Himalayan Blunder
Posted on April 5th, 2013
By Inderjit Badhwar- an Author, Adventurer and former Chief Editor ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢¢”š¬…”ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”¹…” India Today
I n voting against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC for a second time, New Delhi made a pusillanimous display of Pax Indiana’s opacity in a region crucial to its geopolitical stability and security. And New Delhi has missed out on or deliberately ignored crucial home truths. Inderjit Badhwar
First of these is that Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is a diehard nationalist who so far resisted the terrific pressure he has been under from the JVP and JHU for “being an Indian stooge.” His base of support is now rock solid within his own country and he enjoys great relations with Malaysia, Indionesia, Vietnam, Russia, China, Argentina, Uruguay, Bhutan, Pakistan, (!!), Nepal etc.
Whatever the human rights abuses, he may be accused of, he is no Pol Pot or Idi Amin, and SL is NOT a Banana Republic no matter how autocratic the Rajapaksa brothers may be made out to be by their detractors. try to be.
Any R2P (right to protect) ideas that the US/NATO may have in SL are not going to wash after the miserable experiments in Libya, Syria and Mali thatvhave wreaked mayhem and threaten to spread anarchy.
I think Rajapaksa would be far more sympathetic to Indian concerns in his country and respond dramatically and positively if India behaves like a regional superpower and display some independence rather than appearing to be a new satellite of the US/NATO interest. India has an overriding interest in ensuring that Sri Lanka is not converted into a region for big power rivalries and there is no better person to ensure that than Rajapaksa. Had the US not backed Batista and sided with the Cuban revolution instead of alienating Castro– he could have been the best friend America had in that region and Castro’s Communism would have been more benign.
We dont want another Cuba in our backyard. Rajapaksa is hardboiled, earthy like Kamaraj, with the fiercely independent streak of Hugo Chavez and Castro and Allende. Do not misjudge him. He is still a true friend of India but getting angrier by the day.
Our bilateral trade has now crossed US$5 billion– the bulk of the business coming from Tamil Nadu. Amma Jayalalitha is only hurting her local economy by calling for boycotts and the lijke. Already Gujarati and Odisha businessmen are reaching out to Sri Lanka in an effort to hog the emerging markets and exploit the improving economic climate. I’ve talked to several up country Tamils and others and they seem to express the unanimous view that the renewed Eelam agitations in Tamil Nadu and India’s domestic, competitive political one-upmanship is not helping but hurting the Tamil cause in Sri Lanka because it is vitiating the peace process and the goodwill generated by the resettlement and jobs programs in the erstwhile war torn North and causing Sinhala resentment against the local Tamils to rise again. This possible backlash is neither good for the peace process, the LLRC movement, for the Tamils of Sri Lanka, or for New Delhi, particularly when the demilitarization of the North is TRULY proceeding at a healthy gallop and auxiliary forces could be replacing the police, and elections are due in September.
Please remember, however critical you may of Rajapaksa, he NOT and will never be a Sinhala Chauvinist. But India’s insensitivity towards his problems and predicaments and India’s sympathies towards what he considers “propaganda” by LTTE sleeper cells could well push him into the hands of Sinhala chauvinists.
We are already surrounded by neighbors who do not exactly love us — we’ve lost Nepal, alienated Bangladesh, fought wars with Pakistan and China who are breathing down our necks, alienated tiny Maldives with its Muslim population vulnerable to fundamentalist groups from Pakistan and the Middle East, and now New Delhi seems to be doing everything in its power to alienate our remaining true friend in the Indian Ocean– our neighbour Sri Lanka whose leaders call India, “Elder Brother.”
It is true that Rajapaksa hasn’t moved forward of the 13th Amendment. It is even truer that, secretly, he has believed with Premadasa and most Sri Lankans that the 13th Amendment was forced down the throats of a Democratic Country by an “imperialist-dictated” Rajiv-Jayawardane treaty. (Isnt it ironical that even Prabhakaran felt the same way about it, and after initially announcing support, violently rejected it and even cooperated with Premadasa to meet that goal).
A year ago, before the first anti-SriLakan vote in the UHHCR in 2012, the 13th Amendment was at least “negotiable” from a Sri Lankan point of view. Today, because Sri Lanka feels India is part of an international move to isolate Sri Lanka, opposition to the 13th Amendment has become a national rallying point for Sri Lankans.
Any Sri Lankan President can ignore this reality only at his own political peril. The more we try and impose Constitutional “solutions” on Si Lanka from outside, the harder will be their opposition. Rajapaksa is committed to devolution, but not any formula dictated by India or outsiders. A softer, more sympathetic line, a shift away from repeating slogans raised by the human rights industry, a more open appreciation for Rajapaksa’s unique feat in becoming the first nation to annihilate an entire internationally listed and banned terror outfit, may produce better results on the devolution from him than simply preaching the 13th Amendment to him and that too by a country like India which advocates bilateralism in settling controversial issues with its neighbors — a principle solidly enunciated in The Indira-Bhutto Shimla Pact.
Rajapaksa says that forcing devolution formulas from outside is akin to foreign powers asking India to accept solutions such as splitting Kashmir into three — Ladakh, Jammu and the Valley, with the Valley to be “independent” or jointly administered etc.; or NATO or the UN suggesting greater autonomy for Bodoland, Manipur, or creating a separate autonomous tribal central state to solve the Naxal problem. Would India stand for it? No, because no elected government in a democracy would brook such interference.
That’s how Rajapaksa feels. Unlike his predecessors he is nobody’s stooge. And nor does he want to behave like one. Gone are the days when Indian High Commissioners to Colombo a la J.N. Dixit could act like Viceroys and even threaten to “dismember” the nation with military intervention when the Sri Lankans at one point balked at accepting the 13th Amendment.
Today, in Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka has a leader who, in 2007 openly abrogated the Norwegian-brokered Cease Fire Agreement of 2000 when he became convinced that he LTTE was using the hiatus to step up terror bombings and increase its weapons caches. Similarly, if countries use the bludgeon of the 13th Amendment to badger Sri Lanka to accept outside interference that hinders the peace, reconciliation and reconstruction process, he may well publicly disown the 13th Amendment as blight on Sri Lanka’s newly found sovereignty following the defeat of the world’s most ruthless terror army.
Inderjit Badhwar is an Author, Adventurer and former Chief Editor ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢¢”š¬…”ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”¹…” India TodayƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢
April 5th, 2013 at 2:24 pm
Good article but some things are WRONG. Poor grammar and spelling mistakes too.
Is this really written by this Endian?
“His base of support is now rock solid within his own country and he enjoys great relations with Malaysia, Indionesia, Vietnam, Russia, China, Argentina, Uruguay, Bhutan, Pakistan, (!!), Nepal etc.”
Malaysia did NOT vote.
Argentine voted AGAINST SL. And we do NOT have strong relations with them compared to OTHER countries.
April 5th, 2013 at 4:57 pm
Funny how an Indian, no matter how benign always pays token reference to “Sinhala chauvanism”. No mention is EVER made by them of Tamil racism, which Endians are forever encouraging by stirring the pot.
Lorenzo, Malaysia’s abstention is a “win” of sorts for us because their Tamil population is around 10 percent. Malaysian politicians, like politicians anywhere would be tempted to deflect attention from their own simmering ethnic tensions onto Sri Lanka but they have so far, resisted.
April 6th, 2013 at 3:07 am
Behind all this UNHRC non-sense is traitor diaspora. They got these vote-greedy ‘human right champions’ MPs in those countries and put pressure on US, Canda, UK. etc etc. then in turn India makes a lot of noise too keep their coalition intact. Sri Lankan Government should remind these traitors that their kith and kin in the North and East were saved by the President from certain extinction. India, who started all these trouble by creating LTTE, should explain to TN that their foolish actions compromise India’s security in the long run. They have already lost the control of Indian Ocean to the Chinese. They are driving Sri Lanka more and more into the hands of the Chinese.
Nobody can argue about the freedom and the lifestyle enjoyed by Tamils in Sri Lanka. Colombo is full of them. North and east for themselves only. Sinhalese should not be there. They want everybody to believe there were Tamil kingdoms in Sri Lanka even though nobody has ever seen an ancient building. That should be proof enough to anybody. But we still have to be believe them because they are priviledged people. So even these traitors now live 1000s of miles away, we have to break up our country so that they can go on holiday. Tamil Nadu (nadu means country in Tamil) is there. But they want another country for them in Sri Lanka. Don’t want another country in Canada, UK, Germany etc. etc. because those countries are too powerful. You can always slag off the country you were born, which gave free education, free medicine.
We all know these diasporas fled from the LTTE brutality. If they had told the truth in these countries, they wouldn’t have been offered the asylum on a plate. So they blamed the Sri Lankan Government’s ‘atrocities’. How very convenient? It worked for closer to 1 million people to escape to luxury lives in the developed countries, forgetting their beloved brethren 16 miles across the waters. But TNs are easily fooled. Now they want sanctions, eelams, etc, etc. for their brethren abroad. BJP wants a eelam too, for the Sri Lankan Tamils who are now second minority after the muslims multiplied and became the second largest. Eealam in Sri Lanka, then Eelam in India. India will be another Balkan, and disintegration will be inevitable. With a muslim population bigger than what is in Pakisthan, another to the east, Bangladesh, future will be very bleak. But nobody will shed a tear.