by Yatheenthira
Politics of Tamils - In Between the Maneuvers of America and India
In the previous post, we observed a few issues that have been taking place and putting Geneva front and centre. In this post, we will look closely at a few more issues. Recently, a friend shared an opinion with a slight difference. It was a slightly difference perspective. Beyond how fitting it is to today's environment, the reality which cannot be denied is that the environment prevailing today is one in which no idea can be immediately rejected.
That friend said that America's maneuvers in Geneva were actually not against the Sri Lankan government but against the Indian government. Strategically speaking, why would America take actions towards giving problems to India when such a close relationship exists between America and India? To my question, my friend's answer was that America will break up India in the long term.
Everyone can accept the fact that the only country that can challenge the world order led by America is China. The US-India bloc is a tactic within this strategy that can counter China. Because China has developed itself, this is seen by both America and India as a threat. So why is America going to break up India in this situation? However, that friend of mine noted that some people continue to see things in this perspective. He declared definitively that after the release of the photo of the killing of Liberation Tigers leader Prabakaran's son Balanchandran, there is an intentional trend to give troubles to India, and that what happened to the Soviet Union will happen to India.
There are many different research organisations based in the US and operating with a crosshair on China's growth that continue to create arguments against China. Many US defense industry analysts continue to state opinions along the lines that China is a threat to US maneuvers. Given this, even though the idea is a little strange that America is trying to weaken its strategic ally India, which is useful in handling its strategic enemy China, if you look at the situation in another way, it will take a little more discussion to clarify how the issues of Tamils fall through the cracks between America-India maneuvering by the time opinions like all these take shape. If we go a little deeper, an impossible predicament has been reached in taking forward Tamil politics beyond the America-India dealings. In this way, politics that get trapped in the middle, in the future, might still exist or may also vanish.
International relations is something that has two avenues. One is the front door, and the other is the back door. Research and criticisms that continue to be released are based squarely on front-door relations. But tightness or slackness in international relations occur in large part via the back-door. In accordance to the alliances formed through the back door, the issues that need to be discussed by meeting and talking in person through the front door will get decided. If agreements can't be formed through back-door negotiations, then the discussions via the front-door will be unfriendly. The current, ongoing pressures against the Sri Lankan government in Geneva is a discussion happening via the front-door. But definitely many back-door discussions will have happened. According to those such back-door discussions, the front-door pressures in Geneva will get tighter or ease up.
Here, during front-door talks, a few stratagems (deceptive tactics) are being adopted. That is, particularly for small countries like Sri Lanka, to try to give off the appearance that it will not budge on any issue. If such governments want to ensure that their influence amongst the people does not diminish, it is important to show such a tightness in relations. But many different agreements would have been reached in back-door talks. Small governments continue to make use of such tricks in order to escape and survive. When describing people conducting talks with American officials, it is fitting here to also read it as "Subramaniam Swamy" and "Sri Lankan officials". Even though people like Subramaniam Swamy make themselves look like clowns, people like them are in reality the representatives of the secret world. The decisions of the secret world are, in the end, seen as the decisions of the entire world.
When looking at things this way, Tamils do not have their political destiny in their own hands. It has become a task in itself to figure out in whose hands it is in. It seems as if the politics of Tamils in in the hands of America and India. But the purpose of this post is expressing that Tamil politics is caught in the middle of American and Indian maneuvers. But, as it would seem, being stuck this way, in the end, means getting thrown away by the moves of the two sides, or a situation in which the moves of the two sides causes suffocation and death. If you want to escape this, you need to make moves so that you are either fully within one side's camp and are dependent on it, or you stand outside both camps and depend on neither. In regards to this, it is important for the Tamil leadership to think and act.
In Southern Lanka, there are discussions among some that the Tamil National Alliance's (TNA) moves towards America, in the long run, might be an obstacle to Ranil Wickremasinghe taking the seat of power. They try to bolster their argument by citing as evidence an article written by D. Sivaram (Taraki), the politico-military analyst and conferred by the Liberation Tigers leader with the honour "Great Person".
In his article, Sivaram argued that the US inserted itself during J. R. Jeyawardene's time in power because of its strategic interest in South Asia. People are taking that argument and trying to fit it to today's situation. Except for the fact that the US is applying pressure on the SL government on the basis of its strategic interests, it is not upholding Tamil interests. Therefore, the approach towards America by the Tamil National Alliance is not a correct one. This will not bring benefit to Tamil people.
Those people in the South who put forward their argument also do not think about the interests of the Tamil people. Rather, they achieve the effect of making people think, out of fear, that the TNA's growing closeness to America will weaken Ranil Wickremasinghe's support. There are many different perspectives in which such arguments make place. In the centre of all such arguments will always be the Tamils.
Read more!
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Review: The Folly of Eelam Punditry
The Folly of Eelam Punditry
D. Sivaram (Taraki)
Northeastern Herald, 5 May 2003
Today it is clear beyond all reasonable doubt that India and the US-UK-Japan Bloc are trying to influence and manage Sri Lanka's peace process to promote and consolidate their respective strategic and economic interests.
I have been ceaselessly drumming this point wherever I got a hearing here and abroad. But the obfuscation of the political reality caused among Tamils since January 2002 is so great that it is well nigh impossible as the days pass by to cut through the thick and fast accumulating layers of rhetoric and rigmarole surrounding the so called peace process and to show our people the stark truth that even if the Tigers were to discuss peace with Colombo for the next hundred years an acceptable political solution is not possible.
This is not to say that the peace talks should be called off completely. On the contrary, if it suits the long term strategic and economic interests of the Tamils then the LTTE should stick to it for all its worth. But it should do so if and only if it can make an intense endeavour to shake the people out of their current political stupor.
Those who say that we should keep quiet not rock the boat by clamouring about the true motives of the US-UK-Japan Bloc- while certain objectives are being achieved through the peace process, should remember the developments which led up to the Indo-Lanka Treaty and the arrival of the Indian army.
From 1983 to 86, it was taboo among Tamils to propagate the truth that India was exploiting their cause to gain a foothold in Sri Lanka. The few who dared to speak about India's hegemonistic designs were admonished not to be too rash lest we provoke Delhi's ire and cause a disruption in the weapons handouts by the RAW.
Nevertheless, a very small group of intellectuals both within and on the fringes of the armed Tamil Eelam movement did their best to awaken the people from their awesomely naive Indophile proclivities.
Their ideas were placed before the Tamil public at the time chiefly in two works the booklet, 'Vankam Thantha Paadam' and the street play, 'Maayamaan'. But these were mere enlightening drops in the ocean of obfuscation about India and its role in the negotiations between the armed Tamil movement and the Sri Lankan government between 1983 and 87.
Tamil political pundits who were dealing with India would tell us: ": Hush, don't rock the boat. Speak not too loudly, lest someone record your utterances and take the cassette to Delhi and get us in trouble ".
There were also those who acknowledged that Delhi had ulterior intentions which would eventually be detrimental to the Tamil cause but felt that it was prudent to keep silent about the matter with a view to enhancing the armed movement's power by availing of India's hospitality and weapons handouts.
These men realised the truth from their experience and associations in India but were scared that any concerted attempt to educate the Tamil masses might alarm and antagonise Delhi into denying political status to the Tamil liberation movement and its valuable rear base in Tamil Nadu.
Another pet theme of theirs was that we may eventually be able to coax or convince Delhi to politically recognise the armed Eelam groups as comprising a legitimate national liberation movement. That Indira Gandhi had recently recognised the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) as a national liberation movement fuelled false hope among some Eelam political pundits. They believed that if we behaved ourselves with India then we may get the same legitimacy and political status and this, according to their skewed wisdom, would inexorably speed up the realisation of Eelam.
Their argument sounded so credible at the time that the obvious and logically simple truth was completely overlooked.
Even as it provided military training and arms supplies to the Tamil liberation groups, Delhi continued to state quite unequivocally and consistently that it stands by the unity and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka.
Therefore it was clear as crystal that the arms and support given by Delhi for the Tamil movement were not to help achieve Eelam but for bringing pressure on the Sri Lankan state in order to make it toe the line.
Even a brief perusal of the strategic issues which were at stake in the Indian Ocean in the seventies and eighties - in easily and widely accessible documents - would have made it amply clear what India was really after in Sri Lanka.
Yet the Eelam pundits who were pontificating from their offices in Madras saw not the larger than life writing on the wall that the whole Eelam episode between 1983 and 87 was choreographed by Delhi to achieve a permanent strategic foothold in Sri Lanka and cement it with a permanent treaty on the pretext of underwriting a half baked settlement to the Tamil problem.
But this simple, logically obvious truth was never visible even faintly to the vast mass of the Tamils in the northeast because their perceptions were totally obfuscated by the ups and downs, side shows, personalities, high lights, break downs, communiques, letters, revelations, analysis, photo spreads, editorials etc., etc., of the process to settle the conflict and meet the legitimate political aspirations of the Tamils mediated by India between 1983 and 1987.
In the end what did the foolish Eelam pundits get in return for the cause by keeping the lid on the truth about India's real intentions, by preventing the early mobilisation of our people politically against external aggression on our soil? Nothing.
They got no political recognition or legitimacy for the Tamil liberation movement. The Indian training and arms were useless.
And above all, when faced with the dire prospect of foreign aggression we saw the people of Jaffna welcoming the Indian army warmly, as their true saviours. At Suthumalai, to the eternal shame of the Tamil cause, the crowds urged the LTTE leader to handover his organisation's weapons to the Indian army. Also, the Tamil community was deeply divided. There was no national political or defence plan to face the situation.
The price the Tamil liberation movement as a whole had to pay for not educating the people about the truth of India's intentions was high. At this juncture, even a doddering dullard would find the deja vu in escapable.
The Tamil nation cannot afford to make the same mistake again. The current peace process is moving along a path trodden before by India and Sri Lanka. The obfuscators, both professional and casual, in the media, academia and the diplomatic corps are active again with greater vigour and sophistication, aided in no small measure by the continuing folly and intellectual shallowness of the Eelam punditry, inducing widespread political dullness and apathy among the Tamil masses.
We see the carrots of political recognition and economic assistance being dangled before the LTTE for the sole, ulterior purpose of stabilising the Sri Lankan state in a manner that would make it sufficiently pliable to accommodate the strategic and economic interests of the US-UK-Japan Bloc.
We already hear fools (and there are many of the educated variety among Tamils) declaring that we should swallow our pride and yield to the dictates of the world's sole super power, that the US would bomb the Vanni back to the stone age if the LTTE does not toe the line.
Any foreign force can have its way in a country only if its people are divided, politically obfuscated and are irredeemably sunk in political stupor. The creeping intellectual/political barrenness in the northeast should be stopped without further delay. LTTE officials too should stop making pedestrian, boringly predictable utterances on public forums and, instead, make every endeavour to stir the people's reason, intellectual curiosity, their sense of community, their imagination and their intellectual fervour. This is the only way forward to decisively break the vicious circle of political obfuscation by which our people are deeply but blissfully afflicted today.
America may be the mightiest nation on the earth today but that cannot detract an iota from our right to live with honour, dignity and freedom in the land of our fore bears. It cannot for a moment make us give up an inch of our lands to help India or the US Bloc stabilise the Sri Lankan state for the sole purpose of furthering their strategic and economic interests.
Read more!
D. Sivaram (Taraki)
Northeastern Herald, 5 May 2003
Today it is clear beyond all reasonable doubt that India and the US-UK-Japan Bloc are trying to influence and manage Sri Lanka's peace process to promote and consolidate their respective strategic and economic interests.
I have been ceaselessly drumming this point wherever I got a hearing here and abroad. But the obfuscation of the political reality caused among Tamils since January 2002 is so great that it is well nigh impossible as the days pass by to cut through the thick and fast accumulating layers of rhetoric and rigmarole surrounding the so called peace process and to show our people the stark truth that even if the Tigers were to discuss peace with Colombo for the next hundred years an acceptable political solution is not possible.
This is not to say that the peace talks should be called off completely. On the contrary, if it suits the long term strategic and economic interests of the Tamils then the LTTE should stick to it for all its worth. But it should do so if and only if it can make an intense endeavour to shake the people out of their current political stupor.
Those who say that we should keep quiet not rock the boat by clamouring about the true motives of the US-UK-Japan Bloc- while certain objectives are being achieved through the peace process, should remember the developments which led up to the Indo-Lanka Treaty and the arrival of the Indian army.
From 1983 to 86, it was taboo among Tamils to propagate the truth that India was exploiting their cause to gain a foothold in Sri Lanka. The few who dared to speak about India's hegemonistic designs were admonished not to be too rash lest we provoke Delhi's ire and cause a disruption in the weapons handouts by the RAW.
Nevertheless, a very small group of intellectuals both within and on the fringes of the armed Tamil Eelam movement did their best to awaken the people from their awesomely naive Indophile proclivities.
Their ideas were placed before the Tamil public at the time chiefly in two works the booklet, 'Vankam Thantha Paadam' and the street play, 'Maayamaan'. But these were mere enlightening drops in the ocean of obfuscation about India and its role in the negotiations between the armed Tamil movement and the Sri Lankan government between 1983 and 87.
Tamil political pundits who were dealing with India would tell us: ": Hush, don't rock the boat. Speak not too loudly, lest someone record your utterances and take the cassette to Delhi and get us in trouble ".
There were also those who acknowledged that Delhi had ulterior intentions which would eventually be detrimental to the Tamil cause but felt that it was prudent to keep silent about the matter with a view to enhancing the armed movement's power by availing of India's hospitality and weapons handouts.
These men realised the truth from their experience and associations in India but were scared that any concerted attempt to educate the Tamil masses might alarm and antagonise Delhi into denying political status to the Tamil liberation movement and its valuable rear base in Tamil Nadu.
Another pet theme of theirs was that we may eventually be able to coax or convince Delhi to politically recognise the armed Eelam groups as comprising a legitimate national liberation movement. That Indira Gandhi had recently recognised the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) as a national liberation movement fuelled false hope among some Eelam political pundits. They believed that if we behaved ourselves with India then we may get the same legitimacy and political status and this, according to their skewed wisdom, would inexorably speed up the realisation of Eelam.
Their argument sounded so credible at the time that the obvious and logically simple truth was completely overlooked.
Even as it provided military training and arms supplies to the Tamil liberation groups, Delhi continued to state quite unequivocally and consistently that it stands by the unity and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka.
Therefore it was clear as crystal that the arms and support given by Delhi for the Tamil movement were not to help achieve Eelam but for bringing pressure on the Sri Lankan state in order to make it toe the line.
Even a brief perusal of the strategic issues which were at stake in the Indian Ocean in the seventies and eighties - in easily and widely accessible documents - would have made it amply clear what India was really after in Sri Lanka.
Yet the Eelam pundits who were pontificating from their offices in Madras saw not the larger than life writing on the wall that the whole Eelam episode between 1983 and 87 was choreographed by Delhi to achieve a permanent strategic foothold in Sri Lanka and cement it with a permanent treaty on the pretext of underwriting a half baked settlement to the Tamil problem.
But this simple, logically obvious truth was never visible even faintly to the vast mass of the Tamils in the northeast because their perceptions were totally obfuscated by the ups and downs, side shows, personalities, high lights, break downs, communiques, letters, revelations, analysis, photo spreads, editorials etc., etc., of the process to settle the conflict and meet the legitimate political aspirations of the Tamils mediated by India between 1983 and 1987.
In the end what did the foolish Eelam pundits get in return for the cause by keeping the lid on the truth about India's real intentions, by preventing the early mobilisation of our people politically against external aggression on our soil? Nothing.
They got no political recognition or legitimacy for the Tamil liberation movement. The Indian training and arms were useless.
And above all, when faced with the dire prospect of foreign aggression we saw the people of Jaffna welcoming the Indian army warmly, as their true saviours. At Suthumalai, to the eternal shame of the Tamil cause, the crowds urged the LTTE leader to handover his organisation's weapons to the Indian army. Also, the Tamil community was deeply divided. There was no national political or defence plan to face the situation.
The price the Tamil liberation movement as a whole had to pay for not educating the people about the truth of India's intentions was high. At this juncture, even a doddering dullard would find the deja vu in escapable.
The Tamil nation cannot afford to make the same mistake again. The current peace process is moving along a path trodden before by India and Sri Lanka. The obfuscators, both professional and casual, in the media, academia and the diplomatic corps are active again with greater vigour and sophistication, aided in no small measure by the continuing folly and intellectual shallowness of the Eelam punditry, inducing widespread political dullness and apathy among the Tamil masses.
We see the carrots of political recognition and economic assistance being dangled before the LTTE for the sole, ulterior purpose of stabilising the Sri Lankan state in a manner that would make it sufficiently pliable to accommodate the strategic and economic interests of the US-UK-Japan Bloc.
We already hear fools (and there are many of the educated variety among Tamils) declaring that we should swallow our pride and yield to the dictates of the world's sole super power, that the US would bomb the Vanni back to the stone age if the LTTE does not toe the line.
Any foreign force can have its way in a country only if its people are divided, politically obfuscated and are irredeemably sunk in political stupor. The creeping intellectual/political barrenness in the northeast should be stopped without further delay. LTTE officials too should stop making pedestrian, boringly predictable utterances on public forums and, instead, make every endeavour to stir the people's reason, intellectual curiosity, their sense of community, their imagination and their intellectual fervour. This is the only way forward to decisively break the vicious circle of political obfuscation by which our people are deeply but blissfully afflicted today.
America may be the mightiest nation on the earth today but that cannot detract an iota from our right to live with honour, dignity and freedom in the land of our fore bears. It cannot for a moment make us give up an inch of our lands to help India or the US Bloc stabilise the Sri Lankan state for the sole purpose of furthering their strategic and economic interests.
Read more!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
