to racial discriminatory policies followed by successive Sri Lankan governments. Even the brief support to various Tamil militant groups by India in the 1980s was largely to confront the scheming ways of the Sinhalese leadership that undermined its regional status. As a result, India ended up antagonising various ethnicgroups in Sri Lanka.

India’s current policy and approach towards ethnic crisis is mainly influenced by the fear that an independent Tamil Eelam will rekindle secessionist tendencies in Tamil Nadu. This view lacks credibility because the Tamils in India are at the forefront in asserting their national identity along with their ethnic-linguistic pride. India also seeks the military defeat of LTTE for various reasons, including its role in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) debacle. But this overlooks several issues. Rajiv’s assassination has left many unanswered questions that have not been probed further. Publicly stated evidence clearly implicates the LTTE; however, the possibility of the assassination being part of a larger conspiracy involving foreign intelligence agencies has not been investigated. The Jain Commission, which probed the assassination, made similar observations concerning the questionable conduct of some Indian politicians and middlemen before and after the tragic incident. And IPKF debacle was mainly due to the deception and double-gaming practised by Sri Lanka when India was trapped into fighting a bloody and protracted war.

India’s Sri Lanka policy from the beginning also failed to appreciate the deeper historical roots of the ethnic conflict. The roots of current hostility between the Sinhalese and Tamils can be traced back to the intermittent wars between the Tamil and Sinhala kingdoms during the past several centuries. The Sinhalese leadership made this only worse by pandering to Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism after the British left the island in 1948. Starting from the propagation of a biased history in schools(which showed Tamils as invaders and late settlers), to the discriminatory policies that severely disadvantaged the Tamils in education and jobs, and the subsequent violent government-led anti-Tamil pogroms, the ethnic conflict has gone through various phases.

The LTTE’s conduct in the conflict also has its share of problems. It has put an entire generation of Tamils in Sri Lanka through immense hardship by persisting with the armed struggle, employing child soldiers, and systematically eliminating other Tamil groups. But one cannot also ignore the fact that the Sinhalese dispensation would have successfully subjugated the Tamils long ago in the absence of LTTE. In a sense the LTTE is both a source of strength and liability for the Sri Lankan Tamils in the ongoing conflict. After three decades of intense civil war the Sinhalese leadership is not mentally prepared for a fair political solution, even something along the lines of Indian federalism. It is quite a different story that the ethnic conflict would not have assumed violent proportions if the Sri Lankan Tamils had been treated as equal citizens by the Sinhalese. Even today very few outside of Sri Lanka are fully aware of the sophisticated form of an ethnic cleansing unleashed by the Sinhalese majority with state collusion. This long and bitter history makes rapprochement between the Sinhalese and Tamils even more difficult. Given these realities, what are India’s policy options in the ongoing ethnic conflict?

It is increasingly becoming clear that India cannot afford to remain fixated on its past bitterness with the LTTE while crafting its response to the ethnic crisis. The current policy stagnation besides exacerbating the difficulties of Sri Lankan Tamils can also be detrimental to India’s security in the long run. India’s long time interest in making its southern frontier free from influence of external powers made Sri Lanka indispensable for this larger strategy. The Sinhalese leadership was quite adept in exploiting this Indian sensitivity over the years. During the Cold War there was some anxiety in India as Sri Lanka began building closer relationship with the United States. This was largely due to India’s suspicion that Trincomalee would someday end up as a base for the US Navy. Such concerns are becoming increasingly irrelevant now in the light of closer defence co-operation between the United States and India. When Mumbai and Chennai offer better options for naval interoperability, why would the Americans need Trincomalee with a hostile population?

However, there are other potential sources of threat to India’s southern frontiers. China’s naval power projection capability currently doesn’t extend beyond Taiwan. But as China grows and builds a stronger navy it can evolve as a major power in the Indian Ocean region through which large volumes of its imported commodities from Middle East and Africa must pass. China is already playing a major role in building ports and potential naval bases in some Indian Ocean littoral states as part of its “string of pearls” strategy, generating concerns in the Indian defence establishment. India formally extracted concession from Sri Lanka through the 1987 peace accord currently in tatters that Colombo will not allow any external powers in a way detrimental to Indian interests. It will be gross mistake if India believes that Sri Lanka will permanently adhere to this policy.

Sri Lanka has been building parallel defence cooperation tracks with China and Pakistan, and the island has been brimming with Chinese and Pakistani intelligence operatives for a long time. India has gone out of way to help maintain Sri Lanka's territorial integrity knowing well about these developments which can turn out to be a major security problem for the Indian Navy in future. India cannot allow this situation to persist while simultaneously putting pressure on the LTTE and providing military assistance to Sri Lanka. A credible case could be built that an independent Tamil Eelam will be for ethnic-linguistic-religious reasons friendlier towards India than the Sinhalese dispensation harbouring a deep contempt for India and its interests. India’s current military assistance, understandably low-key for domestic reasons, comes at a time when some western countries have begun to take a more nuanced position toward the ethnic conflict in light of the gross human right violations committed by the Sri Lankan state against Tamils. Although LTTE is banned in many countries there is also simultaneous realization that any political solution ignoring the militant outfit will not be viable in the long run.

Keeping in view these long-term interests, India should review its policy and exert pressure on Sri Lanka to seek a political solution for the ethnic conflict. Ironically, India’s own clout with the Sinhalese dispensation in Colombo will vapourise once the LTTE is defeated militarily. Why would the Sinhalese leadership care about India’s sensitivities after obtaining a favourable military solution?

Unless India is able to lock the Sri Lankan government in a broad bilateral security relationship, the Sinhalese will have no qualms allowing China or Pakistan to get foothold in a way detrimental to Indian interests. This is the real danger of India’s current detached policy, facilitating the military defeat of the LTTE. This view is of course not congruent with mainstream Indian thinking about the Sri Lankan ethnic issue. But if India were to take a hard-nosed view of long-term interests, a subtle shift in its position against the LTTE will go a long way in safeguarding the country’s strategic interest in the Indian Ocean region besides securing the interests of ethnic Tamils in the island.

T S Gopi Rethinaraj is a member of the faculty at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

Source: Pragati - The Indian National Interest Magazine April 2008.

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/indian-fore...tions-sri-lanka

Time for India to re-think, says Singaporean scholar

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