The Battle of Swat, the Indian Elections and the End of the Sri Lankan Civil War
By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
There were three significant happenings this week up and down the vertical axis of the Indian Subcontinent.
Up in the North, Pakistani troops battled the Taliban in Swat. As the week closed they had just begun the battle for Mingora, the capital town of the picturesque vale.
Meanwhile down South on a coastal strip along the Indian Ocean, the Sri Lankan Army was concluding what is being called Eelam War IV, the final chapter ending in the elimination of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the killing of its legendary chief, Prabhakaran. It marked the end of a government military operation that matched the LTTE’s own ruthlessness and savagery.
In the middle was India, electing its 15th parliament, fifty seven years since its first. The Congress party, which governed the last five years in a tenuous coalition, was returned to power with increased numbers, while its opponents on the nominal right and left were both shorn of seats.
It was Winston Churchill who remarked that the United States could usually be relied upon to do the right thing… after having tried everything else. The same remark might apply to Pakistan with this alteration, “after having secured promises of billions in additional aid”. Following several months of dilly-dallying — even an accommodation with the Taliban — essentially letting the outlaws run the judicial system in Swat, Pakistan finally moved. Whether nudged by world outrage at the YouTube video of a young lady in Swat being publicly whipped by Taliban goons, or whether as a result of the latest administration of the ancient American patent medicine for Pakistan (one part threat, four parts blandishment) the army appeared to shake off its post-Waziristan funk and move with dispatch and determination against the insurgents. Like the military operations in Sri Lanka, this has resulted in large numbers of refugees (1.4 million per one report) fleeing their homes to escape the fighting. The devastation of the fight for Mingora is yet to come. And there is something unseemly against an army being used against one’s own population, a fact likely to stick in many craws in the months and years to come. But as with Indira Gandhi and Bhindranwale, sometimes the biggest punishment is simply having to eat one’s own cooking.
Widespread celebration all over Sri Lanka greeted the Sri Lankan president’s announcement that the LTTE had been crushed, and that peace had returned to the island paradise (incidentally, the word ‘serendipity’ comes from an old name for Sri Lanka). The civil war there has continued for nearly 30 years. Lincoln concluded his in four. But that is as far as the analogy may be pushed. Compared to the complexities of the Lankan problem, the American Civil war was a piffle. Tamils, though a minority, make up over 25% of the population. They were for long part of the establishment until they were purged by the Sinhalese. Unlike blacks in the US, Tamils have inhabited Sri Lanka for over a millennium, some say even longer than the Sinhalese. And unlike the overt crime of slavery, in the US, Tamils in Sri Lanka have for fifty years been subject to a below-the-radar apartheid, punctuated by pogroms connived at by the Sinhalese establishment. The LTTE was a reaction to this, in the end an overreaction. But if the Tamil’s status in Sri Lanka is at all recognized widely and on its way to being addressed, Prabhakaran for all his crimes and follies deserves a due measure of credit. It is trite to invoke Lincoln’s words about binding the wounds, but it is no less true for that.
Like Sherlock Holmes’ curious incident of the dog in the night, the Indian elections were remarkable for what did not happen.
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