India's [mis]handling of LTTE

In 1991, at the end of the bitter experience of the deployment of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force in Sri Lanka (Operation Pawan), its Divisional Commander GOC, Lt General S.C. Sardeshpande asked, in sheer anguish, “Was India’s national security interest so much threatened by Tamil-Sinhala cooperation that it became our national interest?” The army is deployed only when the nation’s vital interests are involved, interests over which it is prepared to go to war. “The IPKF operations not only injected poison in the Tamil society and Indian polity, but also led to loss of credibility in the region and a large section of countrymen.”

He said if the confrontation with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had to be with “50,000 troops treading on foreign soil, it would have been less costly to strangle the LTTE in Tamil Nadu and achieve the same goal” (article in Indian Defence Review quoted by Press Trust of India; The Telegraph, February 18, 1991).

The soldier in him failed to understand the low cunning of the political leaders. The LTTE was built up by India in Tamil Nadu to serve as India’s weapon against Sri Lanka in order to extract from it a deal with its Tamil citizens on terms India could approve. Missing in this calculation was the fact that Sri Lanka’s friendship was also a vital national interest and India’s interests, as well as concerns on its Tamils, were best promoted if India won Colombo’s trust. This vital interest and the concern (for the Tamils) were, in fact, not only harmonious but should have been integral elements of a coherent considered policy.

However, the use of force was foremost in the minds of Indira Gandhi as well as Rajiv Gandhi. It is little known that both had planned for armed intervention even as the diplomatic process had barely begun in earnest.

The fateful die was cast when JRJ sent his brother, H.W. Jayewardene, to India in August 1983. In her talks with him, Indira Gandhi deftly extracted from JRJ his acceptance of her offer of “her good offices to enable a final decision to be reached”. This concept includes no more than transmission of each one’s proposal to the other, whereas in mediation the mediator himself suggests compromises. In her talks with the visitor, the Prime Minister told him that JRJ’s proposals “may not meet the aspirations” of the Tamils for whom she sought “their due share in the affairs of the country” (see her statement on August 12 and that of HWJ the next day). The crisis was triggered by the killings of 13 soldiers in Jaffna on July 23 and the army’s reprisals. JRJ did what Modi did in the wake of Godhra. He had the bodies brought to the capital, leading to horrendous killings of Tamils.

Indira Gandhi seized the opportunity. Before her “good offices” could even begin, let alone conclude, she began preparations for the use of force against the very side that had invited her, the Government of Sri Lanka.

M.R. Narayana Swamy, who is exceptionally well informed on that dark secret, records in detail how and when India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) began training the Tamil militant groups on Indian soil. “The training began in September 1983 at Dehradun, in the hills of Uttar Pradesh. From then on, hundreds of Tamil boys travelled by train from Madras to New Delhi and later in trucks and buses to Dehradun to learn the art of military science from Indian trainers. It was a great moment for the Tamils and a turning point in the campaign for Eelam. The Tamil Nadu police, unaware initially of what was afoot, detained one group of Tamils just before they were to leave Tamil Nadu and recorded their names and addresses before RAW came to their rescue.

“To the world, India kept up an innocent facade, insisting that it was not doing any mischief. ‘We deny that there are any [Tamil] terrorists in the southern states of this country,’ an Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman said on August 16. ‘We have never interfered with the internal developments of any country in the past and we will not do so now,’ added Indira Gandhi at a public meeting in Bombay on 15 September….

“The Indian government had its own reasons for training the Tamils. Sources in all Tamil groups now assert that India was never serious about Eelam and gave them training and arms only to teach Colombo ‘a lesson’ for its pro-West foreign policy. At the most New Delhi would have wanted the Tamils to secure limited autonomy. But it was widely rumoured then—both in Sri Lanka and India—that Mrs Gandhi might do a Bangladesh or Cyprus in the island’s northeast. The rumour was reinforced by what the Indian trainers told the trainees: ‘We have got to finish this soon,’ Shankar Raje quotes an Indian Army officer as telling him, referring to a batch under training in Dehradun. ‘We need a scout force to lead us. You are not going to do the real fighting. But be prepared.’ Shankar added: ‘The message that was given was clear cut. The Indians were going to intervene.’ Douglas Devananda, who now lives in Colombo, said the way the Indian Army officers conducted themselves, ‘we realised that they were only trying to use us (in their gameplan)’.…

“From September 1983, until India and Sri Lanka signed the Accord in July 1987, the RAW trained an estimated 1,200 Tamils in the use of automatic and semi-automatic weapons, self-loading rifles, 84 mm rocket launchers, heavy weapons, and in laying mines, map reading, guerilla war, mountaineering, demolitions and anti-tank warfare. Each training capsule lasted three to four months, and rarely six months…. A limited number of Tamils were hand-picked for intelligence gathering. …

“Arms deliveries to various groups began in 1984 and went on almost until the 1987 India-Sri Lanka agreement, punctuated by periodic and self-deceiving denials that India was not training Sri Lankans or desiring a break-up of the Island Republic. All three parties in the conflict—the Indian and Sri Lankan governments and the Tamil militants—knew the truth.…

“The Sri Lankan government came to know about the Indian training quite early, both from militants who fell into the hands of the National Intelligence Bureau (NIB) and Colombo’s agents in Tamil Nadu who included Sri Lankans as well as Indians. By 1986, ‘Indian diplomats privately admitted that the RAW was training people,’ former Sri Lankan National Security Minister Lalith Athulathmudali said.…

“On the one hand, New Delhi was pressurising the TULF [Tamil United Liberation Front] leadership to hold talks with Colombo. On the other, it was training the militants to fight the Sri Lankan government. Publicly India was not for Sri Lanka’s break-up. But when the militants, their doubts naturally aroused, questioned their contacts in the RAW about the Indian policy, they were pacified. ‘We will do everything to get you Eelam. Obviously you can’t expect us to say that openly, do you?’ argued RAW officials. Some of the guerillas, new to the world of politics and diplomacy, were satisfied with the reasoning; but seeds of suspicion began to get planted in others. It was the beginning of India’s double-talk which finally brought despair to her Sri Lanka policy.” LTTE leader Prabakaran was in Jaffna when all this began and had to be coaxed to come to India.

If the actual training began in September, the policy decision on embarking on such a course must have been taken much earlier; that is, almost immediately after Indira Gandhi secured Sri Lanka’s acceptance of her “good offices”.

Rajiv Gandhi repeated this very ploy. The India-Sri Lanka Accord was signed in Colombo on July 29, 1987. Major General Harkirat Singh, the first commander of the IPKF, records that “contingency plans for sending troops into Sri Lanka are said to have commenced at the Army Headquarters from April 1987 onwards, and Lt Gen. Depinder Singh, then GOC-in-C Southern Command, claims that, in June he was given a Chief of Staff directive appointing him as the Overall Force Commander (OFC) of the forces to be inducted into Sri Lanka.” Force was not the last option; it was the first option.