BJP, RSS, Shiv Sena answerable to Dasgupta policy-line
Whatever is the journalistic halo behind Swapan Dasgupta, his recent
writings and utterances on the struggle of the genocide-facing nation of
Eezham Tamils could have been ignored as coming from just another of
the dubious ilk that writes for agendas, had he not been a member of the
Rajapaksa-sponsored BJP-RSS-Shiv Sena delegation that went to Colombo
and Jaffna. Now as he openly bares the line of thinking in the camp, the
BJP-RSS-Shiv Sena lot aspiring for power in India, may have to answer
to the world of Tamils and to the humanity in general whether it is
aspiring to become worse than that of the present Establishments in New
Delhi, Washington and Beijing, commented an activist of alternative
politics in Jaffna, urging mainstream polity and public in Tamil Nadu to
be prepared with the needed.
Swapan Dasgupta writing in The
Pioneer on 9th June was sympathetic for Mahinda Rajapaksa becoming “the
latest whipping boy of the morally indignant.”
He may be right
because the boys to be actually whipped by a righteous humanity are
sitting in the Establishments of New Delhi, Washington, Beijing, and in
the international media, especially in a particular section of Indian
media that was long blighting the cause of genocide-facing Eezham
Tamils, just because of petty benefits it was receiving from the
genocidal State or because of its Swapnas (dreams) of Indian imperialism
eating the cake of the island in full by catching the tail of the
Sinhala-Buddhists.
Swapan now 58, was recollecting his earlier
visit to Jaffna 25 years ago and seeing “gun-totting members of various
para-military factions walking with a swagger” to say that thinks are
much better now and to even justify the occupation of the territory of
Tamils by the genocidal Sinhala military, which according to him
“operates well below the radar.”
“Logistically, the army wants to
insulate itself in the security zones, build strategically located
cantonments and operate as a rapid response force just in case
insurgency resurfaces,” Swapan was defending.
If an occupying
military that has committed the worst genocide in the recent times and
is continued to commit genocide could be excused in this way, why the
Tamil sons of the land walking with a swagger in their own land had
worried the journalist or why should he be particular in giving the
epithet “murderous” to the LTTE, unless he is an agenda writer?
* * *
The
journalist was countering the realities of demographic and structural
genocide that take place in the territory of Eezham Tamils by citing a
Chettiar businessman he had met at a lunch hosted by businessmen of
Indian origin in Colombo, who had reportedly told him that 30 per cent
of the people in the capital are Tamils and they control 70 per cent of
the business.
“Sampanthan’s theory of Tamils being an endangered
breed in Sri Lanka doesn’t have too many takers south of the Elephant
Pass,” the BJP-RSS-Shiv Sena journalist says, coming out with his new
theory that “The ‘Tamil problem’ that provides livelihood to the global
human rights industry and provokes indignation in some circles in India
seems essentially a Jaffna problem, and should be renamed as such.”
Whether
the journalist wants to lure the Tamil business class in India to go
against the aspirations of Eezham Tamils or not, both the journalist and
the Chettiyar seem to have forgotten the three pogroms and the
probability further pogroms even now, once the structural genocide of
Eezham Tamils in their land is complete.
According to Swapan,
India “still takes a needlessly gratuitous interest in the internal
affairs of a sovereign neighbour,” in discussing devolution based on the
13th Amendment. But India partnering with the Sinhala State in
committing genocide and continuing partnership in the structural
genocide are not interferences into internal affairs.
Swapan even
put a reader to doubt his journalistic credentials when he projected
the formation of Provincial Councils under the unitary constitution as
“akin to India’s State governments.”
Perhaps, he might have
taken for granted the political ignorance of the majority of readers in
India on the island, as he himself has stated in another article that
Sri Lanka is “better known these days for the slinging arm of Lasith
Malinga and the classical elegance of the well-spoken Kumara
Sangakkara.”
What a contribution of journalism in India when there was a paradigm-setting genocide took place at its backyard!
In
the view of the BJP-RSS-Shiv Sena journalist, the “de-merger [of the
North and East of the Tamil territory in the island] is now a reality.”
Colombo may concede land powers to the province but who can blame
Colombo for its reluctance to give police powers, he asked.
* * *
Before
going to Colombo and Jaffna, on the Rajapaksa sponsored trip, Swapan
Dasgupta, giving an interview to India’s Niti Radio on 4th June said the
following:
“We may have some concerns over whether Hambantota
port should be Chinese. We can have some concerns about the level of
their proximity to China and etc., but by and large we do not consider
Sri Lanka to be a hostile force. Indeed, it seems to be a friend of
India – a country which has got a deep civilisational ties with India –
and more important: let us not forget that in the last stages of the
war, when a powerful section of the Western countries was urging Sri
Lanka to have a ceasefire with Pirapaharan and the LTTE – an opportunity
which no doubt Pirapaharan and the LTTE would have used to gain time,
re-group as he has done in the past, it was at that time the Sri Lankan
offensive that you either surrender or we fight to the last – that
policy had the basic tacit concurrence of the Government of India,
because everyone in the Government of India and in the rest of the
Indian society knew that the LTTE wasn't really an ordinary separatist
movement. It was a menace, which had really had a lot of damaging
implications, which had destroyed a part of Sri Lanka and its ability to
create a safe haven for itself in Tamil Nadu or something that
endangers Indian security, which is why there was a basic understanding
as far as Delhi and Colombo were concerned that the destruction of the
LTTE was a step in the right direction. […] India has very deep business
relations with Sri Lanka. We are jeopardising this for the sake of
remnance of an LTTE, which has really no interest of securing the
rehabilitation of Tamils, which wants to keep the fire of the separatism
alive.”
“Sri Lanka, for all its sins today, is one of those countries which we can call a friend,” he said.
“Any
country, which sees a powerful country trying to flex its muscles,
there is bound to be a domestic reaction,” he condemned any pressure of
India on the State in the island, asking “Wouldn't there be fury
building up there in India, if the US Senate had been planning some sort
of resolution which was on the issue of Kashmir or something like
that?”
One could see how the natural rapport between Eezham
Tamils and the Tamils of Tamil Nadu is perceived by the BJP-RSS-Shiv
Sena journalist as a worst ‘security’ threat than the Sinhala State
bringing in China to the borders of Tamil Nadu. What about Tamils
deciding to bring in China then, as a last resort to the audacity of New
Delhi?
If just a political pressure from a powerful country
[India] bringing in domestic reaction among Sinhalese is understandable,
what reaction should come from Tamils for the complicity of India in
the genocide of Eezham Tamils? Why that is not an understandable logic
to the ‘journalist’?
If Sri Lanka has ‘civilisational’ ties with
India, what logic is there that you should allow one nation there to
erase the identity of the other? What prevents you from thinking of a
policy of having two civilizational partners of parity in the island?
* * *
The
journalist condemned the DMK for coming out of the New Delhi coalition
after its demand to pass a resolution against Sri Lanka was not
accepted. “You cannot have a resolution pertaining to one single
country,” he said, adding that “next time, someone passes a resolution
on Kashmir, you do not have a leg to stand on, just remember that.”
What
does the journalist say for India condemning apartheid in far away
South Africa and liberating Bangladesh in the neighbourhood? Even the
Tibetans in India should beware of politics of Dasgupta genre coming to
power in India.
Kashmir always used to be cited by Sri Lanka
friends in India to detract Indian political and public support to the
cause of Eezham Tamils. It was there even in the early 1980s, but Mrs
Indira Gandhi was not afraid of it.
If the Dasgupta ilk’s
continued citation of it is going to be the policy of any future
government in New Delhi, even after committing a heinous genocide in
recent memory and continued genocide driving the people of the Tamil
nation to the wall, then Tamils have every justification in making a
strong bond with peoples of similar situation in the rest of South Asia.
In fact it will be a folly of their mainstream polity, if it is not
making such moves but continues to hang on the two culprits the Congress
and the BJP in making governments in New Delhi.
The
BJP–Rajapaksa paly-paly only shows that they are neither for Hinduism
nor for Buddhism, but only for using the religions of the ‘majority’ and
for power that doesn’t shun genocide as means.
* * *
Swapan Dasgupta again wrote in The Times of India on Sunday.
The
Bombay-based Times Group, including its Economic Times of India,
surpassing the Chennai-based The Hindu in buttressing the Rajapaksa
regime for whatever may be the reason, is very well observed in recent
times.
“The origins of that war lie in a divisive, chauvinist
politics that, thankfully, the country has now repudiated. There is a
sense of optimism in Colombo and a great sense of relief in Jaffna that
the war which probably left no family in the island unaffected is over,”
he reiterated on the new positive ‘avatar’ of the Sri Lankan State
while structural genocide through subjugation, militarisation, land
appropriation, forced demographic changes, rape and sexual abuse,
imposition of Sinhala language, destruction of Tamil/ Muslim places of
worship and construction of Buddhist establishments., is an everyday
phenomenon just like the physical genocide of mass killings taking place
every day during the war.
A journalist cannot overlook
objective evidence, but almost all the English language journalists
shamelessly shielded the magnitude of the genocide of Tamils that took
place during the war and one need not be surprised at what Dasgupta is
doing now.
After seeing the orientation of the BJP-led delegation
to Jaffna, the talk among the news reporters in Jaffna was that it was
just another group that had come to receive suitcases from Rajapaksa.
But more serious minded didn’t buy that story as they were aware that
the elements that had come are capable of giving suitcases to Rajapaksa.
* * *
In
both the features of Dasgupta that appeared in The Pioneer and in The
Times of India, the focus of attack was on the Tamil diaspora.
Within
a one-day guided visit arranged by Rajapaksa, he was capable of
grasping and telling to the people in India and to the world that the
ordinary people in Jaffna, desperate for a breather, are not seeking
separation, but it is the diaspora “with a view of the island that is
frozen in time.”
In his assessment the diaspora is with unchanging historical memory and hateful vision for future.
“The diaspora bankrolled murder,” he accused.
He was particular about the diaspora in three countries:
“Tragically,
the quiet elation over a new dawn is being soured on a daily basis by a
diaspora that wants its own version of Sri Lanka, crafted in Canada, UK
and Norway,” he wrote.
“Imagine our reaction if India’s politics
was sought to be remote-controlled from Southall and New Jersey [places
where Indian diaspora lives in large numbers in the UK and in the
USA],” Dasgupta concluded his Times of India feature.
* * *
Perhaps
Dasgupta is frozen in time with the memory of Indian Establishment
crushing the Khalistan struggle with a massacre in the Golden Temple, a
pogrom in Delhi, making a Sikh as a president and another a robot Prime
Minister, alienating the diaspora and pretending as though nothing has
happened. In his frozen memory, he may be thinking that the Sinhala
State could also do something like that.
But the war in the
island was not domestic. It was actually an international war waged by
30–40 Establishments across the world led by the USA and India. China
was an opportunist benefactor. No one can now escape from the responses
becoming international and the diaspora being an integral part of it.
India
had a chance of resolving the crisis within the region. But by its
injustice to Tamils and by an approach unrealistic to the chronic
question in the island, it lost the opportunity like a chasing dog
allowing the squirrel to climb the tree (A’nil ea’ravidda Naay).
New
Delhi’s Romila Thapar was also attacking the Tamil diaspora when she
rushed to Colombo to buttress the genocidal State immediately after the
war.
What many of them don’t see, or pretend they don’t see, is
that it is the Tamil people in the island facing the prick of the
day-to-day genocide, who are more determined secretly in their heart
than the people in the diaspora, about getting liberation from the
genocidal Sinhala State.
In the age of communication, the
diaspora is not frozen in time. It interacts every minute with its kith
and kin in the island and gets its impressions only from them.
What
right the Dasguptas coming from the outside have, in implying that they
know better than the kith and kin in the diaspora on what is good for
the Tamils in the island? MK Narayanan spoke in a similar way to the
TNA. This arrogance will never allow Eezham Tamils to reconcile with the
Establishment in New Delhi.
Leave aside the acknowledgement of
genocide and the right to self-determination. But, New Delhi has not
even taken a single step in soothing the emotions of Eezham Tamils. It
was constantly acting in contrary, irritating and mentally torturing the
Eezham Tamils at every step.
The sin that has been committed is
not a small one to forget and for Dasguptas to say that now everything
is becoming okay, unless there is substantial remedy in the form of
fundamental political justice. Dasgupta thinks, “only the political
loose ends remain.” He must have sure been imagining the loose ends
remaining for the completion of structural genocide and the total
annihilation of the nation and territoriality of Eezham Tamils in the
island.
The diaspora only voices what the gagged people in the island are unable to tell.
The
international war needs international justice and the diaspora has to
internationally operate until the justice is meted out with
international guarantees.
This internationalisation is the reality now.
The
Tamil diaspora responding in a hitherto unseen way for a hitherto
unprecedented genocidal paradigm of the International Community of
Establishments in unison is also a reality now.
These realities are in no way comparable to Dasgupta’s Southall and New Jersey examples.
New
Delhi and the ilk of Dasguptas have to first realise these realities
before daring to tell the Eezham Tamils that the de-merger of the North
and East is the reality now or the genocide is a reality with which the
Eezham Tamils should learn to live.
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