by John Keay
Considering how effectively she and Sanjay had masterminded her return to power, and how she then swept the polls to win a majority comparable to that of 1971, the reinstated Mrs Gandhi appeared as formidable as ever. She was isolated, certainly. She trusted no one save Sanjay, surrounded herself with sycophants, supposed herself the embodiment of the nation and took all expressions of dissent as personal affronts. ‘“Paranoia” may be the most appropriate word here,’ says Guha.14 But a rival suggestion that ‘she no longer had a firm grasp over politics and administration … [and] showed signs of being a tired person’ was not borne out by events.15 Still in her early sixties, she enjoyed reasonable health, the close support of her family and the conviction that only she could hold the nation together.
Arguably, the initiatives of her last four years in power were no more ill-conceived than those of her first four. But whereas in the late 1960s she had embraced leftist policies to discomfit her opponents, in the early 1980s and for the same reason she wheeled to the right. Reasoning that Janata had owed its short-lived success entirely to the Jana Sangh and its emphasis on Hindu nationalism, she tailored her public conduct to the new communalism. A Hindu holy man took up residence in the prime ministerial home, and in the weeks immediately after her return to power she made a point of being photographed at temples all over India.16
A more communalist approach was also evident in her ritual toppling of non-Congress governments in the states. Though formerly a supporter of Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference in J and K, she now championed the sense of alienation felt by Hindus in that state’s Jammu region and accused the National Conference of ‘anti-nationalism’. Apparently Farooq Abdullah, the Conference’s leader since the death of his father, the Sheikh, in 1982, had sought ‘Gulf money for the development of the state’ in a bid to ‘place Kashmir on the international map’. This was neither particularly sinister nor well substantiated; but it gave Mrs Gandhi a pretext for changing tack. Moreover, her ploy to outbid rightist opponents paid off. In the 1983 state elections her Congress comfortably upstaged the challenge of the Hindu right in Jammu as now represented by the Bharatiya Janata Party (or BJP), a reincarnation of the Jana Sangh in the wake of the Janata Party’s collapse. Mrs Gandhi’s ploy was nevertheless questionable, in that it ran contrary to Nehru’s insistence on secular neutrality. Indeed, though most of the BJP’s candidates had lost, Mrs Gandhi’s showing in Jammu could be construed as an endorsement of their platform. As a contributor to the BJP’s official organ consoled its readership, ‘ideas are more important than seats’. The ploy also failed in its primary objective of toppling the Abdullahs’ National Conference. In what was widely regarded as the state’s fairest poll to date, Farooq Abdullah brushed off his rejection in Jammu and was returned to power thanks to the overwhelming support of the Muslim vote in the Kashmir Valley.
No less mischievous interventions in Assam and Punjab were equally counter-productive and would ultimately prove much more disastrous. But it was not just in the centre’s relationship with the states that Mrs Gandhi’s cavalier attitude to her father’s principles was evident. Regional relations also suffered, most notably in respect of Sri Lanka.
In that troubled island, as in Bangladesh, an upsurge of violence in the 1970s was already concerning New Delhi. A combination of India’s ethnic links to the island’s Tamil-speaking minority, growing anxiety over possible superpower involvement in resolving the violence, and resentment over the transit facilities afforded to Pakistan in the Bangladesh crisis argued strongly for another assertion of India’s regional responsibilities. Additionally, a prime ministerial reputation already built on popular success beyond India’s northern borders in Bangladesh and Sikkim might well be reinvigorated by timely engagement with an unhappy island just off the country’s southern seaboard.
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In a city notably short of landmark buildings, Colombo’s Galle Face Hotel stands out as much by reason of its prime location as of its teak and stone colonnades. To the west the Arabian Sea pounds the hotel’s open terraces; east runs the city’s main traffic axis; south lie the Indian High Commission and the US Embassy; and north, facing the hotel’s palm-fringed entrance, stretches a broad, grassy esplanade from which strolling couples can watch the sun set. On this breezy sward on the morning of 5 June 1956 some two hundred Sri Lankan Tamil parliamentarians and supporters had assembled in silence. Primed on Gandhian tactics, they sat down and they stayed there, saying nothing, offering no resistance, while organised mobs converged on the park and set about them with sticks and stones. The police were under orders not to intervene. In the nearby Parliament Building the debate on the Official Language Act went on regardless.
‘Miraculously’, according to later reports, no one was killed. One protester had an ear bitten off, another was thrown into a lake and dozens were so badly beaten as to need hospitalisation. But it was not a massacre, and it was all over by 1 p.m. That evening guests at the Galle Face Hotel might sally forth to take the ocean breeze as usual. Yet Sri Lanka would never be quite the same again. ‘The riots that erupted on this occasion and spread to many parts of the country brought an end to … 40 years of communal peace … The rancour and the bitterness they left behind did not augur well for the governance of the country.’17 The island’s fifty-year agony had begun.
A vast nation like India, if ringed by lesser entities, is bound to regard them as its legitimate concern; no less certainly, it is bound to be regarded by them with deep suspicion. In 1956 Sri Lanka’s population stood at around ten million. This was under a fifth of Pakistan’s or Bangladesh’s, and around a thirty-third of India’s. Most of India’s constituent states are in fact larger and more populous than Sri Lanka. The equality implicit in Sri Lanka’s sovereign status and UN membership could thus be deceptive. Likewise, the bullying hegemonism of which New Delhi is habitually accused should occasion no surprise. Both are par for the course. In Sri Lanka, as in Nepal, physical proximity to India, historical links, population exchange, a shared cultural matrix and a considerable degree of economic dependency have long limited the exercise of sovereign prerogatives.
Colonial rule had done nothing to change this. Acquiring Sri Lanka in 1796 on the whim of an enterprising academic called Cleghorn, the British government had not regarded ‘the island of Ceylon’ as pertaining to India or to the East India Company. In time it was run by Britain’s Colonial Office rather than the India Office; and it took no part in either the great Indian Rebellion/Mutiny of 1856–57 or in India’s protracted freedom struggle. On the other hand, links with India were if anything strengthened. Under British rule, business houses and the administration relied less on the island’s Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority than on its long-established Tamil-speaking and mainly Hindu minority. Meanwhile more Tamils were recruited from the Indian mainland as bonded labour to work the island’s new tea and rubber plantations.
Of these two Tamil-speaking communities – the semi-indigenous ‘Sri Lankan Tamils’ and the less favoured and more transient ‘Estate [or Indian] Tamils’ – the first were concentrated in the north and east of the island and the second throughout the interior. When Sri Lanka attained its independence in 1948, each group represented around 12 per cent of the island’s total population.
In the 1950s and ’60s Indian concern focused mainly on the fate of the Estate Tamils. Nearly two decades ahead of India, Sri Lanka had adopted a system of universal franchise which effectively defined who was a Sri Lankan citizen. ‘Estate Tamils’ qualified only if they could prove five years’ residence. This excluded many, some of whom migrated back to India during the Depression years of the 1930s or moved overseas. More followed when in 1948 independent Sri Lanka’s first government redefined citizenship in such a way as to disenfranchise most of the remaining Estate Tamils. The move also incensed the much larger Tamil community in mainland India, prompting Nehru, Shastri and then Mrs Gandhi to intervene on behalf of these now stateless (and often Estate-less) Tamils. In 1964 a
nd again in 1974 pacts were signed to resolve the problem. India would ultimately repatriate about half of the one million remaining Estate Tamils; Sri Lanka extended citizenship to slightly fewer; others swelled the ranks of the Tamil diaspora, mostly in Canada and the UK.
By contrast, the long-resident Tamil community in the north and east of the island was at first little affected by these arrangements. Better-educated but much divided by caste and profession, these ‘Sri Lankan Tamils’ did qualify as Sri Lankan citizens. They participated in the political process, and in the Jaffna peninsula (just across the Palk Strait from India) they actually constituted a majority. They were also well represented in the offices and bazaars of Colombo and other cities. But post-Independence, such prominence came to be resented by the island’s non-Tamil majority. Though riven by divisions of its own, this Sinhalese majority began asserting a national identity based on its own shared allegiance to Buddhism and the Sinhala language. As a result, constitutional provisions originally conceived as necessary for the protection of minorities like the Sri Lankan Tamils were increasingly portrayed as discriminating against the Sinhalese majority. To redress the situation, successive governments embarked on a programme of affirmative action, albeit with the unusual object of empowering not a minority but the vast majority.
Access to the country’s sole university and schemes for the development of new lands proved especially contentious. Tamils objected to Sinhalese being settled on reclaimed tracts in the north and east, so diluting the Tamils’ numerical strength in the provinces they considered their homeland. They also, and especially their youth, took strong exception to a weighted system of admission requirements for the Colombo Schools of Medicine and Engineering; for to reduce the disproportionate imbalance between Tamil-speakers and Sinhala-speakers in these cherished professions, Sinhala-speakers were to be admitted with a lower mark than that required of their Tamil-speaking peers.
But it was the issue of language itself which, in Sri Lanka as in Indian Tamil Nadu, provoked the greatest outcry. At the time of Independence, Sinhala, Tamil and English served as the official languages. English was soon to be phased out; and so, it seemed, was Tamil when in 1956 the ‘Sinhala-only’ or Official Language Act was passed: under it Sinhala was to become the sole national language within five years.
The main Tamil political party countered with demands for Tamil’s reinstatement and for greater autonomy for the northern and eastern provinces. The first demonstration in support of these demands was the non-violent protest mounted on the breezy sward outside Colombo’s Galle Face Hotel on 5 June. Following the rout of the protesters, the attackers turned their attention to Tamils in other areas of the city. Elsewhere in the country ‘150 people died’ in related incidents before the situation was brought under control.18
Worse followed when in 1958 the government of Mr S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, under pressure from members of the Buddhist monastic community, reneged on a later compromise permitting the official use of Tamil in the northern and eastern provinces. Tamils again protested, and the attacks this time spread to the north, where Tamils responded in kind.
All this coincided with the rise to power in India’s Madras province of the Tamil DMK, followed by the creation of the Tamil-speaking state of Tamil Nadu and the eventually successful protests there against the adoption of Hindi as India’s official/national language. Delhi seemed a lot more responsive to Tamil concerns than Colombo; and this would remain the case when the ruling Congress in New Delhi habitually sought the support of the ruling DMK (or its breakaway AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu. Sri Lankan Tamils took heart from this example. Their main political mouthpiece called itself the ‘Federal’ Party, and increasingly presented its linguistic grievances in terms of a demand for the island’s northern and eastern provinces to be granted the autonomous powers enjoyed by the Indian states.
The Sinhala-only Act duly came into effect in 1961. But with the Tamils’ Federal Party holding the balance of power in Parliament, the implementation of the Act was again diluted by concessions to the Tamils – concessions which were again withdrawn under pressure from Sinhala nationalists. In 1970 the electoral triumph of Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike at the head of a left-supported United Front government ended this stop–start shuffle. A new Constitution awarded the Prime Minister and Parliament additional powers, enshrined Sinhala as the official language, favoured Buddhism as the majority faith, and effectively ruled out any further concessions. The die was cast. Feeling excluded from power, constitutionally hobbled and educationally disadvantaged, Sri Lankan Tamils of different castes, age groups and ideological persuasions drew closer together. The leader of the Federal Party, a mild-mannered Christian called Chelvanayakam, resigned his parliamentary seat; and in 1973 the party ‘adopted a new and uncompromising line: separatism’.19
In the north and east of the island many Tamils now regarded the army and the police as ‘hostile forces of occupation’ to be resisted and targeted as the agents of Sinhala supremacism. Throughout the 1970s murders and other acts of violence increased. They included the assassination of an MP by radical Tamil youths answering to the twenty-three-year-old Velupillai Prabhakaran. As of 1975 Prabhakaran’s militant Tamil Students’ Federation adopted the name the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Other militant groups proliferated, among them the ill-named EROS (the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students), founded in London in the same year. Soon after, in 1976, a national convention of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), a constitutionally minded grouping rather than a militant one, resolved on a ‘sacred fight for freedom … [for] the goal of a sovereign socialist state of Tamil Eelam’.20 The rhetoric, no less than the reality, was threatening war. Another South Asian partition looked to be on the cards.
With the example of Bangladesh fresh in Tamil minds, ‘the hope and assumption was that what India had done for the people of East Pakistan it could be persuaded to do for the Tamils of Sri Lanka’, writes the historian K.M. de Silva. Nor would the Tamil secessionists be disappointed. The expansion and progress of their struggle ‘would have been impossible without the support and encouragement of the political parties of Tamil Nadu and … the more calculating, self-serving, and yet vital assistance of the Indian government to Tamil separatism in the 1980s’.21
In 1977, the year in which Mrs Gandhi was defeated in the polls by the Janata Party, Mrs Bandaranaike shared a similar fate. With the election of J.R. Jayawardene as Sri Lanka’s premier, another Constitution ushered in a presidential form of government and proportional representation. TULF, campaigning on the platform of a separate Tamil state, won the second most seats and headed the parliamentary opposition. But these developments, while insufficient to reassure the separatists, more than sufficed to alarm Sinhala opinion. Riots and reprisals followed in 1978. The LTTE was banned, a state of emergency was declared in Jaffna, and vigorous counter-insurgency operations by the security forces triggered another Tamil exodus. Militant Tamil groups began to withdraw across the Palk Strait to Tamil Nadu; sympathisers – plus many Tamils who simply despaired of their future in Sri Lanka – either followed them or joined the wider diaspora.
In Indian Tamil Nadu an AIADMK government headed by M.G. Ramachandran, the corpulent but quasi-divine hero of innumerable Tamil films, was decidedly sympathetic to the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils. Accommodation was found for the incomers and funds provided for them. But no clear distinction was made between refugees and those whom the Sri Lankan government regarded as terrorists. Nor was it easy to distinguish the role played by the government in New Delhi from that of its AIADMK ally in Madras. From later report it appears that ‘India’s covert training of Tamil militant groups in Tamil Nadu may have started as early as May 1982’.22
India’s diplomatic involvement in attempts to mediate a settlement between the militants and the Jayawardene government also dates from this period. But it assumed much greater urgency as of July 1983. In that month an LTTE ambush in which thirteen Sinhalese soldiers
were killed sparked island-wide attacks on Tamils. The violence was communal but otherwise indiscriminate. Sinhalese mobs turned on Tamil neighbours regardless of whether they were in sympathy with the separatist movement; the same innocent parties might be targeted by Tamil militants as suspected traitors to the separatist cause. Though officially classed as ‘riots’, the killings and burnings reminded observers of the ‘madness’ that had overtaken Calcutta in 1946 and the Punjab in 1947. Again the government was slow to intervene, leading to suspicions of complicity. Again the death toll is disputed: estimates range from three hundred to 3,000. And again there was a massive movement of population. Up to 200,000 Sri Lankan Tamils were displaced, many of them preferring exile in India or the West. The only big difference was that whereas in India and Pakistan the killing had been stopped in a matter of weeks, in Sri Lanka it marked the beginning of the twenty-six-year war.
The Jayawardene government’s barely-disguised sympathy for the Sinhala nationalists continued to make matters worse. By rushing through a constitutional amendment that obliged all parliamentarians to forswear separatism, it gave TULF MPs little option but to resign. The consequences proved fatal. ‘Their departure from politics created the vacuum that was filled by Velupillai Prabhakaran and his Tamil Liberation Tigers [LTTE].’ In the north and east, LTTE attacks kept pace with the increased deployment of Sri Lankan police and troops. Soon the Jaffna peninsula was effectively under guerrilla control. Funds raised by the diaspora were now channelled principally to the militant groups, and it was their recruits who were despatched to training camps in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere in India. ‘The events of 1983 [had] made them “terrorists”.’23