India and Sri Lanka : Jayalalitha's gambit

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/09/india-and-sri-lanka
ARE relations between India and Sri Lanka falling to bits, as various news outlets
have suggested in the past few days? On the face of it, tensions are
growing across the Palk Strait. Perennial problems over the harassment
of Indian fishermen by Sri Lanka’s navy cause intense anger in the
southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Now Sri Lankan pilgrims have been
attacked, their buses stoned, by Indian Tamils suspected to be
sympathisers of the now-defunct rebel army in Sri Lanka, the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Sri Lanka’s government this week
issued a travel advisory warning against visits to Tamil Nadu, where, in
turn, the vociferous chief minister, Jayaram Jayalalitha, has been
inveighing against anyone who dares show a friendly face to Sri Lankans.
That a junior Sri Lankan football team was recently allowed to play in
Tamil Nadu, she believes, was utterly unacceptable. She also is furious
that a couple of Sri Lankan military types have been allowed to get some
training and advice in India.
Relations between the countries are
not exactly rosy. In January India’s ageing and slow-moving foreign
minister, S.M. Krishna, visited Sri Lanka and asked for bland
reassurances that the government in Colombo would try harder to look
after the interests of Tamils in the north of the country. The northern
Tamils were—broadly—on the losing side of an awful civil war that ended,
with massacres, in 2009. Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa,
however, all but thumbed his nose at India, later contradicting Mr
Krishna’s account of what the two men had agreed.
Soon after, to
Sri Lankan dismay, there came India’s vote at the United Nations in
Geneva, calling for the rulers in Colombo to prove they are doing much
more to investigate the probable commission of war crimes in 2009.
India’s government, in part, explained its vote as being compelled by
internal politics: Tamil political parties and voters would not tolerate
anything less, given Sri Lanka’s obstructive ways.
Other signs
are poor. The introduction of a new ferry service across the Palk
Strait, which would bring Sri Lankan shoppers to Tamil Nadu, has come to
nothing. Among the many Tamil refugees from northern Sri Lanka who fled
to southern India during the civil war, the desire to return home is
weak. Efforts have stalled over a trade deal to allow Sri Lankan
suppliers and exporters greater access to the Indian market, in exchange
for Indian investors to do more in Sri Lanka. Nor do Sri Lanka’s cosy
economic ties with China do much to encourage Indian warmth, even if
India remains a big donor for post-war recovery in Sri Lanka’s north.
Yet,
as tetchy as relations are between the countries, the more important
political manoeuvring at the moment is probably happening within India:
between Tamil politicians, such as Miss Jayalalitha, and India’s rulers
in Delhi. India is fast entering the campaign stage for the 2014
election, which is likely to deliver a fragmented outcome, in which the
ruling Congress party loses many seats but the opposition Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) may fail to emerge as dominant. The result will be
that regional actors can expect to play a decisive role, either in
propping up a national party in power, or heading a coalition of smaller
parties (a “third front”) that takes charge in Delhi.
Sit in
Delhi and the focus tends to be on northern political parties and their
ability to influence outcomes. Thus Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, or
Mulayam Singh of Uttar Pradesh, have great influence over Congress. For
the BJP the likes of Nitish Kumar of Bihar may be influential. But get
out of Delhi and spend time chatting to people in Chennai, for example,
and Indian politics can look rather different. Since the north of India
is fragmented into smaller parties, the influence of southern parties
may increase.
Vaiko, a firebrand Tamil nationalist in Chennai,
talks of the government in Delhi having “betrayed the Tamils” both in
Sri Lanka and in India. He suggests that tensions between Tamils and
Delhi are so bad “the unity of India will be in jeopardy; the younger
generation will not tolerate this betrayal”. Mr Vaiko is not typical as
he waxes on about the “extreme good qualities” and “humanism” of
Velupillai Prabhakaran, the brutal and terrifying leader of the Tamil
army in Sri Lanka, who was killed in 2009. But his hostility to Delhi’s
rulers, and sympathies with northern Tamils in Sri Lanka, is only a
notch stronger than those of many ordinary Tamils in India.
How
then should leading Tamil politicians, such as the chief minister, who
are trying to position themselves to be influential in 2014, go about
building up support among voters in the coming months? One natural
answer is to bash Sri Lanka’s rulers and speak up for Tamils across the
water, make a loud fuss when votes are expected on war crimes at the
United Nations, criticise Delhi’s ruling class as supine in the face of
Sinhalese nationalists and keep alive tensions between the two
countries. Indian Tamils care strongly about the issue, so there is an
opportunity both to attack the ruling Congress party and just possibly
to influence foreign policy. For Miss Jayalalitha, the closer the
national election looms in India, the greater the reason to inveigh
against the wicked Sinhalese in Colombo. If this analysis is right,
India's internal politics will discourage warm ties with Sri Lanka until
at least 2014 and probably beyond. So prepare for more spats and
stone-throwing.

oh to hell with formatting this .. click the link folks.

Is Dr.JJ going to protest India's upcoming trip to SriLanka to participate in the TontyTonty world cup?