The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi Page 8

  The parallels—so far as the provocation for such a strike is concerned—between Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were tellingly similar. In 1971, a million or more Bengalis of Pakistani nationality, had escaped the genocidal Pakistani army and taken refuge in India, clearing the way for Mrs Gandhi to invade then East Pakistan and restore it to the Bengalis.

  Similarly, following the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 that raged on until 1985, thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils abandoned their homes in the north and east of the deeply divided island, crossed the 18-kilometre stretch of the Palk Strait in rickety boats and flooded into Tamil Nadu where they were settled in refugee camps all along the coast. They were clamouring for justice, for restitution. The then Tamil Nadu chief minister, Ramachandran, and Opposition DMK leader Karunanidhi were being pressed by Indian Tamils to save the Jaffna Tamils.

  But there were crucial differences between this situation and that of East Pakistan. The Mukti Bahini had no rival Bengali groups to compete for India’s affections. And unlike the Tamil Tigers, the East Pakistanis were true partners who went to war arm in arm with the Indian Army. Secondly, the Bengalis were being given a nation; the Tamils were told they had to be content with a truncated province—the north without the east. Indeed, Rajiv Gandhi never wanted the Tigers to become the sole voice of the Lankan Tamils and had always planned to give groups like the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) and the EPRLF an equal say.

  Colombo’s charge was that Indian interventionism was an all too real threat, in keeping with a pattern of intercessions in the neighbourhood, which began with East Pakistan in 1971 and was followed by the takeover of Sikkim in 1975. This, they felt, became a reality when Rajiv Gandhi used the ploy of ‘Tamils in peril’ to send troops into Sri Lanka in 1987.

  Whether or not India genuinely believed it could solve the Sinhala–Tamil impasse or was sucked into a trap set by Sri Lankan President Jayewardene, few believe today that Indian boots landed on Lankan soil solely at the express invitation of the President of the island nation as J.N. Dixit, Rajiv Gandhi’s pointman in Colombo, claims, both in his books India’s Foreign Policy1 and Assignment Colombo,2 and in many interviews about the conversation between the two leaders he had been privy to.

  Except, military escalation, especially when the firepower is foreign, comes with its own baggage. The results are never what you bargained for. The foreigner, in this case, the Indian Army—and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi—were, unfortunately, tarred as the barbarians at the gate.

  Could Dixit, mentor and guide to so many journalists, including myself, have been trying to be economical with the truth on the reasons behind Rajiv Gandhi’s decision to send troops into Sri Lanka?

  The accusation that India was training and arming militants wasn’t too far off the mark. Sri Lankan commentator Rohan Gunaratna in his searing book Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka,3 published by the South Asian Network on Conflict Research, states that as many as 10,000 Tamil insurgents were being trained by India in thirty-odd training camps across Tamil Nadu and in the foothills of the Himalayas. He backs up the charge with pictorial evidence. This has of course never been acknowledged by the Indian government, as the training was allegedly conducted by servicemen recruited by the covert RAW, and not the army per se, giving all actors plausible deniability.

  Apart from the LTTE, five other militant groups were created and given arms, training and funding. These included the TELO led by Sri Sabaratnam who was fully backed by Karunanidhi’s DMK, the PLOTE, the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS), the EPRLF and the precursor to all these groups, the TELA.

  India’s abrupt scrapping of its covert policy of supporting Tamil separatists when Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister caused tremendous heartburn and anger among the Lankan Tamil community. Smuggling of weapons into Jaffna came to a halt as the coast guard stepped up patrolling soon after Rajiv Gandhi was told that an aircraft carrying weapons bound for Sri Lanka’s Tamil-held north had been detained at Madras airport.

  But Rajiv Gandhi’s Sri Lanka policy, crafted at the height of the Cold War, was seen by him and his new team of advisers as pragmatic, equitable and as the need of the hour, even if it ultimately proved to be impractical and unenforceable. India’s strategic interests were as much an issue for Rajiv Gandhi as they were for his mother and predecessor, but it was overlaid in his case by a well-meaning intent to start with a clean slate.

  Mrs Gandhi’s fondness for former premier Sirimavo Bandaranaike and the mutual hostility between her and Bandaranaike’s successor, the Sri Lankan President Jayewardene, were the other mitigating factors behind the tough line she took on Sri Lanka’s actions against its Tamil minority. But the critical factor in Mrs Gandhi’s case may have been Indian intelligence agencies reporting that the US was pushing for a base in Trincomalee port, and setting up a powerful transmitter for its Voice of America radio station in the eastern port city that would enable it to snoop on India.

  While it was an open secret that Delhi had been playing footsie with Tamil militants since 1981, Colombo’s growing closeness to the US, Israel and Pakistan during that period required a plan to pull the strategically positioned island back into its sphere of influence.

  Gen. Vernon Walters of the US, during his diplomatic forays into Sri Lanka in 1983–84, muddied the waters considerably with his attempt to co-opt Colombo by reportedly offering Israeli training and arms to the Sri Lankan armed forces as a quid pro quo for intelligence on India’s Tamil assets. British mercenaries, under the cover of a private security firm, the oddly named Keenie Meenie Services—‘snake in the grass’ in Swahili—were also active on the east coast.

  Mrs Gandhi was equally concerned that the US’ Cold War ally, arch-rival Pakistan, was similarly—much before the Chinese string of pearls strategy to encircle India—building bridges with the Sri Lankans, with many of its top officers training its army. At the height of the Bangladesh war in 1971, Colombo had alienated India by giving Pakistan’s air force permission to refuel its aircraft and use its airfields, when India had closed off its airspace to Pakistan’s civilian and military aircraft.

  When Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister, the revolving door in his foreign policy cell also saw the exit of one seasoned expert after another who had been handling Colombo, including G. Parthasarathy (senior) and A.P. Venkateswaran, and the entry of Natwar Singh and P. Chidambaram as well as Arun Nehru and Arun Singh—the last two were unfamiliar with realpolitik. This happened even as Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Ramachandran kept lines open with the Lankan Tamil groups that he nurtured in the state.

  Much before Rajiv Gandhi became aware of the Sri Lankan government’s persistent foot-dragging over reaching an agreement with the Tamils, he had quickly come round to the belief that continuing support for Tamil separatists was no longer morally tenable. Pakistan’s military establishment was still smarting from the humiliating defeat it suffered at the hands of the Indian Army in 1971 when it surrendered and 90,000 of its soldiers were taken prisoner. Islamabad was looking to settle scores with India.

  With Pakistan readying plans to actively foment and support a separatist insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, any move by India to prop up a militant movement would be used by Islamabad as ammunition in its stepped-up campaign to separate Kashmir from the Indian Union as payback for India’s vivisection of Pakistan. Rajiv Gandhi was of the firm belief that India would have no locus standi over Jammu and Kashmir if it was seen as backing a claim to a separate state by Sri Lankan rebels whom it supported and funded.

  Equally important, he wanted to end, once and for all, the pipe dream of a Tamil Desam that was being actively promoted by India’s canny Tamil politicians who at the time (much as they do today) used the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils to weaken his Congress party.

  The pan-Tamil state would bring together Tamil Nadu on the Indian mainland, the Tamil ‘homeland’ in Sri Lanka’s north and east, and parts of Malaysia and Singapore in South East Asia, where a sizeable Tamil-speaking populati
on resided. In sending Indian troops to Sri Lanka, therefore, Rajiv Gandhi was signalling unequivocally that India would no longer back the Tamil insurgents in their quest to create an independent ‘Greater Eelam’. What he hadn’t been able to do was convince Colombo that India had no intention of taking over northern Sri Lanka as a prelude to creating a separate state for the Tamils, and that the ‘interference’ of sending in the IPKF was only to ensure that Tamils were not persecuted thereafter. Rajiv Gandhi wanted to be seen as a ‘guarantor’ of peace and not as an invader, or the head of an army of occupation.

  Rajiv Gandhi’s Sri Lanka policy—a reversal of Mrs Gandhi’s militaristic line—was in keeping with the rejection of many of Indira Gandhi’s other policies, demonstrated by the Rajiv Gandhi–Longowal accord in Punjab and the Assam accord. In April 1987, with Bofors casting a shadow over his prime ministership, former diplomat Ambassador K.C. Singh says the commonly held view, as the scam blew up in Rajiv Gandhi’s face, was that he was probably looking for a foreign policy success that would take attention away from the controversial howitzer deal. ‘The Indo-Sri Lankan accord that Rajiv Gandhi pushed the Sri Lankan President into agreeing to, was going to be it,’ says Singh.

  Rajiv Gandhi, temperamentally different from his mother, did not want to go down in history as being politically incorrect and as having meddled in the affairs of another nation. His advisers may even have put it about that forging peace with Sri Lanka after a slew of accords with insurgents at home could win him the Nobel Peace Prize, alongside Sri Lankan President Jayewardene.

  Rajiv Gandhi’s Bid to Solve the Ethnic Impasse

  There is no doubt that solving the ethnic impasse in Sri Lanka was a major challenge for the young prime minister, faced with multiple foreign policy crises.

  In 1984, the LTTE had not yet become the formidable guerrilla force that it would eventually grow into. Indeed, it was just one of many that India had in play. Its chief, Prabhakaran, befriended by Tamil Nadu leaders like the iconic MGR, with whom he shared ethnic linkages (their fathers came from Kerala, India, and took up work in Sri Lanka’s plantations), was the only Tamil insurgent leader who made no secret of his reservations about the accord.

  Flown to Delhi in July 1987, and kept incommunicado in a room at Ashok Hotel until he agreed to go along with the accord (he had sat on it for almost two hours, after which it was translated from English to Lankan Tamil), he finally extracted a verbal promise of monetary help for his cadres from Rajiv Gandhi when they met late that night, and believed that of all the Tamil groups supported by Delhi, he was the one who would be given the lead role in the Northern and Eastern provinces.

  But Prabhakaran must have known that he had nothing on paper. Ill-advisedly, he was allowed access to a telephone.

  In a phone call to Tamil Nadu politician Vaiko, Prabhakaran gave vent to his fears when he said, ‘We have been betrayed.’ A phrase that he would raise at the first public rally he ever addressed, on his return to Jaffna in August 1987, and again and again over the next few weeks and months, whipping up emotions until he went to war with the IPKF.

  Prabhakaran had dug in his heels over talking to Colombo, resisting the pressure to agree to a negotiated peace settlement when he had been flown to the SAARC summit in Bangalore in 1986. It was in Bangalore that the newly elected Indian prime minister first shared with Sri Lankan President Jayewardene his concerns over the escalating ethnic violence in Sri Lanka and the difficulties posed in hosting armed Tamil militants on Indian soil. But Jayewardene reportedly did not play along and was openly critical of India at the SAARC meet.

  This deeply upset Rajiv Gandhi’s advisers, possibly forcing the Indian leader’s hand on pushing Jayewardene into agreeing to the broad contours of an agreement that, at one level, served Colombo’s purpose as it brought India in to tackle the Tamil insurgents they had nurtured, while ensuring that India could not back Tamil terror outfits. Rajiv Gandhi believed that at least on paper, he had a victory as the accord made it incumbent on the Sri Lankan leadership to give the Tamils a status within a sovereign, united Sri Lanka.

  However, as a former diplomat said, Rajiv Gandhi was also being cautioned by his Tamil allies and his military and intelligence advisers against allowing Jaffna to fall to the Sri Lanka Army. It would take away one of India’s few bargaining chips—control of Jaffna—and scupper the rehabilitation of Tamils who were resentful of being treated like second-class citizens in their own country, the grudge that was at the heart of the insurgency. In fact, during Operation Liberation in May 1987, Sri Lankan forces had already captured the LTTE nerve centre of Vadamarachchi and were within a heartbeat of taking Jaffna.

  The paradox was that without the Tiger ‘gun’ being held to their head, Colombo would have not have brought the real power behind the Tamil insurgents, the lumbering Indian elephant, into the room. Equally, in conceding on an intervention, Rajiv ceded the upper hand to Colombo and boxed himself into a corner. He could no longer deliver on the promises he had made to Prabhakaran who had serious misgivings about the accord, particularly the call for a referendum on the Eastern Province, that was nothing more, he believed, than a ploy to divide the north and the east.

  Prabhakaran had no intention of revisiting the merger of the north and east, calling it a fait accompli.

  The deliberate resettlement by Colombo of the Sinhalese-speaking southerners in the Eastern Province, with the armed forces bringing in their families and moving into homes in the area once occupied by Tamils, had left the returning Tamil population without a roof over their head in their traditional homeland. Prabhakaran believed the referendum was an intentional move to change the demographics and reverse the unification of the north and the east.

  In interviews to various publications in August 1987, after the Indian Army had flown him from India to Jaffna ahead of a public surrender of arms planned for early October, Prabhakaran said as much. ‘Having fought so much, having sacrificed so many lives and having lost 20,000 people, all this has been subordinated to India’s strategic interests. Not only that, we, the representatives of such martyrs, have not been properly respected. Hence, in this kind of situation during the interim arrangement . . . we feel that we want to demonstrate to the Government of India the support we have from the people. India has not given us our due.

  ‘Without consulting us, they have arrived at an agreement. Hence, we would like to enter politics with the people’s support and with the goal of Tamil Eelam. That will be the fitting reply.’

  In the same interview to an Indian publication, Prabhakaran was asked what Rajiv Gandhi’s response was when the LTTE supremo raised the issue of the removal of the 200 Sri Lankan army camps that had been set up across Trincomalee and Batticaloa. ‘We oppose the agreement on this point. Nobody was prepared to consider it,’ he said. In Delhi, the interviewer asked. ‘Yes, in Delhi,’ replied Prabhakaran.

  In forcing Prabhakaran to return to Jaffna, India also failed to factor in that the militant leader, for the first time since he had taken up arms, was having to resolve the day-to-day problems of the people whose cause he was claiming to espouse. Hundreds of Lankan Tamils could not return to their own homes that had been commandeered by the Sri Lankan settlers from the south, and the only person he could blame this on was the Indian prime minister.

  As he told the interviewer: ‘Mr Rajiv Gandhi gave the assurance that we, the Tamil people, will be protected in the north and the east. But people are not able to return to the east . . . The Indian Army has gone there but the Tamil people are not able to go there—because there is an increasing opposition from the Sinhalese Home Guards and the Sinhalese people. There are army camps there in individual houses, schools and cooperative stores. But the Indian Army has not been deployed in such places. The Ceylon Army has not been evacuated, the problem has not been solved. Another thing is the people’s lack of faith arising out of the non-removal of the Ceylon Army. Even if the Indian Army goes, occupies such places and later vacates, the Sinhala army
will come back. Further, we wouldn’t have arms.’

  In fact, the forced surrender of arms would blow up in India’s face. An LTTE representative told Tamil newspaper Uthayan in Jaffna that the organization would not surrender their arms. Prabhakaran reconfirmed it in several interviews to Indian newspapers, including Indian Express and Frontline. ‘Yes, we made the statement. It is better to fight and die than surrender the weapons in an insecure environment and die on a mass scale.’

  The idea of sending troops into Sri Lanka may have been raised by the Sri Lankan President first. But lulled into a false sense of confidence by Rajiv Gandhi’s assurances that India would not betray Tamil interests, it took several weeks before it finally dawned on the LTTE that India had turned its back on them.

  The other Tamil separatists were far more accepting of the new reality in the hope that it would be their turn to be at the receiving end of RAW largesse in the near future. However, for the LTTE, in the forefront of the battle for Eelam, their very survival was at stake. Caught on the wrong foot, Prabhakaran and his cadres who knew no other language but confrontation and war, retaliated the only way they knew how.

  If Rajiv Gandhi is to be blamed, it should be for his political naivety and for not heeding the advice of his outspoken and highly respected Foreign Secretary A.P. Venkateswaran.

  Venkateswaran made no secret of his misgivings over sending Indian troops into Sri Lanka, saying in public that India’s decision to send the IPKF to Sri Lanka was a mistake. He was dismissed by Rajiv Gandhi during a press conference in June 1987.

  Foreign ministry officials who served at the time say that the momentous decision Rajiv Gandhi took, without considering his more seasoned advisers’ concerns, was fraught with risk. It was made worse when there was no attempt to seek some kind of accommodation with the Tamil insurgents by offering a middle path, a face-saver that would give the proud Tamil primacy in a new arrangement, by holding out the promise of a state sometime in the future, however negligible the prospect of that ever coming to fruition.