Eelam: It’s a voters’ issue, will get numbers

By Meena Kandasamy

(May 14, Chennai, Sri Lnaka Guardian) This time around, the DMK-Congress combine is finding it difficult to chart its victory using the favourite trademark of commitment to social justice and secularism. Tamil national and Periyarist groups, which rallied behind the DMK-Congress and hailed the Central government’s decision to implement reservation for OBC students in elite educational institutes like the IITs and IIMs, seek shelter in selective amnesia. Now they are harping on India’s failure to stop the war in Sri Lanka, distributing VCDs with visuals of gruesome deaths in the so-called No-Fire Zone and urging people not to vote for the Congress.

Even though the DMK was pivotal in bringing about Assembly resolutions, all-party meetings, human chain demonstrations, relief funds and general strikes to highlight the Lankan Tamils issue, the anti-Congress sentiment could adversely affect the DMK’s chances. In a strategic damage-control exercise, chief minister M. Karunanidhi claimed that he was LTTE leader V. Prabhakaran’s good friend and he even ensured that his forenoon fast foregrounded the announcement of the "conclusion of combat operations". Knowing that sustained criticism against the Congress could prove costly, Sonia Gandhi and son Rahul also reiterated their love for Tamils and highlighted the efforts of the Indian government to bring peace to the war-torn island nation.

In such a scenario, Vaiko — with his fiery speeches and forecasts of bloodbaths — is no longer the star-campaigner for Eelam, a position that has been surreptitiously taken by AIADMK leader J. Jayalalithaa. A few months ago she dismissed the deaths of thousands of Tamil civilians as a natural by-product of war. Today, on election platforms across Tamil Nadu, she systematically builds up mass hysteria by reeling off day-to-day death counts in Wanni and has even promised to send the Indian Army to create Eelam, if voted to power in Delhi.

Regularly traded charges (dynasty politics, six-hour power-cuts and, of course, corruption) have been relegated to the background since Eelam happens to be the war cry in the electoral battleground.

Politicians aspiring to be rulers, and working overtime to achieve that, cannot be expected to play collective foolery on the Eelam issue. They won’t have wasted their precious campaign time on this issue if they were not convinced that it would sell with the masses, particularly when there is no other major issue and no pronounced anti-incumbency mood.

That they are convinced about Lanka’s Tamil tragedy being a potent poll issue was demonstrated when all of them, including Congress politicians with their million hiccups when it comes to uttering "Eelam", embraced battered Tamils in the island.

Meena Kandasamy is a Sri Lanka expert and lecturer at Anna University, Chennai

-Sri Lanka Guardian