Inconsistency in India’s stance on Mumbai, LTTE terror
Thursday, January 1, 2009 - Muharram 4, 1430
LONDON: An article in The Guardian has drawn a parallel between India’s stance on Pakistan with regard to the Mumbai attacks and its own position on Tamil Tigers and their safe haven in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
In the article titled ‘India’s double standards’, the writer says **“while India blames Pakistan for inaction after Mumbai’s terror attacks, it turns a blind eye to a dangerous terror organisation – the LTTE”.
“There should be no double standards in the global fight against terrorism,”** Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared last week, according to the article. According to the article, the message was intended for Pakistan, but if Singh was concerned about double standards, he should look closer to home.
The article said that earlier in December, **Sri Lanka’s state-run Sunday Observer published an interview with the country’s army chief, Sarath Fonseka, who, while expressing solidarity with India after the Mumbai attacks, criticised some Indian politicians for supporting the LTTE.
Fonseka had particularly used harsh words for the powerful Tamil Nadu politicians Vaiko Gopalsamy and P Nedumaran, calling them ‘jokers’ and accusing them of being venal mouthpieces of the LTTE. He wondered why these men would support an organisation that had assassinated an Indian prime minister, and warned that they were a threat to India’s own integrity.
Within hours of the interview’s publication, Tamil Nadu’s political establishment united in condemnation of General Fonseka. In a letter to the Indian prime minister, Vaiko demanded that New Delhi seek an apology from the president of Sri Lanka.
He wrote, “In a democracy, army generals do not criticise leaders of a foreign country.” Sensing trouble, Sri Lanka’s president issued a statement ‘regretting’ General Fonseka’s remarks, and last week the Sunday Observer’s editor Dinesh Weerawansa was summarily sacked.** But all of this, far from diminishing General Fonseka’s claims, only casts light on India’s own irresponsible role in the vortex of terror that threatens to consume Sri Lanka, the article in the Guardian said. It pointed out that the LTTE could not have grown without the support of successive state governments of Tamil Nadu in India. Founded in 1972, the LTTE has used Chennai as a safe haven, and their activities, as the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha wrote, “were actively helped by the state government, with New Delhi turning an indulgent blind eye”.
The 1987 pact signed by Rajiv Gandhi and JR Jayawardene put a temporary halt to this, and India agreed to send peacekeeping forces to Sri Lanka to help Colombo disarm the LTTE, an adventure so disastrous that one Indian journalist at the time called it ‘India’s Vietnam’. The Tamil Tigers retaliated by assassinating Rajiv Gandhi.
**The article called the LTTE arguably the world’s most dangerous terrorist organisation. It is the only terrorist outfit to have successfully carried out assassinations of two heads of government. Its international cadres regularly extort money from Tamils situated in different countries.
It further said that the Tamil Tigers make Al Qaeda look amateurish.** But because the LTTE’s victims are not Western, it does not elicit the same kind of response that Al Qaeda does.
India banned the LTTE in 1992, but a report released by Jane’s Information Group last year identified Tamil Nadu as the principal source of LTTE’s weapons; and Fonseka was not exaggerating when he said that the Indian politicians who support the LTTE are a threat to India’s own integrity much as the men who supported the Mumbai attackers are a threat to Pakistan’s.
The article accused New Delhi of consistently meddling in Sri Lankan affairs, stymieing Colombo’s efforts against an adversary that has used almost exclusively violent means to achieve its ends. The article said after the Mumbai attacks, Singh stated in emphatic terms that there can be no negotiations with terrorists, then, kowtowing to pressure from Tamil Nadu politicians, he agreed to send his foreign minister to Colombo to push the Sri Lankan government to do exactly that.
“If this does not amount to double standards, what does?” the article asked. app
Why the hypocracy? Or are the Hindu Terrorists now out of Hindustani military Control?