Protect India from the debris of LTTE defeat

By Shankar Roychowdhury

(May 19 , Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) In the last days of the Sri Lankan Army closing in on the Tamil Tigers' final remnants in the island nation, an unprecedented attack by a pro-LTTE mob on an Indian Army convoy took place on the Indian mainland near Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Was this the first warning sign of Sri Lanka's Eelam war spreading by proxy to India?

Sri Lanka's decades-long ethnic war between Sinhalas and Tamils was fought with all the savage ferocity characteristic of such conflicts: Colombo's ruthlessness in militarily eliminating the LTTE separatists was matched by the latter's determination to achieve Eelam. On Sunday Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse proclaimed the LTTE's military defeat and media images of a huge fireball erupting from his last-known command bunker appeared to indicate that the supreme commander of the organisation along with his family and close companions has chosen to commit a fiery hara-kiri rather than be captured alive. On Monday, the Sri Lankan military said that Velupillai Prabhakaran was shot dead while trying to break out of the Army encirclement, and that an official announcement would be made after DNA tests. It can now be reasonably assumed that the final round of a 20-year killing match is over, at least for the present. But the perceived martyrdom of its leaders, especially Velupillai Prabhakaran, is unlikely to be the final chapter of the battle for Eelam.

The men of the LTTE come from the same ethnic stock as the southern regiments of the Indian Army, the Madras Regiment and the Madras Sappers, and are a tough people who proved formidable opponents in Sri Lanka during "Operation Pawan" (1987-89). The LTTE was among the most devious and ruthless terrorist organisations in the world, with a fanaticism on par with or exceeding the most radical of jihadi outfits in Pakistan, and their remnants will attempt to extricate critical assets and personnel at all costs to sanctuaries and safe zones inside as well as outside the island nation. They will attempt to regroup and rise from the ashes in a perhaps more deadly form, based on surviving infrastructure inside Sri Lanka as well as amongst the Tamil diaspora worldwide.

One of their primary targets is likely to be Tamil Nadu, the place that is closest to Sri Lanka and one with which they are most familiar. Like the cry for "azadi" in the Kashmir Valley, a significant body of sentiment in Tamil Nadu - including some of its top political icons, resonates with the ideology of Eelam, and the state has long been perceived as a region of strategic depth for the LTTE. Preventive patrols of the Indian Navy and the Coast Guard have been deployed in the Palk Straits as part of "Operation Tasha", and a number of LTTE gun-runners and smugglers have been intercepted. This vigil will have to be further strengthened. A fairly extensive network of LTTE supporters and local proxy agents has also been developed in Tamil Nadu, which is believed to have established working relationships with other terrorist groups in this country, from peninsular India to the Northeast.

The governments at the Centre as well in the state must take serious cognisance of this threat and take adequate counter-measures before events overtake them. Mumbai's 26/11 must never be repeated. It will be easier to do this if cooperation with the Sri Lankan Navy is formalised, but this appears unlikely due to opposition from domestic Tamil sentiments, which will only intensify with major players in Tamil Nadu politics entering the new UPA government. Parochial pressures of totally amoral coalition politics will possibly compel New Delhi to tread warily even on issues critical to our national security. Similar political compulsions have succeeded in choking off Indian military assistance to Colombo, allowing China and Pakistan to gatecrash into India's sphere of influence as providers for the Sri Lankan military. This had also driven the Indian government to rush our national security adviser and foreign secretary at short notice on a "mission impossible" to Colombo, to try and pressure the Sri Lankan government to call off its offensive against the beleaguered LTTE. But like Pakistan after 26/11, Sri Lanka too politely but summarily fobbed India off with non-substantial responses, further downsizing India's pretensions to regional pre-eminence.

For India, the war in Sri Lanka invites parallels with Bangladesh in 1971, where the roles of the Pakistan Army and the Mukti Bahini almost mirror those of the Sri Lankan Army and the LTTE in the present conflict. It should be remembered that in 1971, India had to intervene militarily to establish Bangladesh as a "Bengal Eelam" to which over 10 million refugees could return in relative security and dignity. The Sri Lankan Tamil issue raises essentially similar concerns, with at least one shrill voice in Tamil Nadu politics demanding that the Indian Army establish Eelam by force of arms. But an "IPKF-2" option to establish an Eelam on the pattern of Bangladesh looks extremely remote, to the point of absurdity. Besides, India has already travelled the military route earlier with the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) and Operation Pawan (1987-89), primarily to coerce a recalcitrant LTTE into compliance with the Indo-Sri Lankan Agreement of 1987, but burnt its fingers in an ill-designed politico-military intervention launched in an environment of pervasive bad faith which could not cope with LTTE intransigence and Sri Lankan duplicity. Nevertheless, it should be noted for the record that international military interventions on humanitarian grounds have taken place under similar circumstances in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Haiti, some under the auspices of the United Nations.

India's regional influence has been at a low ebb after a series of rebuffs from Pakistan after 26/11 and Sri Lanka, and New Delhi can no longer realistically aspire to shape events in Sri Lanka. Diplomatic options have been reduced to futile reiterations of angst, which have been ignored.

However, with the latest developments in Sri Lanka, hopes have arisen of succour for Sri Lankan Tamils and an early alleviation of their long-drawn agony, in which India can undoubtedly play a major role. But in the days and weeks to come, much will depend on the sagacity and understanding of the Sri Lankan government in the moment of final victory. This much, however, is clear: that unless the clash of civilisations between Tamil and Sinhala is brought to an end by mutual and genuine reconciliation between civil societies in the island nation, and substantial autonomy given to the Tamil region within a unified, federal Sri Lanka, the Eelam conflict is more or less guaranteed to revive and burst into flame at some future date. In such an eventuality, both New Delhi and Chennai must jointly ensure that the spillover from such a conflagration is kept safely away from India.

Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury (Retd) is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former Member of Parliament

-Sri Lanka Guardian