Not fast, but slow poison

(April 28, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) Tamils in Sri Lanka are facing the worst possible predicament that can befall human beings: To be driven out from their own land is a mournful mortification.

And to struggle to survive amidst booming guns and blasting bombs makes it both dangerous and doleful.

The images, of scrawny and haggard men and women, with their small ones either perched precariously on their hips or tagging along with wide-eyed fear and some strange curiosity at the intrigues around, hands reluctantly extended to get hold of the doles dropped with causal indifference, are full of poignancy and pathos that challenge language and articulation.

It is a feeling whose pain and pinch that outsiders can only imagine through the assumed world of words. Caught between the Scylla of the devious LTTE and Charybdis of the marauding Sri Lankan armed forces, the Lankan Tamils today are victims among the already victimised. A double whammy of wretchedness and woe.

Their life has perhaps been sapped of all its meaning, sans that stand for bodily existence. Sympathy, even if well-meaning, can tend to sound cruel considering what they have been enduring for long. In the event, playing politics for personal power and pelf with them in the Centre is an exercise that is at once execrable and obscene. Political parties in Tamilnadu are guilty of this extreme crime.

Case in point is DMK chief and Chief Minister M Karunanidhi’s polls-in-the-mind parody of a ‘fast’ yesterday. Aside from the simple fact that how not eating between meals can amount to fasting, Karunanidhi’s sly show is condemnable as he has sought to cash in on a horrendous tragedy.

It takes an congenitally devious and diabolic mind to conceive such a charlatan gimmick and try to pass it off as a Samaritan show. It is sickening in the guts to see Karunanidhi and his lapdog media making a show of what was essentially just a show event. Even vultures that prey on carcasses will eventually move away once the stage of skeletal residue is reached.

But this gang of pitiless predators in search of more power and more pelf would not baulk at plundering on the barebones. The fast, a word used here just for the sake of casual description, strips away even the elementary dignity which alone is left for the Lankan Tamils. Karunanidhi, if he manages to win votes through this heartless artifice, should know that his throne will be built on the bodies of innocents and guileless.

For years Tamilnadu politics has been unkindly utilising Lankan Tamil crisis. But this poll season new nadirs have been plumbed. Karunanidhi’s scheming shenanigans is matched by Jayalalithaa’s devious desperation as she has suddenly let her ‘backing’ for separate Eelam public. Who is she trying to kid? What of Vaiko, Dr S Ramadoss and sundry other politicians who have fattened themselves on a tragedy that seems to have no end? The only solace for the Lankan Tamils amidst this theatre of morbidity —— LTTE, Sri Lankan army and Tamilnadu politicians —— could be that even if they happen to reach hell after death it would seem heaven in comparison. And that is till the politicos reach there and let into play their callous chicanery.

-Sri Lanka Guardian