Author: Luke Harding
Publication: Island
Newspaper, Reprint from the Guardian
Date: November 29, 2000
As India struggles to
maintain a ceasefire in Kashmir, its territorial integrity comes under
yet more threats, this time from secessionists in the south of the country,
reports Luke Harding
There is one word, which
every senior Indian government politician dreads. It begins with
S: secessionism.
Ever since India achieved
its independence from Britain, various ethnic groups within the subcontinent
have demanded independence.
There have been insurgencies
in the north-eastern states, the Punjab and Kashmir. It is Kashmir,
above all, which has come closest to breaking away from New Delhi.
An uprising against Indian rule in the valley, abetted by Pakistan, has
been going on now for more than 10 years. Pakistan feels it was cheated
out of Kashmir at Partition. India insists that Kashmir is an integral
part of the Indian state. To let it go, so the thinking goes, would
lead to India's inexorable Balkanisation.
And yet the latest, and
most insidious, threat to India's territorial integrity comes not from
the north but from the south. To be precise, Tamil Nadu, a region
of some 60m Tamils, who ostensibly have little in common with their Hindi-speaking
northern neighbours. A series of posters sprung up next to bus stations
in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, featuring Velupillai Prabhakaran,
the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who celebrated
his 46th birthday three days ago. He is dressed in military fatigues
and smiles into the camera. Mr Prabhakaran has spent the last 17
years masterminding a deadly guerrilla war in Sri Lanka. His aim
is a separate Tamil state in the north of the island.
But to the alarm of India's
Hindu-nationalist leaders, Prabhakaran's influence is steadily growing
within Tamil Nadu itself. This was dramatically illustrated recently
when the bandit, Veerappan, himself a Tamil, finally released his matinee
idol hostage, Rajkumar, after holding him in the jungle for 108 days.
The man who negotiated Rajkumar's release was P. Nedumaran, a known
LTTE supporter, and extreme Tamil nationalist politician.
As the hostage crisis
dragged on, it became clear that Veerappan was working closely with a previously
obscure radical Tamil nationalist group, the Tamil Nationalist Liberation
Army. Some sources suggest that Nedumaran came bearing a message
from Prabhakaran, and it was this that swung Rajkumar's release.
They also suggest the payment of a hefty ransom, which will almost certainly
be channeled towards the extremist Tamil movement. With Rajkumar
free, Indian special forces are now poised with the backing of New Delhi
to launch a commando operation to flush Veerappan out of the Tamil Nadu
forests. But the operation has another subtext: to crush the growing
threat of Tamil separatism.
It was, of course, an
LTTE suicide bomber who carried out the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi,
India's prime minister, in 1991. The organisation has been proscribed
in India ever since. Tamil nationalist groups have enjoyed only sporadic
support over the last 10 years, but the Rajkumar affair appears to demonstrate
that they are now gaining ground.
Only a narrow coastal
channel separates southern Tamil Nadu from Sri Lanka's Jaffna peninsula.
Were the LTTE ever to succeed across the water, so the reasoning goes,
it would be only a matter of time before they turn their attention to liberating
their ethnic Tamil brothers in Tamil Nadu itself. Within Sri Lanka,
Prabhakaran's customary birthday message was more keenly awaited this year
than usual. In May, the LTTE seemed on the brink of a decisive victory,
when they came within a few miles of recapturing Jaffna, the town they
lost to Sri Lankan government troops five years ago.
Since then the Sri Lankan
army, aided by new Israeli hardware, has decisively halted the LTTE's advance.
Earlier this month, the Norwegian special envoy, Erik Solheim, met Prabhakaran.
He announced that the rebels were ready to resume talks without preconditions
with the Sri Lankan government, raising hopes that a negotiated solution
to Sri Lanka's protracted civil war might just be possible. Such
an outcome would also delight the weakening Indian state, as it finds itself
held to ransom by one bandit, and the darker, more menacingly chauvinist
forces that he represents.
