( October 1, 2012, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) How do you efface memories of the fact that at
least 40,000 civilians (Tamils) were killed in the final phase of a genocidal
war in Sri Lanka, the majority of them by the Sri Lankan army’s shelling of
hospitals and “safe zones”? How do you move on when 3,00,000 Sri Lankan Tamils
were internally displaced—and continue to be treated as suspects by a
chauvinist Sinhala regime?
You encourage tourism,
pilgrimages, music and dance performances, literary festivals, football
friendlies and, of course, cricket tournaments. Once these vital signs of
normality are in place, you look the other way as Sri Lankan Air Force
personnel train at the Indian Air Force station in Tambaram, near Chennai, or
are shifted out of the state when Tamil Nadu’s politicians file their
obligatory grumbling.
What’s unfolded in TN in the past
week is a vulgar charade of competitive righteousness on the part of all
players, including the media. So when the Sri Lankan government sends
handpicked, vetted tourists—mostly Sinhalese Christians, but a handful of
Tamils too—to visit the Velankanni church in TN, it paints itself as a mature
state honouring the sentiments of its minority population. Earlier this August,
the governments of both nations got Carnatic musicians T.M. Krishna and
Unnikrishnan, and Bharatanatyam dancer Alarmel Valli to perform at a three-day
festival held in Jaffna’s Nallur Kandaswamy temple, marketed as the first such
event in 30 years.
Lost a limb to a bomb? Ayyo!
Here, Kannamma, this Subramanya Bharathi song will be a balm! The media’s
abetment in this manufacture of normality has been crucial. So The
Hindu—ever-eager and Rajapaksa-doting—obliged with a slew of reports that
certified this festival as a sure sign that the region was ‘limping back to
normalcy’. Neither Krishna, Valli nor The Hindu may have cared to notice the 28
new Buddha statues that have sprung along the A9 Highway that leads to Jaffna,
especially near Vavuniya, a Tamil area where hardly any Buddhists live. After
all, The Hindu’s former editor N. Ram had said within two weeks of the end of
the war: “Justice has not been done to Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government for its
astonishing feat of rescuing by military means close to 275,000 civilians.” And
later, a Sri Lankan minister picked up on the perverse cue and described the
war as “one of the greatest humanitarian operations in modern times”.
What we don’t read is how more
than one person disappears every five days in post-war Sri Lanka. On August 30,
the International Day of the Disappeared, over 500 families of abducted persons
gathered in Vavuniya demanding justice and the whereabouts of their loved ones.
India, with its own army’s brazen record of making more people (8,000)
disappear in Kashmir, can teach some statecraft to Sri Lanka.
Tamil Nadu’s political class,
having failed to do much when Tamils were slaughtered in 2009 when the general
election was under way, now has to make the mandatory noise. They have to play
their part in a script perfected over decades; but Tamil Nadu’s politicians
have been as insincere as the Sri Lankan and Indian states. And should they cut
some slack when Rajapaksa is mounting such a diplomatic charm offensive, they
will look like fools. More worrisome is the apathy of India’s writers and
intellectuals.
The Rajapaksa regime has more
blood on its hands than Narendra Modi’s in Gujarat, and yet writers of a
liberal-secularist persuasion in India, such as Githa Hariharan who spearheads
the Indian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (INCABI)
and had rightly campaigned against Amitav Ghosh accepting the Dan David prize
from Israeli president Shimon Peres in 2010, have no qualms about participating
in the Galle Literary Festival. She’d happily hold a workshop about “writing
conflict” on a trip sponsored by the India-Sri Lanka Foundation (established by
an MoU between the two governments in 1998; whose mandate now is also to send
two Sri Lankan writers to the Jaipur Litfest in exchange for two Indian writers
delegated to Galle).
The embers of the 2009 war hadn’t
even cooled when historian Mukul Kesavan, after a year-end holiday in Serendip,
wrote in January 2011 about the “civility and courtesy that marked my
transactions as a tourist”, “the non-stop prettiness” of the landscapes; he praised
Sri Lanka’s achievements on the human development index front, and gushed over
the “welfare state”, saying it “isn’t an aspiration, it actually exists”. In
The Telegraph, not some tourism ministry brochure.
All this is a run-up to Sri Lanka
hosting the CHOGM in 2013, when 54 heads of nations will gather—an exercise
that is expected to condone the well-documented war crimes. In the interim,
let’s sit back and be entertained by the T20 World Cup to unfold in Sri Lanka.
The recipe for forgetting the wounds of war is clearly a mixture of tourism,
sport, music, dance and literature and occasional military training from a
“friendly” neighbour. - Out Look India
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