Untold Facts

LTTE’s Rise and Fall:Indira’s Prompting and Hegemony

Tamils and Indira Gandhi
Is it not an astonishing matter that the LTTE’s who once controlled one third of the Sri Lanka’s territory and had a war of resistance for liberation for 26 years failed and defeated by the Sri Lanka’s Army at the end on the 18th May 2009 encircled in a patch of jungle of about 1.5 sq km? In the war the Tamil rebels demanding independent state for the ethnic Tamils at the north and east of Sri Lanka had fighting force of 10,000 regulars and their own Navy and Air Force, as well. They had their own administration and even school system organized and run for years. Money, arms and ammunitions were not in short supply that had its first seed money from the Indian Tamils well known to be sponsored in early 1970s and vigorously supported since then in her life time directly by the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) and her central intelligence agency, the R&AW.

Indira’s goal of hegemony
Indira along with her R&AW intelligence operatives not only prompted the Young Tamil LTTE leader Provakaran for obviously then getting votes of the Tamil people of south India, on the one hand, and had also had her eyes, on the other, for dominance through hegemony in the region around that historians know well that the India Doctrine duly nurtured not only by Indira’s father first Prime Minister of independent India Pandit Nehru but also with more aggressive audacity by her.

Ramrajya in Akhand Bharat
Though Nehru posed as an atheist which Indira did not but as a Sanatanist, they had both presented them to the common simple poor folk Hindus of India in millions and millions as the firm believers in re-establishing the epical RAMRAJYA or the Kingdom of God Ram in AKHANDA BHARAT or Undivided India not only limited to the present boundary of India but also much beyond from the Bali Island in the far East of Indonesia to the out stretch of Afghanistan bordering Iranian territory. Sri Lanka was in no way outside their view in the matter. Forcible occupation of Junagardh, Manvadar, Hyderabad, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir in 1947-48, Sikkim in early 1975, etc. are part of the game, as one of their retired Army General Shanaker Roy Chowdhury termed recently in the Asian Age (London edition) as the GREAT GAME they had set for the re-establishing that epical AKHANDA BHARAT. Nepal and Bangladesh are there in the same game that India seriously turned in 2009.

Indira and bloods
It was not too late when Indira lost her elder son Sanjay in a plane crash. Soon she herself gave blood (31 bullets found in her dead body by operating doctors) in the hands of her own Sikh body- guards, Beant (shot dead right then) and Satwant (hanged later on), on the 31st October 1984 that came about as a sequence in four months after the vicious so-called Operation Blue Star carried out in the Golden Temple (Akal Takht) at Amritsar, the holiest of the Sikh temples that had the pool of bloods of 3000 lives of the Sikhs then led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who had also been killed in the operation, a proponent of the Khalistan State or the separate independent homeland of the Indian Sikhs. Indira’s other son who took over after Indira’s death and the P.M. Rajib earlier hit on his neck by a Sri Lankan soldier in a state parade fortunately survived and then tragically gave life and blood in May 1991 by the suicidal attackers of the LTTE’s; Provakaran was listed as the main suspect for Rajib’s killing in the suicide attack.

Distancing
Rajib’s killing by suspected LTTEs naturally created distance between the R&AW and the Congress party, on one side, and the LTTE, on the other. Even so, for appeasement of the Tamils of India, Congress maintained some apparent sympathy for the LTTE and the war. That was understandably a ploy to keep Sri Lanka under India’s control of hegemony as she has been engineering against other smaller countries in the region, possibly except nuclear Pakistan but not without interference into many of her internal matters.

Raised hopes
The LTTE raised hopes of the Tamil people for a State of their own. The South Indian Tamil people had sympathy for the movement. Tamils living in the outside world helped the movement with huge money and other external logistic support. They had also high hopes for the new country for they were told repeatedly that in Sri Lanka they had been second-class citizens. These Tamils may not forget the issue right away. They would naturally feel alienated from the Singhalese and Sri Lankan administration, as they had been psychologically conditioned to be for long 26 years. Whether the Singhalese President Rajapakse with his hopefully integration and assimilation policy would soon win the hearts and minds of the Tamil people is hard to foresee. Instead there may not be any wonder if new leadership takes up the Tamil Elam issue to fill up the void, once they reconcile to the death of Provakoron.

Bloods for power game
It is estimated that nearly 70,000 people died in the 26 years war. It is a huge cost of blood. History would assess and record that Indira Gandhi owed much for the blood letting in this war in Sri Lanka, because, it was she who engineered the game beginning in early 1970s. Had she not started the nasty game, Tamil issue would not have surfaced, much less LTTE and Provakaron, because, all Sri Lankans lived as peaceful citizens of the same country together since independence in February 1948 and the 13% Tamils had no significant rationale to become independent as against 73% Singhalese and other smaller minorities.

Author:Dr. M.T. Hussain