The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam supremo, Velupillai
Prabhakaran’s death circa May 19, 2009, in circumstances we will never quite get
to know, concludes a morality play.
As the curtain comes down and we leave the theatre, the
spectacle continues to haunt us. We feel a deep unease and can’t quite figure
out the reason. Something rankles somewhere. And then we realise we have blood
on our hands.
Not only our hands but our whole body and deeper down, our
conscience – what remains of it after the mundane battles of our day-to-day life
– are also dripping with blood.
Prabhakaran’s blood. No, it is not only Prabhakaran’s but also
that of 70,000 Sri Lankan Tamils who have perished in the unspeakable violence
through the past quarter century.
All the pujas we may perform to our favourite Hindu god, Lord
Ganesh, for good luck each morning religiously so that we march ahead in our
life from success to success cannot wash away the guilt we are bearing – the
curse of the 70,000 dead souls.
Our children and grandchildren will surely inherit the great
curse. What a bitter legacy!
A long time ago we created Prabhakaran. We picked him up as an
urchin from nowhere. What we found charming about him was that he was so
thoroughly apolitical – almost innocent about politics. He was a simpleton in
many ways, who had a passion for weapons and the military regimen. He suited our
needs perfectly.
Which was to humiliate the Junius Richard Jayewardene government
in Sri Lanka and teach it a hard lesson about the dangers of being disrespectful
to India’s status as the pre-eminent power in the Indian Ocean. Jayewardene was
too western-oriented and behaved as if he had never read about the Monroe
Doctrine when he read history at Oxford. We didn’t like at all his dalliance
with the Israelis and the Americans in our very own backyard.
So we fostered Prabhakaran and built him up to prick
Jayewardene’s vanity – like Sikh leader, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, of the
Deccan.
Then, as time passed, we decided that he had outlived his
utility, as we had come to develop an entirely different outlook on the
pro-western orientation of the Colombo government by that time. Our egotistic
leader in Delhi who detested Jayewardene was no more in power and the new
soft-spoken leader didn’t share his predecessor’s strong political antipathies.
So we arm-twisted Prabhakaran to tone down and fall in line with
our changed priorities. But we didn’t realise that by then he had become a
full-grown adult.
He resisted our blackmail and pressure tactics. When we
pressured him even more and tried to collar him, he struck back. He dispatched
assassins to India and killed our beloved leader. And he became our eternal
enemy.
Yet we couldn’t do anything to harm him. He had already become
so strong – an uncrowned king among his people. So we waited. We are a patient
lot. Who can match us in infinite patience, given our 5,000 years of history?
Our cosmic religion gives us a unique wisdom to be patient and stoic and to bide
our time.
And then the opportune time came. We promptly moved in for the
kill by aligning ourselves with Prabhakaran’s enemies. We armed them and trained
them in better skills to kill. We guided them with good intelligence. We plugged
all escape routes for Prabhakaran. And then we patiently waited as the noose
tightened around Prabhakaran’s neck.
Today he is no more. Believe it or not, we had no role in his
death. How and when he died shall forever remain an enigma wrapped in mystery.
We will, of course, never divulge what we know.
All that matters is that the world woke up to the death only
after the May 13 polling in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Otherwise the
parliamentary election results may have gone haywire against us. Strange are the
ways of the Indian democracy.
We have had our revenge. Nothing else matters for the present.
What lies ahead? We will continue to make noises about a
"political solution" to the Tamil problem that Prabhakaran championed through
violent means.
Of course, let there be no doubt that we will periodically
render humanitarian assistance to the hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians
who have been herded into camps and may languish there till the dust settles
down. We will demonstrate that we are indeed capable of the milk of human
kindness. After all, the Sri Lankan Tamils are part of our historical
consciousness.
But we must also be realistic. We know in our heart of hearts
that the scope for a political solution such as that which our leaders seem to
suggest publicly is virtually nil.
The Sinhalese will never allow the world to dictate to them a
political solution. More so, they will promptly and conclusively rebuff any
attempt by us to seek a role in what they will now insist is strictly their
internal affair.
Always remember that Sri Lanka is one of the last bastions of
Theravada Buddhism and preserving that legacy is the Sinhalese people’s precious
tryst with destiny. At least, that is how they feel. We have to accept the
weight of their cultural nationalism.
They see Sri Lanka as the land of the Sinhalese. How could they
allow us Indians, who wiped out Buddhism with such ferocity from the
subcontinent, to interfere with their keen sense of destiny as the custodians of
that very same great religion? Never, never.
If we try to pressure the Sinhalese, they will approach the
Chinese or the Pakistanis to balance our pressure. They are capable of doing
that.
The Sinhalese are a gifted people. We all know that few can
match their terrific skills in media management. They have always lived by their
wits.
Equally, they are fantastic practitioners of diplomacy. We
suspect that they may in fact have an edge over us on this front, for, unlike us
who are dissimulating from day to day as if we’re a responsible regional power,
and dissipating our energies in pastimes such as hunting down Somali pirates in
distant seas, they are a highly focused lot.
They have the grit because they are fighting for the
preservation of their country’s future identity as a Buddhist nation.
Only last week (May 11) they showed their diplomatic skills by
getting the Russians and the Chinese to stall a move in the United Nations
Security Council to pressure them.
The Europeans fancy that they can try the Sinhalese for war
crimes. What naïvety!
We have asked the Sinhalese in private many a time how they
proposed to navigate their way in the coming period. They wouldn’t divulge.
But we know that it is not as if they have no solution of their
own to the Tamil problem either. We know they already have a blueprint.
See, they have already solved the Tamil problem in the eastern
provinces of Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Ampara. The Tamils are no more the
majority community in those provinces.
Similarly, from tomorrow they will commence a concerted, steady
colonisation programme in the northern provinces where Prabhakaran reigned
supreme for two decades. They will ensure incrementally that the northern
regions no more remain as Tamil provinces.
The Tamils will be made into a minority community in their own
northern homelands. They will have to live among the newly created Sinhalese
settlements in those regions to the north of Elephant Pass.
All this will indeed be within Sri Lanka’s "federal structure".
Sri Lanka will continue to adhere to parliamentary democracy.
Give them a decade at the most. The Tamil problem will become a
relic of the bloody history of the Indian subcontinent.
The Sinhalese are good friends of India. Our elite and their
elite speak the same idiom. We both speak English well, play golf and like
chilled beer. We should therefore wish them well.
As for the blood on our hands, true, it is a blessed nuisance.
But this is not the first time in our history that we have blood on our hands.
Trust our words. No lasting harm will be done. Blood doesn’t
leave stains.
(MK Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in
the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
This article was published by Asia Times Online
on May 20, 2009.)