Last week was a general bandh in Chennai, in support of Sri Lankan Tamils. While LTTE is in shambles, there did not seem to be much sympathy for it. From what I hear, a couple of decades ago, Adyar was one of the places very sympathetic to LTTE and its cause. Shekhar Gupta has an excellent analysis in his IE article:
At the peak of the IPKF operations in Sri Lanka in the winter of 1987, when the Indian army was still suffering more casualties than at any time during the war in Kargil, I had a conversation with then-Lt Gen (and later chief of army staff) Bipin Joshi, its director of military operations. “These LTTE people,” he said, “were just macho young people with no other purpose in life but to kill and die.” I thought, then, that it was in fact Gen Joshi’s remark that sounded so much like a macho soldier talking. […]
To me, in fact, it was the Indian army that had looked arrogant and macho to the extent of being imprudent. [I]t was our own army that had gone in under-prepared and under-gunned against a largely unknown enemy, had suffered initial setbacks and casualties, and Gen Joshi was calling the LTTE macho and irrational!
[…]
In this moment of the LTTE’s destruction and defeat you can’t but reflect on that. What kind of people take on an entire nation’s modern army, in the face of total worldwide opprobrium to their terrorist ways and unmindful of the plight of the Tamils whose cause they professed to be fighting for? Only people driven by violent madness, militaristic fascism, the suicide-bomber cult, for whom killing is not a means to the end, but the very purpose of living. Over two and a half decades, the LTTE has killed literally tens of thousands, a majority of them Tamil. They invented the human bomb and used one to kill the one man (Rajiv Gandhi) who staked his name and reputation and his country’s might and resources to find for their fellow Tamils a peaceful and just settlement. […]
For Prabhakaran, peace talks were just a cynical tactic to recover, regroup and rearm whenever the going got tough. […]
When the IPKF, under Lt Gen Amar Kalkat, had got the better of him decisively and controlled all inhabited areas, driving him into his Kilinochchi dugout (from which the Sri Lankans have just prised him out) he made common cause with President Premadasa, one of the cruellest and most pathologically anti-Tamil Sinhala leaders ever. […]
I once wrote a piece in this newspaper (‘To know courage…’, IE, August 1, 1999) describing how, of the 28 names that figured in my reporter’s notebook from my first Sri Lanka story in early 1984, only eight had survived. None of the 20 had died of natural causes. Most had been killed by the LTTE. Most were also Tamils. Most of them were also men of peace, fighting and campaigning for a better deal for their fellow Tamils. That piece was inspired by the killing by a human bomb that morning of Neelan Thiruchelvam, a middle-ground MP from Jaffna and a man of peace with a heart of gold; a man who only spread warmth, affection and generosity, and fought tirelessly not only for Tamil rights, but also for peace — which is why, in the LTTE’s penal code, he deserved capital punishment. The bomber threw himself on the bonnet of his car as I waited to join him for breakfast in the lobby of the Intercontinental. Yogeswaran and his wife Sarojini, Padmanabha and Yogasankari, Sam Thambimuthu and P. Joseph, all elected MPs from Tamil territories, all as Tamil as Prabhakaran or Vaiko or Karunanidhi, were assassinated by the LTTE for the same crime: questing for peace. Joseph, a most loveable man who wouldn’t harm an insect, was shot during Christmas mass in his native Batticaloa in 2005. There was nothing Prabhakaran hated more than peacemakers. They created dissonance, disruption in a world of murder and deceit. He was, indeed, macho, arrogant, irrational, fascist. If you don’t bow to me, I will send a teenager, a child, maybe a woman, with a bomb-belt, to embrace you. […] He eschewed a negotiated settlement at every stage.
(all emphasis mine; read the whole piece.)
That is exactly the feeling I got when I happened to strike a conversation with some guy on the bus while going for dinner. Mr. Gupta has a very important advise for the Sri Lankan and the Indian governments:
But it is also a time when Rajapakse’s government has to be firmly told to ensure his army does not make the mistakes victorious armies usually make. The Tamil population must be comforted so they can breathe freely after decades of LTTE subjugation, and assured that this war was as much about their own dignity and rights as about Sinhala pride and Sri Lankan national integrity. This is where India, now and after elections, has to play a key role, not in finding Prabhakaran and his last surviving thugs an escape or reprieve.
Tags: General by Niket
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