The New "Ram" Sethu in Tamil Nadu:

The New "Ram" Sethu

by Rajan Philips

N. Ram, Editor-in-chief of The Hindu, Chennai’s inimitable English daily, has emerged as the most influential eminent person on either side of the Palk Straits. Earlier in October, his paper condemned the chauvinistic eruptions in Tamil Nadu in support of the LTTE. Mr. Ram himself got on the phone with the Sri Lankan President to find out first hand what was going on in “India’s utmost isle.” No one else in Chennai or Delhi, not to mention Colombo, could have done better. Last week, Mr. Ram conducted a face-to-face interview with President Rajapakse in the “tranquil setting” of the Temple Trees.



[N. Ram, Editor-in-chief of The Hindu]

As interviews go, it was more platitudinous than probing; soft answers to softer questions instead of tough questions and firm commitments; a rather surreal fiddling when the objects of the interview are burning. Temple Trees must be the only oasis of tranquility in a city of barricades, check points, arrests and kidnappings. “Oppressive tranquility”, was how Pablo Neruda sensed the city’s ambience with some uncanny foresight, seventy years ago when he was a Chilean foreign officer in Colombo. As bridge building goes, the new Ram Sethu is a bridge for the establishments – of Colombo, Chennai and Delhi. The subalterns will have no access to it.

50 years ago, when communal violence targeting Tamils first engulfed Colombo, an even more eminent citizen of Madras, nay of all of India, the great Chakravarthy Rajagopalachari (Rajaji), used his Swarajya column to express sadness over the violence in Colombo and to chide the government of the day for breaking the island’s ethnic tranquility. The column must have stung Prime Minister Bandaranaike, for he used one of his parliamentary interventions to respectfully refer to Rajaji’s concerns. I was too young at that time to read the Swarajya, but I remember picking up the story from family table talk, and later reading Mr. Bandaranaike’s speech in the Hansard.

Old stories, old forces

The Hansard of 1956-59, the period during which Mr. Bandaranaike was Prime Minister until felled by an assassin’s gun, offers a reflection of the emerging contradictions in Sri Lanka’s politics. There was Philip Gunawardena, breathing fire at the Neanderthals (his term) who were setting fire to Tamil houses in Colombo; there was Colvin R de Silva perorating to the government front benches not to drag the country down the path of Sinhala Only; there were chauvinist voices telling Pieter Keuneman to go to Australia; there was S.J.V. Chelvanayakam, already inaudible, but insistently clinging to his faith in federalism; and there was Prime Minister Bandaranaike vainly trying to please everyone, and valiantly trying to enable the statesman in him to put back the communal genie in the bottle which the politician in him had uncorked to win the 1956 elections.

I am not trying to regurgitate old stories here, or to draw an uncharitable pair-wise comparison between Rajaji and Ram, on one side of the Palk Strait, and Bandaranaike and Rajapakse on the other side. But those of us, who have lived through the ethnic turbulences of the 1950s and every worse decade thereafter, have seen too much for too long not to raise alarm at the recurrence, as new faces, of the old forces who torpedoed Mr. Bandaranaike’s efforts to find a structural solution to the Tamil question. These forces still have sway, if not so much in the country, but certainly over the policy directions of President Rajapakse and his government. What is worse, President Rajapakse is not trying even half as much as S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike did.

But unlike Mr. Bandaranaike, President Rajapakse has a stranglehold on power. He has successfully internalized and emasculated all political opposition among the Sinhalese. The few checks against his regime occasionally emanate from the Supreme Court. For different reasons, India and the outside world could exert a limited influence on the government’s handling of the political solution to the Tamil question. But everyone concerned has given the green light to the government’s military offensive against the LTTE. The effects of this exclusive military plan on the Tamils are immediate and transparent, but it would be a while before the effects on all other Sri Lankans including the Sinhalese become apparent.

Let off the hook

In these circumstances, any political solution would be impossible if it does not have the commitment from and constant involvement by President Rajapakse. But there is a difference, a big difference, between the President’s support being a necessary condition for a political solution, on the one hand, and assuming that the President is in fact genuinely supportive of a political solution and is seriously striving to achieve one. The fact that the President says so to Mr. Ram is also not good enough as there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. It could not have been that the visitor from Chennai was unaware of this evidence, but in a mutually-admiring encounter the guest is constrained not to embarrass the host with unedifying evidence.

Particularly insulting is the reference in the reporting of the interview to the tardiness of the All Party Representative Committee Process, and the assurance by the President that “I myself will take charge of the political process and see it through politically.” Come on! Mr. Ram knows enough people in Colombo to ascertain for himself that the real reason for the tardiness of the APRC was the President himself. Rather than probing what went wrong and how different the APRC process will be from now on, the interview simply lets the President off the hook and swallows the President’s words – hook, line and sinker.

Mr. Ram and his newspaper are well known for their uncompromising characterization of the LTTE as the deadliest terrorist outfit in the world that needs to be eradicated totally and absolutely. There is little that is exceptionable about this characterization, but what is utterly indefensible is its simplistic corollary that any process that seeks the defeat of the LTTE will automatically lead to the liberation of the Tamils. To its credit, India has emphasized the difference between defeating the LTTE and resolving the Tamil question that predates the LTTE and in fact gave rise to it in desperation. It is this measured diplomatic missive from Delhi to Colombo that created the possibility, as I argued last week, for the progressive forces within and outside the government to begin to influence the President to take a new direction and formulate a political solution independent of pursuing the military offensive.



[President Mahinda Rajapakse-AP file photo]

Alas, Mr. Ram’s interview seems to have given President Rajapakse enough room to wiggle out of a tight situation, showing off his new talking points: “A military solution is for the terrorists; a political solution is for the people living in this country.” And the new 4-D approach: Demilitarization; Democratization; Development; and Devolution. To the most significant question in the interview – “are they (the 4-Ds) in some order?” – President Rajapakse affirmed the order in answer: no devolution without development, no development without democratization, and no democratization without demilitarization. In short, no nothing without a military victory. And there is no Ram Sethu for the half a million repeatedly displaced people stuck between military solution and political solution.

Posted by transCurrents on November 1, 2008 10:01 AM |