Where Ignorance is Not a Bliss

by N. Sathya Moorthy

(October 27, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) The arrest of MDMK founder Vaiko by the anti-terrorism Q-Branch of the Tamil Nadu Police, and the Congress political ally's decision not to participate in the human-chain campaign called by the ruling DMK in the State over the 'ethnic issue' should have confused some and cleared the suspicions on some others in Sri Lanka. The groundswell of public sympathy in the State over the plight of their Tamil brethren is genuine, but it has got entwined with the intricacies of electoral politics, as anywhere in the rest of the world.

The ignorance is not confined to only one side of the Palk Strait. Despite decades-long engagement with Sri Lanka, not to mention the historic, geo-political and cultural linkages between the two nations, the knowledge and understanding of the island-nation, starting with the various contours of the 'ethnic issue' with all their implications and imputations, are abysmal in India.

Despite the long and varied engagement between the two nations, particularly over the last two or three decades, very few in India have studied bilateral relations in their entity, one way or the other. The limited expertise is often confined to the strategic community, often drawing their knowledge from their days in the IPKF. Barring a handful in a nation of 1.1 billion, most academics in India are enchanted more by the study of Russo-American relations or European Union or South-East Asia, or what else but China and/or Pakistan.

The situation is no different in Tamil Nadu which otherwise prides itself over the 'umbilical chord' relationship with the Tamils in Sri Lanka. It is as yet unclear if the 'umbilical chord' relations stopped with the Sri Lankan Tamils, or extended to include the Tamils of recent Indian origin, whose plight used to be worse, and continues to be rather so, until the 'ethnic war' pushed them all into the background of bilateral ties. This is true as much about the relationship between the two peoples speaking the same language as between the two nations.

Less said about Tamil Nadu's engagement with the Tamil-speaking Muslim community in Sri Lanka, for instance, the better. The Muslim community in Sri Lanka is the one that has all along maintained more than a semblance of relationship with the State, through trade and business relations. In turn, the travels that such ties entailed have helped the community maintain constant contact with their families in Tamil Nadu, through marriage and wedding ceremonies.

It is thus heartening to see in the latest announcement of the Indian Government that New Delhi welcomed a peacefully negotiated political settlement to the ethnic issue "within the framework of a united Sri Lanka, respecting the rights of the minorities", including the Tamil community. For long the construct used to refer to the 'rights of the minorities', and was more recently modified to read as the interests of 'all communities' in the island-nation.

It is not unnatural for Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans to return the compliment in more than full measure. If in India, the Foreign Service and allied agencies of the Government are handicapped by the absence of personnel knowledgeable in Sinhala language, for instance, the less said about Colombo, the better. The 'national problem' would not have arisen in the first place, and gone international subsequently, if only the powers-that-be had no hesitation to learn the language of a people who formed at least a fourth of the population.

It is sad that few politicians from Tamil Nadu, or even the rest of India, have travelled to Sri Lanka over the last 100-plus years. It is thus that the Tamils in Sri Lanka still have retained a generational memory for the historic visits of Mahathma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru -- that too before both nations got Independence from the common British ruler, over 60 years ago. Their more recent memories are confined to their pitiable presence, of they having to depend on the Indian indulgence in political terms, and hospitality – however inadequate – in the refugee camps of Tamil Nadu.

The 'majority Sinhala' memories about Tamil Nadu, if any, are frozen in the era of Rajaraja Chola, a millennium ago. About the rest of India, those memories have not gone beyond the arrival of Prince Mahinda and Princess Sangamitta, and with them, the Gautama's Teachings and the sapling of the Holy Boe Tree. That was another millennium earlier. In recent decades, there have been academic dissertations and bureaucratic fulminations that have often translated into political justification for peripheral groups to target bilateral relations more in electoral terms than even in ideological terms.

President Mahinda Rajapakse has done well to speak about the 'coalition compulsions' in India, that too in the context of Tamil Nadu. His colleagues in Government have clarified that the political protests in Tamil Nadu remained 'an internal matter of India'. As President Rajapakse would only know too well – and so do other mainline political parties in the country – there are genuine 'southern concerns' in Tamil Nadu as there are 'southern concerns' in Sri Lanka.

To the extent that the policy-makers in both capitals are purposeful and focussed in their approach to problem-solving on all fronts, starting with 'ethnic issue', the situation would remain under control. That would not however mean that the leaderships concerned cannot look inward and sort out mutual concerns, which otherwise concern their own people, and are also the concerns of those very people that they are sworn in, to address.

[The writer is Director of the Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), the Indian policy think-tank headquartered in New Delhi] The article originally published by Colombo based daily the Daily Mirror. - Sri Lanka Guardian