Indian MPs' concern for Sri Lanka a joke

By Bijo Francis

(December 18, Hong Kong, China, Sri Lanka Guardian) M. Venkiah Naidu, a senior leader of India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, has demanded that the Indian government send a parliamentary delegation to Sri Lanka to verify the situation of the Tamil minority in the island.

Speaking of ethnic tensions in the country during a parliamentary debate on the peace process in Sri Lanka last month, Naidu said, "One can win the war but lose the peace … There is need to expedite a solution or the issue will resurface and have disastrous consequences."

K. Malaisamy of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party also expressed concern about the resettlement of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. He said the government was not doing enough to secure the welfare of Sri Lankan Tamils. He also suggested the Indian government should “arm-twist” the government of Sri Lanka to force it to do more for the Tamils on the island.

These statements by India’s parliamentarians do reflect a concern for their neighbor's peril. But that is the only good thing to be said about this debate. The fact is that most of these parliamentarians cannot be believed or trusted.

Malaisamy's request that his government “arm-twist” a neighboring government also shows the lack of intellectual maturity among India's parliamentarians. Of course, nothing better could be expected from a politician of the AIADMK party since “arm-twisting” was the party’s specialty while in power in Tamil Nadu.

The party under the leadership of J. Jayalalitha was notorious for twisting not just the arms, but also the necks of ordinary people in the state. Thanks to the general public, the AIADMK was given a well-deserved rest from power in the general elections of 2006, to recover from the energy loss the party's leadership suffered after spending a full term in office.

The statements made in the Indian Parliament about Sri Lanka are nothing but hollow expressions of political arm wrestling. The Sri Lankan issue is nothing but one more stone for the opposition politicians to throw at the government.

If India's parliamentarians are really concerned about ordinary people and their welfare, they need not take the trouble to cross the rough waters between the Rameswaram and Mannar islands that separate India and Sri Lanka. There are enough concerns to be addressed at home.

For instance, there are a few million dalits, or low-caste people, in India who are forced to live as manual scavengers on the fringes of Indian society, bonded against their will due to caste-based discrimination and engaged in some of the most menial jobs ever forced upon a community in the history of mankind, including carrying human excrement in loads on their heads each day.

Then there are a few hundred thousand tribal people living in villages in states like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Orissa, which have been turned into a war zone in the past two years due to an ongoing war between the state and the Naxalites, the radical communists supportive of Maoist political sentiment and ideology. The conflict has already killed an estimated 1,400 persons in the past 24 months in the three states alone.

There are also conflicts of similar or even graver intensity going on in Indian states like Manipur. This year, at least 260 persons have died, killed by the state police. Even the director general of police in Manipur has admitted to that in public.

Not many parliamentarians have taken the trouble to visit these war zones. In the recent past, in spite of several calls for help from the people of Manipur, not a single parliamentarian has visited the state with the purpose of listening to the people.

The number of people killed and maimed in India in the past 10 years by state-sponsored violence is higher than the number of Sri Lankan Tamils killed in the country’s civil war. But neither Naidu nor his BJP party speaks about these things.

The BJP is part of a political allegiance in India that has founded, is financing and promoting some of the most violent religious fundamentalist organizations in India, like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Both their organization and their engagement philosophy resemble those of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany under Adolf Hitler.

On softer grounds, the BJP and one of its main opponents, the Congress Party, support Salwa Judum – an anti-Naxalite people’s resistance movement that began in 2005 in the state of Chattisgarh, but has since driven many people to join the Naxalites due to the militant nature of the so-called “peace movement” that has killed and forced people to join the group.

The Salwa Judum is supported by state administrations wherever they exist in the country. Their members are parliamentarians and even ministers in some states. On those grounds, some Indian legislators are worse than Hewa Koparage Mervyn Silva, the notorious Sri Lankan minister of labor relations and manpower.

Most leftist parliamentarians in India are also a farce. Had it not been so, the state of West Bengal where one of the left parties in India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), has ruled continuously for the past 32 years would have been an oasis in India's democratic wasteland. Instead, West Bengal today is an almost lawless state with Kolkata, known as the “dead city,” as its capital.

The debate in India’s Parliament on Sri Lanka is nothing more than one more “shout and forget” exercise the parliamentarians resort to when they get fed up with literal arm-twisting and neck-wrenching in the legislative houses. Nothing more on this is expected other than the initial “ha and ho.” This is what Indian politicians are mostly good at.

(Bijo Francis is a human rights lawyer currently working with the Asian Legal Resource Center in Hong Kong. He is responsible for the South Asia desk at the center. Francis has practiced law for more than a decade and holds an advanced master's degree in human rights law.)

-Sri Lanka Guardian