Sri Lanka's Tamil issue : Will History Come a Full Circle?

Few realise that the genesis of Sri Lanka’s Tamil problem with India lies buried in its decision to let Pakistan’s troop laden aircraft refuel and fly onto the killing fields of Bangladesh in 1971.

After Pakistan unleashed a brutal military campaign in early 1971, to stifle an uprising in its eastern wing by murdering millions of its civilian citizens, India banned Pakistani aircraft from overflying India.

Mrs Indira Gandhi

Pakistan’s President Yahya Khan believed his troops only had to “Kill three million of them (East Pakistan’s Bengali citizens) … and the rest will eat out of our hands.”^* To carry out this task he needed to reinforce his forces in the East.  The military ruler launched what was titled operation `Great Fly-In’ to transfer the 9^th and 16^th infantry divisions of the Pakistan Army to the East. Troops were to be flown out to Dhaka in February 1971, using Pakistan International Airlines’ fleet of Boeings and the Pakistan Air Force’s Hercules transport aircraft, bolstered by more aircraft lent by Turkey and Iran.

However, with Mrs Indira Gandhi banning Pakistani aircraft from using Indian airspace from January that year, these planes needed to fly a longer route which required refuelling facilities at Colombo.

Khan reached out to Sri Lanka’s President Srimavo Bandaranaike. Strangely, Bandarnaike allowed Pakistani troop carting aircraft, rights to refuel at Colombo even as the airport was guarded by Indian soldiers against left wing extremists who were trying to topple her regime!

Sri Lanka's Srimavo Bandaranaike

A furious Mrs Gandhi eventually put an end to this strange accord between the island nation and Pakistan, but not before Yahya Khan had managed to ship some 25,000 soldiers, complete with equipment to bolster his deputy Lt. General Tikka Khan’s murderous rule over East Pakistan.

Mrs Gandhi saw Bandaranaike’s action not only as anti-Indian perfidy but as betrayal of the good neighbourliness India had displayed in a 1964 pact where it had agreed to repatriate some 5,25,000 Tamils, ^** descendants of plantation labour brought to Lanka by the British in the 19^th century. In return, Sri Lanka was to have given citizenship to the remainder 3,00,000 `Indian’ Tamils, which it had denied to them since its independence in 1948.

Indian labour, often in the form of forced or bonded labour, and entrepreneurs had helped built the economies of many British ruled territories from Fiji and Guyana to Mauritius and Kenya. With the end of the colonial era, many people of Indian origin had sometimes to face a different kind of racial hostility in their new homelands but nowhere other than in Sri Lanka, Burma and Idi Amin’s Uganda were they denied basic rights to live in the country they were born in.

The 1964 pact hammered out by a docile Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri with the far more aggressive Bandarnaike,  was seen as a landmark pact where India bent over backwards before a neighbour to buy goodwill.

Shastri with Bandaranaike

Even before the ink on the pact had dried, Mrs Srimavo Bandaranaike dealt her first blow - `Indian’ Tamils given citizenship would form a separate electorate and could not vote with the rest of the Sri Lankans. The ruling Congress party had to deal with a stormy Indian Parliament which was not at all amused by either Shastri’s `largese’ or Bandarnaike’s bid to turn the remaining `Indian’ Tamils into second class citizens. Still it lived with this one sided pact and literally turned the other cheek to try work out better relations with a smaller neighbour.

Consequently, the 1971 attempt by the same lady to help India’s enemy, was like pouring hot oil on burning embers. The problem for Sri Lanka and Mrs Bandarnaike was that Mrs Gandhi was not a lady who easily forgot or forgave a slight.

Sri Lanka like most Asian nations always had deep ethnic fault-lines, but unlike India or Singapore, it did not try to resolve them by turning to nation-building. It instead relied on resurgent Sinhala nationalism to hold the island together.

Sri Lanka Demography

Sinhala, who claim descent from the followers of Prince Vijay Singha, a prince of a mythical kingdom in Bengal who according to legend was exiled to the island sometime around 543 B.C, form about 75 per cent of the population. However, Sri Lankan Tamils who pre-date Sinhalese on the island and speak a slightly different version of Tamil, from Indian Tamils, and live in the Eastern part of the island form about 12 per cent of the population. `Moors’ or descendants of Arab traders make up about 9 per cent of the population and `Indian’ Tamils who live in the central highlands where most of the tea and rubber plantations are, make up for the remaining 4 per cent of the population.

The attempts by successive Sinhala-controlled Sri Lankan governments to forcibly repatriate the impoverished  `Indian’ Tamil labourers had more to do with the tensions between the Sri Lankan Tamils and the Sinhalese than any real threat to Sinhala domination of the island by the `Indians.’ The underlying fear seems to have been that `Indian’ Tamils might make common cause with Sri Lankan Tamils and take on Sinhala control of the government.

In 1948, the Sri Lankan Tamils who were part of the first ruling coalition through their own party had joined to frame a citizenship act which disenfranchised `Indian’ Tamils. But with growing Sinhalese chauvinism, eight years later they faced their first come-uppance. In 1956, the Ceylonese Parliament passed the `Sinhala Only Act’, which replaced English with Sinhalese as the sole official language in the island ignoring Tamil, a move which led to a spate of ethnic riots.

Attempts at state-sponsored colonisation of Sri Lankan Tamil areas led to more riots and bitterness. In 1973, a policy of educational standardisation was brought in, ostensibly to rectify regional disparities in University enrolment, but which in effect saw more Sinhala enrolment and fewer chances for Tamils to get University seats.

However, for Mrs Gandhi, the  last straw was the then Sri Lankan President J.R.Jayawardene’s bid in 1979 to bring in Americans to balance Indian power in the straits. Jayawardene strengthened Sri Lanka’s political and military engagement with the US and gave them rights to set up a Voice of America station on the island, which Indians saw as a camouflaged electronic `listening station’ directed against the mainland.

Mrs Gandhi who came back to power in 1980, must have vividly remembered the American attempt to frighten India with its deployment of the Seventh fleet at the height of the 1971 war with Pakistan, and seen the Sri Lanka-US friendship as against Indian interests.

Sri Lankan Tamil groups fighting for an `Eelam’ or homeland who had earlier relied on a distant and not too helpful Britain in their fight for rights, suddenly found a champion and refuge in India under Mrs Gandhi. 

Tamil rebels in action

Mrs Gandhi unleashed her `dogs of war’. In a thinly disguised move, Indian intelligence agencies started training several motely groups of Sri Lankan Tamil rebels, none of whom saw eye to eye in their aims or objectives.

However, the rebels made life difficult for Jayawardene and Sri Lanka. An inept and not too professional Sri Lankan army was hard put to handle the insurgency.

In time, the ding-dong battle between the Tamil groups and Sri Lankan forces, saw Tamil areas blockaded, forcing India to air-drop food and medical supplies in 1987. Eventually in the same year, India stepped in and sent peace-keeping troops into Sri Lanka and brokered an accord between the island government and Tamil Eelam fighters, among whom the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had emerged as the prime mover.

While most Tamil groups disarmed after the accord, LTTE refused to hand over arms. Indian peacekeepers were forced into a situation where they had to fight the very LTTE, they had come in to help out. Strange as it seems, intelligence sources aver, the Sri Lankan government whom India had bailed out with its deployment, entered into a secret deal with the LTTE in 1989, supplying them with arms and ammunition to fight Indian troops!

Indian Peacekeepers in Sri Lanka

As casualties mounted, calls for the return of Indian troops grew louder at home and in Sri Lanka. Mrs Gandhi’s son, Rajiv Gandhi who was India’s prime minister during this phase, refused. But after his government was replaced by V.P.Singh’s, India’s Lankan adventure was called to an end with the last troop ships crossing the Straits in mid-1990.  The 32-month presence of Indian peacekeepers in Sri Lanka resulted in the deaths of 1200 Indian soldiers and over 5000 Sri Lankans.

LTTE did not stop at fighting Indian soldiers. In 1991, suicide bombers sent by the group killed Rajiv Gandhi at an election rally. The Sri Lankan Tamil issue became `untouchable’ in Indian politics. Even the Tamil parties shied from associating with Sri Lankan Tamils.  

India probably silently encouraged the Sri Lankan government after the slaying of Rajiv Gandhi, to fight it out with the thuggish LTTE, which was ruling over the Tamil majority areas in a dictatorial manner,  and finish it off as a potent force for ever.

However, the brutal manner in which Sri Lankan forces ended their battle with the LTTE, killing thousands of civilians, corralling tens of thousands more into `camps’, has revived sympathy and support  for the Sri Lankan Tamils  once again in India.

History, they say, is all about the story being repeated with different characters. One wonders where the latest events where the Sinhala majority refuses to give basic rights back to the Tamil minority will take Sri Lanka and India to. Hopefully not back to a full circle.

*Robert Payne, Massacre [1972], p. 50. 

** Indo-Sri Lankan pact of 1964 and the problem of statelessness – a critique : http://www.onlineresearchjournals.com/aajoss/art/82.pdf