Former non aligned leader, India now all out for Mahinda war on terror

By Dr. Wickramabahu Karunaratna

(February 08, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) I recently got the opportunity to participate in a conference in Tamil Nadu. It was a strange conference with pro establishment calling for post LTTE democracy while others insisted on a peace accord and discussions with the LTTE.

Dr S Narayan, B Raman, R Swami Nathan, Dr Chandrasekaran and Col Hariharan stood for the establishment while Dr Carr and Dr Nainan Koshy stood for the radicals. Of all these contributions what I found interesting was the speech made by Dr Koshy. He spoke of the historical change of Indian foreign policy with the rise of influence of global capital. India, the leader of the nonaligned movement, became the greatest ally of the American rulers. This sad historical event changed the destiny of the developing world. In particular it changed the path of Lankan society. He started his address by explaining thus.

Volatile regions

“I will highlight some of the major developments and broad trends which have bearing on the issues raised by the topic of the seminar. South Asia has been one of the most volatile regions of the world. The nature of its volatility and that of the conflicts has been redefined by the US-led war on terror in which the rulers of the region have joined.

Tensions within the region have been heightened and conflicts have been made more intractable as states sought alliance with the USA. Peace and conflict in South Asia are today sought to be defined in terms of US interests and objectives in the region or in a framework imposed by the USA.

The major factor in the new relationship of the US with South Asia projecting its interests and objectives in an unprecedented manner into the region is the strategic partnership with India, with its pronounced military dimension.”

He couldn’t be sharper in placing the development of Indian polity within the South Asian context. I could see the establishment figures who participated turning uneasily. Ninan exposed precisely what they wanted so eagerly to cover up. They do not want to see and they do not want to say that India has lost its independence to America. The giant that got out of the clutches of British imperialism after six decades becoming the cudgel of Yankee Uncle Sam is something that they do not want others to know. Dr Koshy undisturbed by the changes in faces continued.

Calculated dismantling

“India was one of the first, if not the first, countries to declare unequivocal support for the US war on terror. India enthusiastically applauded President Bush’s ‘with us or with the terrorists’ speech. There was a deliberate departure from the decades-old policy of refusing to get drawn into military entanglements with any power. There was no longer any opposition or objection on the part of Indian policy makers to joining a formal alliance with a great power which had declared an indefinite war against unspecified enemies. At work in New Delhi was the beginning of the calculated dismantling of the entire rationale of non-alignment and the edifice of an independent foreign policy subjugating India’s national interests to US war plans.

As the US prepared for retribution against the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, Pakistan was among the first nations, it turned its attention to. Literally at gunpoint, the military establishment was asked to stand up and be counted as a supporter of the new war on terrorism or be treated on par with the terrorists. The US conveyed, in unambiguous terms, that any reservations on the part of Islamabad would be deemed as a hostile act and the consequences would be unimaginable. In spite of political changes in Islamabad and US’s changing emphasis on sticks and carrots depending on the situation, basically the relations between the US and Pakistan remain the same as shaped at the beginning of the war on terror.”

Thus Ninan gave the base for all of us to make the respective contribution to the discussion. Many of us wanted to explain the impotence of Indian support to the Mahinda regime. We wanted to explain why the influence of India today is different from what it was at the time of the Indo-Lanka agreement. If there were conflicting interests at that time, now, those have gone with the winds. The India that once military supported the Tamil militants to fight against the Yankee Dickey of Lanka has made a complete somersault to support the Colombo regime in its fight against terrorism. Intellectuals and bureaucrats who worked to arm the Tamil youth have to tell us the exact definition of terrorism. Amazingly, they cleverly took the turn.

-Sri Lanka Guardian