Asada M Erpini

 Every now and then Karunanidhi of Tamil Nadu (TN) wakes up from his slumber (nidhi) and comes out with his favourite topic of the suffering of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. To compete with him there is the TN Chief Minister Jayalalitha harping on her pet theme of the grievance of the Tamil Nadu fishermen who get arrested when they engage in fishing – according to the all-compassionate lady – in their traditional fishing grounds near Katchatheevu.

 A report appearing in Times of India on 29 July refers to the latest pronouncement by Karunanidhi that Sri Lanka had committed genocide and annihilated Tamils”. He goes on to urge the Indian delegation not to participate in the defence conference that is to be held in August in Colombo.  

 Jayalalitha, in a report attributed to her in the local media dated 29 July, wants the Prime Minister of India to intervene in the release of the TN fishermen arrested by the Sri Lankan Navy for poaching in the island’s territorial waters” (italics by the writer). The number of TN fishermen involved in the recent episode is apparently ninety two while sixty fishing boats and fishing gear have been taken into custody by the Sri Lanka Navy, adds the report.

 An important matter that Karunanidhi has conveniently brushed under the carpet and pretends not to know, naturally to curry favour with the ignorant TN millions and to steal the political limelight, is that nearly 50% of the population in Colombo is Tamil. They own the most valued real estate in the Colombo suburbs, run lucrative business and media empires and hold prestigious managerial positions in banks and other commercial concerns. The situation is such that a visitor to a place like Wellawatta may even wonder whether he is in Sri Lanka, which has a 75% Sinhala population, or has landed in Chennai or Madurai in TN.

 As Karunanidhi alleges if there has been genocide and annihilation (complete destruction or obliteration, according to the Oxford Dictionary) of Tamils, from where did the current Tamil residents, shop owners and the government and private sector employees in Colombo come? When the alleged annihilation took place, how did all these hundreds of thousands of Tamils manage to survive? The fact that such utterances are a canard is known to all clear-headed people. Yet, there are many media that unhesitatingly disseminate them globally, possibly with added incentives provided by the anti-Sri Lanka Tamils, both local and abroad.  

 There was a recent report of a move to install a series of buoys near the Katchatheevu island to indicate the maritime boundary between India and Sri Lanka. The measure would have prevented the possibility of TN fishermen claiming that they entered Sri Lanka’s territorial waters inadvertently, and one may be tempted to believe that all parties to the dispute as regards fishing rights would gladly embrace it. No, that was not to be the case: the first prominent figure to object to that plan was the TN Chief Minister!

 When the TN Chief Minister is not crying over the harassment and the arrest of TN fishermen by the Sri Lanka Navy, her other pet topic, over which she sheds copious tears, is the suffering of the Sri Lanka Tamils. Little does she seem to realize that when the TN fishermen poach in Sri Lanka’s territorial waters near Katchatheevu, it is the livelihood of the very same Tamils who live in northern Sri Lanka that is being robbed by her countrymen.
When lies are repeated ad nauseum, as these two persons keep on doing, they tend to get treated as facts with time. To the uninvolved, gullible reader of the media who has no special interest in TN or Sri Lanka, or in the TN fishermen or the Sinhala ethnic group of Sri Lanka, they ultimately become the Gospel truth.

 The best example of fiction turning into ‘fact’ is the number killed during the last stages of the liberation war that ended in May 2009. The UN Office in Colombo, which had Mr. Gordon Weiss as its spokesman at the time, had stated that the number of deaths estimated was 7721. Yet, it did not release the figure as an official death toll because it added that it did not have any witness to the incidents on site. Mr. Weiss later quoted a death toll of 20,000, but within a few days of his arrival in his native Australia, the figure magically ballooned to 40,000. And, today, every Tom, Dick and Harry, repeats without batting an eyelid that Sri Lanka’s armed forces killed 40,000 Tamil civilians during this period.

 Sri Lanka urgently needs a few hard-core liars. Give them some false figures of Sinhala people who have been discriminated, deprived of their basic rights, chased away from their traditional homelands or annihilated, and let them make announcements to the media or make press releases on this (mis)information. The day may soon dawn when the concocted lies would get accepted as fact.