"Unlike believed and propagated, for any Indian attempt at influencing the Sri Lankan Government on the ethnic issue to fructify, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should attend CHOGM-2013, and also take up the issues involved with President Mahinda Rajapaksa on the Summit sidelines. Arguments against such a course, and possible action on those lines, would have long-term consequences that would help neither the Sri Lankan Tamil cause, nor the larger Indian cause. That includes the ’fishing issue’ that continues to bother Tamil Nadu, whose sentiments are cited to demand that India boycotted CHOGM this time.
CHOGM is not a bilateral affair, but a multilateral institution. A boycott or down-grading now could encourage constituency-driven pressures being exerted for India to boycott other multilateral institutions, starting with SAARC and spread across all South Asian nations. Others can return the compliment, too. Political parties and other interest groups demanding CHOGM boycott should relate it to possible counter-demands on the Sri Lankan Government by the majority Sinhala polity and society. To them all, Indian prime ministerial presence would be the real high-point of CHOGM-2013, and his absence, a ’national hurt and humiliation’. They would never fully recover from either, now or ever.
Extending the current arugment further, India should boycott China and Pakistan for good, as larger national sentiments than regional sentiments are involved in both. The other argument that the Sri Lankan Government has not kept the promises made to the Government of India on the ’ethnic issue’ too are not comparable to the un-kept promises from Pakistan on ISI terrorism or from China on ’border incidents’.
After Rajiv Gandhi visited Sri Lanka to sign the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord as far back as 1987, no other Indian Prime Minister has undertaken a bilateral visit to Sri Lanka for the past 26 years. Less said about the Sri Lanka visit of Indian Heads of State or Vice-Presidents in recent decades the better. It’s a dubious record involving any two ’friendly neighbours’. Against this, every Sri Lankan President, Prime Minister and Foreign Minister in recent decades have made New Delhi, their first overseas destination after assuming office. If the trend is not arrested here and now, institutional memory on the other side of the Palk Strait would claim its pound of flesh, in good time. India would be poorer for it more than one can imagine just now.
Not but not the least, the Tamil leadership that has won the first-ever democratic elections in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, have reiterated that India was the only nation that Sri Lanka would listen to, and India alone was responsible for the conduct of the poll. Such being the case, it is for those demanding India’s boycott of CHOGM, and the political parties in Tamil Nadu and at the national-level, to tell us if an Indian boycott of CHOGM or the Prime Minister’s absence would help the cause of the ’Tamil Nadu sentiments’ or otherwise -- and if such high-level interactions would not help take the TN fishers issue even a step closer to peaceful negotiations than otherwise.
(The writer is Director, Chennai Chapter of Observer Research Foundation, Delhi)
Courtesy: The Asian Age/Deccan Chronicle, October 31, 2013
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