How Sri Lanka is not an election issue in Tamil Nadu

For those Sri Lankans, Sinhalas or Tamils, who still believe that the electoral fall-out of the ethnic issue or any other internal domestic affairs of the country influences bilateral approaches by neighbouring India, here is the raw truth.

The Sri Lankan Tamil issue has never ever influenced the Indian voter in southern Tamil Nadu, which is what both are hinting at, as pressuring the nation’s federal dispensation in distant Delhi.

Leave aside the present, when a Tamil actor-politician Vijay’s speech at the state conference of his infant Tamizhaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK), wanted ‘Katchchatheevu retrieved’, there is no electoral appetite in the State for this or any other ‘external factors’ that are not germane to domestic politics in the State, whether or not it influenced the political discourse in the rest of the country. Suffice to point out that the TVK is the newest of ‘em all, and is waiting to face its maiden elections only in the State Assembly polls, equivalent, if at all, to Provincial Council elections in Sri Lanka.

But there is a difference. Unlike Sri Lanka, where PC polls have not been held in the nine Provinces for over a decade now, with every other Government in power finding new, or old, reasons to delay it, in India, they are conducted without fail, barring on a few occasions, for which they had to pass a constitutional amendment with two-thirds majority in federal Parliament.

The best example is the 1991 elections to the nation’s Parliament, with which Tamil Nadu Assembly polls also coincided. The ‘Rajiv Gandhi assassination’ occurred in the midst of the long drawn-out election process, which generally takes a month and more to complete – given in particular the size of the country and individual electorates (or constituencies) and also the greater concern on security matters.

After a couple of weeks of postponement for the Election Commission to assess the mood and refurbish security where all needed, India went through the process, as if nothing had happened. But no Indian leader can postpone constitutionally-mandated elections at whim, as has been happening since before the Yahapalayana Government (2015-19).

Incumbent Anura Kumara Dissanayake is the fifth President in a row, who is now tasked with divining new and (un-)convincing reasons for a further postponement. After all, his ruling JVP-NPP combine’s vote-share in the nation-wide local government elections slipped back to the leader’s 42-per cent in the presidential poll only a few months earlier. In the intervening period, the ruling combine had won an unprecedented brutal majority of 159 seats in a total of 225, and a vote-share of a high 62 per cent.

Perception politics

Talking of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination and the 1991 elections in India, that was, if at all, the only poll in which events involving Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans became a decisive factor – but confined only to Tamil Nadu, where the assassination occurred. Again, it owed to the shock and awe that the daring – and foolhardy – assassination and the consequent questions about the maintenance of law and order under the previous Government of DMK Chief Minister M Karunanidhi.

That in particular owed to the mounting perception that the State police / Government had (wantonly?) failed to capture the LTTE assassins of EPRLF leader K Padmanabha and 14 others, including two Indian citizens, inside a cramped apartment house in the heart of the State capital of Chennai. Looking back, the failure of the ruling DMK to play the ‘perception politics’ right on law and order failure in the matter, as much as the Padmanabha killing, contributed to the near wipe-out of the party in the elections that followed the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, less than a year later. It might have been an even-match minus the Rajiv assassination, yes.

Nothing brings out the fact that the ethnic issue, which had peaked into a raging war, at the height of India’s elections to the federal Parliament, did not have any electoral purchase in the country in 2009. In particular, Tamil Nadu did not vote for those elements identified with the LTTE. Instead, even Vaiko, who was by then heading a DMK breakaway group, calling itself the MDMK, and considered the LTTE’s poster-boy in State politics, lost by a substantial margin in his native Sivakasi constituency. The rival DMK-led combine, in which Rajiv Gandhi’s Indian National Congress was a partner, won more seats than the other in which the MDMK was a part.

Immediate relevance

Compared to the ethnic issues and its multiple fall-outs in the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka and the Katchchatheevu dispute, which is a fall-out of the larger livelihood concerns linked to the bilateral fishermen’s concerns, the latter has greater and immediate relevance at least to a section of the Tamil Nadu voters. The State’s fishermen community in general – and they spread across the long coast – and those in the southern Ramanathapuram constituency / electorate in particular, it would be assumed in Sri Lanka were voting on the basis of the latest development on the fishing dispute, or the accompanying ‘Katchchatheevu issue’.

No, never. The fishermen community across the Tamil Nadu coast have always voted on issues other than the bilateral livelihood issue with their Sri Lankan Tamil brethren. Even fishermen voters in Rameswaram, the eye of the bilateral fishing storm, have voted on such other domestic issues like the rest of the voters in the State, who incidentally number about 63 million against Sri Lanka’s total of 17 million.

In context, President Dissanayake’s Katchchatheevu visit remained a domestic affair of Sri Lanka, if at all it was any. No political party in India, particularly Tamil Nadu, even took notice of it. However, their demand for the Indian federal / central Government to ‘retrieve’ the barren islet remains a political talking-point. Incidentally, the not-so-infrequent reference to Katchchatheevu, in the context of the bilateral accords of 1974 and 1976, by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders has not enthused the Tamil Nadu voters, least of all the fisher community in Rameswaram.

This remains so, despite the all-powerful and ever-charming Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagging the ‘Katchchatheevu Accords’ issue at the height of last year’s parliamentary polls in the country. In the Ramanathapuram constituency, where Rameswaram is located, the BJP-supported candidate and three-time Chief Minister O Pannerselvam lost very badly, by a high 15-per cent vote-margin in a turn-out of 1.1-million voters.

Comfort zone

Yes, it is thus time that Sri Lankan political class and a section of the self-styled strategic community obsessed with India and is opposed to India, need to re-read their own scripts to make appropriate corrections, if they are not going to be proved wrong, again and again, in their assessments of the so-called reasons for India ‘pressuring’ successive Governments in Colombo, to do their bidding.

Such constructs apply to each and every one bilateral government-to-government deals and pacts between the two countries, which critics in Colombo have been trained only to find fault with. They have no interest in knowing or learning the latest trends in international and bilateral trade pacts and political trade-offs. Like the ruling JVP of the present, whose is an ‘accidental Government’ and incumbent Dissanayake is an ‘accidental President’ more than his predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, this academic / professional critics wantonly live in the past, which alone is their comfort zone.

Dig deeper, and you will find out that they all are still living in Sri Lanka that is a thousand years younger. They have not forgiven Rajaraja Chola for sending a naval expedition of Sri Lanka and trouncing the Sinhala ruler. There was looting and pillaging, we are told. That’s what war was all about across the world at that time, not that it’s condonable, post facto.

But not one of the Sri Lankan critics of the Cholas have asked himself – or, herself – why Rajaraja had to send out a naval expedition to Sri Lanka. Was it to loot and pillage? If that was the aim, there were vast and rich kingdoms in the landed parts of India. He need not have launched an unprecedented and equally risky naval expedition to Sri Lanka, about whose treasures, he might have had only little information, if at all.

Rajaraja targeted the Sinhala kingdom in Sri Lanka only because the latter was constantly partnering with his local rival, the Pandyas, and sending his military to fight battles that were not theirs in the first place. Once you have joined a war, even if it were yours by some imaginary explanation, then there is no way of escaping the consequences of the same. That’s what happened in this case, too, only that Sinhala critics of the Cholas have not attempted to take an impartial and unbiased approach to studying their own history.

Suffice to point out, to them all and most of their political leaders, too, it is ‘southern India’ still, and not ‘Tamil Nadu’, which is what it is. The reference of course is only to Tamil Nadu, present or past, only that our Sinhala critics still live in a past that is nearly a thousand years old – and refuse to move ahead, and with the times!

(The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)