Jayalalithaa’s offensive threatens the Centre’s cosy neighbourliness with Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa’s tough stand against Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, which large sections of the media have failed to take note of, is likely to have far-reaching political and diplomatic consequences in the Subcontinent. India helped Rajapaksa win his war with the LTTE, which was fighting for a separate Tamil nation, but now Jayalalithaa wants him to be tried for war crimes.

Jayalalithaa, who began her third term as Chief Minister last month, after her party’s landslide victory in the Assembly polls, fired her first salvo against Rajapaksa on 13 May, when the election results were announced. “The President of Sri Lanka must be tried for war crimes and brought before the International Court of Law,” she declared.

Jayalalithaa did not stop with those remarks, but went on to urge New Delhi to impose economic sanctions against Sri Lanka if the latter failed to give equal rights to Tamils. It was a wake-up call to the Congress-led UPA government that the new regime in Chennai will no longer toe the Centre’s line on Sri Lanka.

Apart from token protests, the DMK regime never put any real pressure on the Centre to review its pro-Rajapaksa policy. But Jayalalithaa appears determined to see a change in the Indian Government’s policy towards Sri Lanka.

Her actions prove it. She is not merely talking, but also acting. Last week, she got a unanimous resolution passed in the Assembly urging the centre to impose sanctions against Sri Lanka till all Tamils displaced during the war and now staying in camps return to their homes. The resolution also called upon the Indian Government to press the United Nations to declare those accused of war crimes against Tamils war criminals.

While the Indian Government fails to acknowledge that Sri Lankan Tamils do not enjoy equal rights with the country’s Sinhalese, the Tamil Nadu Assembly’s resolution did not mince words in stating the facts. The resolution pointed out that Tamils in Sri Lanka are treated as second-class citizens and their demands for equal rights are yet to be met.

Contrary to the Indian Government’s silence on the recent UN panel report that indicted the Sri Lankan government for alleged war crimes, the Tamil Nadu Assembly’s resolution took note of its observations. “The Sri Lankan military rained shells on ‘no fire’ zones and bombed hospitals; the government blocked humanitarian aid from reaching the people there, and a large number of Tamils died due to shortage of food and water,” said Jayalalithaa.

Next day, the Assembly adopted a resolution on Katchatheevu, impleading the revenue department in a case filed by Jayalalithaa in the Supreme Court in 2008 to retrieve Katchatheevu Island ceded to Sri Lanka. Retrieval of Katchatheevu is Jayalalithaa’s pet cause. The island was ceded to Sri Lanka in 1974 when her arch rival and DMK chief, M Karunanidhi, was Chief Minister.

Jayalalithaa has maintained that the ceding was unconstitutional since it was not ratified by Parliament. The island was handed to Sri Lanka through an agreement signed between the two countries.

The Katchatheevu resolution passed unanimously by the Tamil Nadu Assembly cited a Supreme Court order of 1960, which stated that Parliament has to ratify the ceding of any Indian territory to another country. Whenever Jayalalithaa speaks on the Katchatheevu issue, she accuses Karunanidhi of having done nothing to stop the ceding of the island, which was then part of Tamil Nadu.

Though Katchatheevu is a tiny island in the Palk Bay, it has strategic military value. If India gets back Katchatheevu, it will extend the country’s maritime boundary by many miles, thus increasing the fishing grounds for Indian fishermen, who are regularly shot at by the Sri Lankan navy whenever they fish near the disputed island.

The two back-to-back resolutions rattled New Delhi, which quickly got into damage-control mode. National Security Advisor (NSA) Shivshankar Menon took a special aircraft to Chennai and met Jayalalithaa to take stock of the situation. The meeting took place on the eve of the NSA’s scheduled visit to Colombo, along with Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and Defence Secretary Pradeep Kumar.

Jayalalithaa took up with Menon the Lankan navy’s attacks on Indian fishermen and the issue of rehabilitation of Tamils in Sri Lanka. She reiterated her demand that Tamils be accorded equal rights with the country’s Sinhalese.

Colombo has reacted cautiously to developments in Tamil Nadu. Sri Lanka’s Cabinet Spokesperson and Media Minister Keheliya Rambukwella has taken the stand that Sri Lanka deals with the Indian Government and not individual states. Colombo’s efforts to cultivate Jayalalithaa have failed. Recently, Milinda Moragoda, a senior advisor to Rajapaksa, met former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister and Telugu Desam leader Chandrababu Naidu in Hyderabad to request his help in arranging a meeting with Jayalalithaa. Even while Naidu gave his assurance to cooperate, events in Tamil Nadu picked up pace.

Jayalalithaa’s stand on Sri Lanka has won her new friends. Sri Lankan diaspora Tamils, who once looked upon Karunanidhi as their supporter, are now rallying behind Jayalalithaa. Tamil nationalist groups in the state have also thrown in their lot with her.

Firebrand Naam Thamilar leader Seeman even plans to hold a public meeting to thank her for passing the resolution seeking economic sanctions against Sri Lanka. “It is a historic resolution, which will go a long way in helping the cause of Sri Lankan Tamils. Based on this resolution, we now plan to mobilise the support of other Indian leaders for the Tamil cause,” he says.

For Jayalalithaa, the support from Tamil groups is a welcome addition to her votebank. Not too long ago, she was seen as anti-Tamil. Her hard stance against the now-vanquished LTTE and its supporters in Tamil Nadu made her despicable to fringe Tamil nationalist groups that were mostly pro-DMK till recently.

During her last term (2001–2006), Jayalalithaa had detained Thamizhar Thesiya Iyakkam leader Pazha Nedumaran and MDMK chief Vaiko on charges of supporting the LTTE.

However, Jayalalithaa has made a clear distinction between her earlier anti-LTTE stance and her present pro-Eelam Tamils stance. She still proudly claims that she was responsible for the Centre’s ban on the LTTE in 1992 and recalls the resolution passed in the Assembly in her last term seeking the extradition of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabakaran.

The first hint of her change of mind came during the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls in 2009 when she declared that the formation of Eelam—a separate nation for Tamils carved out of Sri Lanka—was the only solution to the ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka. As Professor Ramu Manivannan, department of politics and public administration, University of Madras, says, “At that time, she may not have been fully convinced about her stand. Now, she has done her homework. The UN report must also have helped her. The good thing about Jayalalithaa is that when she takes up something, she goes the whole hog.”

But there is speculation about Jayalalithaa’s agenda in taking up the Eelam cause. Different views are being aired. “Why don’t you believe she has taken up the cause on a purely humanitarian basis? Why attribute motives to it?”asks Agni Subramaniam, a Chennai-based human rights activist and strong supporter of Eelam Tamils.

“More than political expediency, it may be a strategy of containment,” says Professor Manivannan, who feels that Jayalalithaa may want to pre-empt the growth of Tamil parties like Seeman’s in Tamil Nadu.

Many also believe that Jayalalithaa may have taken the pro-Eelam stand to strike at the root of the DMK’s support base. As Seeman says, “We were brought up to believe that the DMK was the true representative of Tamils. That belief was belied when the DMK failed to take any steps to stop the war in Sri Lanka, a war that claimed thousands of innocent Tamil lives. If Jayalalithaa is willing to support Tamils, why shouldn’t we support her?”