Posted on 05/19/2009 1:17:25 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Rajiv: The Tiger chief's big mistake
Seema Guha
Tuesday, May 19, 2009 1:22 IST
New Delhi: Prabhakaran made two fatal mistakes which brought about his downfall. One was his complete isolation from the rest of the world and the decision to eliminate former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
In 1991, Indian reporters visiting Jaffna were flooded with questions from LTTE leaders about the chances of the Congress returning to power. The thinking was: If Rajiv is elected, his first priority would be to avenge the humiliation suffered by the IPKF -- when ex-president Premadasa and Prabhakaran got together to throw out the Indian army from the island.
Prabhakaran himself was convinced Rajiv would win the elections and turn his mind to LTTE. Prabhakaran was advised not to go ahead with his assassination plan as it would have long-term implications. Instead, he was advised to send feelers to make up with the Congress.
Anton Balasingham the most visible face of the Tigers, and one of Prabhakaran's trusted aides was against Rajiv's assassination. But the LTTE chief went against all advice.
He did not know when it was time to talk peace, unlike fellow South Asian Maoist Prachanda in Nepal, who read the situation correctly. When Chandrika Kumaratunga came to power, with her liberal non chauvinistic agenda and offered a peace deal to the LTTE, he summarily rejected it and broke the ceasefire by attacking a naval ship in Trincomalee.
Chandrika and her late film star husband were among a handful of Sinhala leaders in the '80s who sympathised with the Tamil cause. Yet he sent assasins to kill her and though she escaped, she became a hardliner. She believed Prabhakaran would never opt for peace.
Kumaratunga was not successful in her bid to wipe out the LTTE and the army suffered several reverses in Mullaitivue and left an unfinished agenda for Rajapaksa. Later, Prabhakaran admitted that killing Rajiv and alienating India was not the correct decision. Much of the sympathy for the Tamil cause disappeared in India and no government in Delhi would maintained contact with the outfit.
The LTTE boss also failed to realise that after 9/11, the world would not tolerate terror, however just the cause. Colombo could do what it liked without the world extending a helping hand to the Tamil cause.
He who lives by the sword, dies by it. Prabhakaran had a chance to settle for a good deal, but he got too enamoured by blood lust. The only long term solution for the Tamil-Sinhalese issue is to look at their ethnicities: the Tamils are Dravidians with ties to Tamil Nadu and other south indian dravidian states, while the Sinhalese are related to the Biharis and northern Indians. The only sensible solution is for Sri Lanka to join the Indian federation and ask for more devolution of power to the states, so that the Sinhalese state would be the south and west of the island of Ceylon and the Tamil State would include the north and east of the island + the current state of Tamil Nadu. This will meet both ethnic needs and economic needs.
Since the Tamil Tigers were the world’s most murderous terrorists (and I didn’t know that they were the ones who killed Rajiv Gandhi), it is unlikely that passions will allow this to happen for a long time.
I realize that, since I had a college course on the history of India. Not an expert, but know more than most Americans. I realize that India is almost as diverse as the other Asian peninsula, Europe, tied together almost entirely by the British colonial domination and language. A federation would be the ideal, bur faces obstacles including the need for unity vs China and Pakistan, and national pride as the world’s largest democracy and a rising power.
All of that sounds plausible, but the idea of the disintegration of a nuclear nation makes me nervous.
Came across this very interesting piece from the Economist when I was browsing through their site-it was written in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination-
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13684479&source=hptextfeature
India’s trial
May 25th 1991
From The Economist print edition
ASSASSINATION, said Disraeli, never changed the history of the world. He may have been right, in his day. But the bomb that killed Rajiv Gandhi this week sent its blast through an India already on the edge of tragedy. That is why a single act of political barbarism, in the southern town of Sriperumbudur on the night of May 21st, may yet smash the world’s biggest democracy into sectarian fragments.
Mr Gandhi’s murder came in the middle of a general-election campaign that had already been marred by more killing, intimidation and vote-grabbing than India had seen in any of its nine previous elections. Sikh separatists, Assamese secessionists, Tamil militants, Bihari gangsters, Kashmiri guerrillas—all had provided bloody evidence, well before the election, of an India sliding towards ungovernability. The lofty idea that India could endure as a secular democracy of diverse peoples had come under open attack from the Hindu chauvinists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Despite being an affront to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi, the founding father of independent India, the BJP’s attack had been immensely popular. Equally depressing, in its implicit rejection of the notion that merit deserves reward, was the cynical appeal made to the lower castes and the Muslims by V.P. Singh’s Janata Dal Party.
Yet India contains not just the forces of fragmentation, but also reserves of strength. One is the refusal of its generals, in contrast to their counterparts in Pakistan and Bangladesh, to be drawn into politics. The other is the resilience of the union.Even in its infancy, India was strong enough to survive the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Decades later, in 1984, the sense of unity was still strong enough to calm the sectarian anger that followed the murder of Rajiv Gandhi’s mother, Indira. Mr Gandhi’s murder is a new and testing tragedy. But neither as a national leader nor as a party politician was he as commanding as his mother or his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Why should his death, however tragic, threaten irreparable damage to an institutional structure of such proven strength?
The answer lies in India’s recent wasted years, for which Mr Gandhi was partly responsible. He was a charming man, and a brave man (his decision to lower the wall of security between himself and the voters must have encouraged his assassins). But he lacked the intellectual force which his mother and grandfather had, and which he needed if he was to fulfil his ambition to drag India “into the 21st century”. The opportunity was there: when he became prime minister after his mother’s assassination by Sikh extremists, he carried with him the goodwill and sympathy of both parliament and public. He talked of opening the economy to the modernising forces of technology and the market, and of ending the corruption that pervades every stratum of an infinitely stratified country. He calmed secessionist sentiment by dealing constructively with the regional parties of Kashmir, Assam and Punjab.
Ultimately, though, he failed. By the time he and the Congress Party were humbled in the 1989 election, his administration had fallen prey to all the usual vices of Indian factionalism. Party colleagues, notably Mr Singh, deserted him, and his own reputation was tarnished by allegations that he had taken bribes from Bofors, a Swedish arms company. Out of office, he played the politics of Machiavelli. Chandra Shekhar’s minority government rested on the support of Congress— support which Mr Gandhi then chose to withdraw, thus bringing about the present election. When he died, India was still too far from the 21st century.
Can it complete the journey, as one nation, without him? Since his widow, Sonia, has declined appointment in his place as president of the Congress Party, his murder will probably mark the end of the Nehru dynasty whirls has ruled India for 40 of its 44 years of independence. The Nehru creed was of India as a secular union. Its doctrine was self-sufficiency and the Fabian socialism that Nehru’s generation imbibed during the struggle against colonialism. The creed still makes sense but, as both Mr Gandhi and Mr Singh began dimly to realise in the 1980s, the doctrine does not.
The necessary journey
After this week’s murder, India’s first task is to keep the idea of secularism alive. Only under a secular constitution can a nation of nearly 850m people that is divided and then sub-di-vided by race, religion and caste stay peacefully together for the journey ahead.
Lal Krishna Advani’s BJP argues that a nation that is 80% Hindu can peacefully assume an official Hindu identity. The argument is both dangerous and disingenuous. India’s minorities are huge—Muslims alone number 100m—and spread throughout the country. When the banner of religion is raised as a banner of politics, blood will flow, just as it has done in Belfast, Beirut and Colombo. India of all places should know that. Vast numbers died in the 1947 partition of Muslim Pakistan from Hindu-dominated India. Last year’s attempts by the BJP to build a Hindu temple on the disputed site of a mosque in Ayodhya sparked off murderous riots across the nation. Indira Gandhi’s assassination was itself an act of revenge by her Sikh bodyguards, after hundreds of Sikhs were killed during the clearing of extremists from their Golden Temple in Amritsar.
That is why, in the short run, it matters enormously who was responsible for Mr Gandhi’s assassination. If, as the government’s first reports suggested, the blame lies with disaffected Tamils, so much the better—the Indian masses care little about the problems of Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka. Heaven forbid that Sikhs or Muslims are to blame.
To Congress, the task
When the election campaign resumes, the responsibility for India’s future could well revert to the Congress Party. It was already showing strength in the exit polls, and may now be boosted by a sympathy vote. That is a better outcome than an India dominated by the likes of the BJP, or by the Marxist members of Mr Singh’s National Front coalition, or by the woolly minds of Mr Chandra Shekhar’s Socialist Janata Dal. Congress’s hands may be soiled, but at least they are experienced, a fact which the voters have begun again to appreciate. If the party can command India’s electoral centre, it stands a chance of keeping India secular, at one and at peace.
An India that overcomes its present political trial will still have work to do. It must be fierce about preserving Nehru’s creed of secularism, but equally fierce about ditching the failed policies of economic interventionism and self-sufficiency that he attached to it. India’s economic failure is not the cause of the hatred between its religions, but it makes the hatreds worse. A country where the average income is only $350 a year, and where the poor jostle for space as well as food, will never find it easy to bind up its factional wounds.
Mr Gandhi was probably the last of the Nehru rulers, of whom the Congress Party is a creation. But he had the unhappy knack of making enemies in the party. The end of family rule may now give Congress a chance to reunite. If Congress brings itself to adopt the economic freedoms which have made so much of Asia rich—but which India’s intellectual and social elites have smugly rejected—the yearned-for 21st century is within its grasp. If it fails, the world’s biggest democracy will be even less able to survive the next assassin’s blow.
Nice, insightful, yet ultimately WRONG piece by the economist
Did Hinduism have its roots in Buddhism? Do the Sinhalese view Hindus as an apostate branch much as the Sunnis view the Shiite sect of Islam?
I remember reading a National Geographic article some years ago on Sri Lanka. What made it memorable is that even the warring parties interviewed couldn't explain why they were fighting.
Robert Blake, the American Ambassador, was trying to use the UN to allow the LTTE leader to escape. He is currently a candidate for a higher position in the new administration.
Actually its the other way around-Hinduism predates Buddhism.
As I said, I'm trying to understand why the bad blood runs so deep between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the Tamil Hindu minority in Sri Lanka.
Very informative post. Thanks!
The Sri Lankan civil war isn’t a religious conflict.
Many of the LTTE’s top cadres were Hindus and Christians.
Meanwhile Prachanda's Naxalite brothers continue to murder scores of innocent Indians monthly. Just don't try to kill a Ghandi, right?
MTCC, you are right and wrong. It’s origin is ethnic and the war was primarily Sinhalese v/s/ tamils. However, the Tamils were mostly Hindu with Christian and Muslim minorities and the Sinhalese were mostly Buddhists with some Christians. It is portrayed that the Buddhist clergy are against compromise, but that is mostly due to their ethnic background rather than religious.
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