The Tamil Nadu Resolution: Jayalalitha secures Chennai stopover in Delhi-Colombo shuttle diplomacy

The Tamil Nadu Resolution: Jayalalitha secures Chennai stopover in Delhi-Colombo shuttle diplomacy
June 18, 2011, 4:33 pm



Rajan Philips


The Tamil Nadu State Assembly resolution of June 8, 2011, apart from provoking conflicting emotions among Sri Lankan Sinhalese and Tamil nationalists, served notice on the Union government that Chennai is to not to be by-passed in future shuttle diplomacy between Colombo and Delhi. Delhi would appear to have heard the message loud and clear. A day after the resolution, the Indian troika of National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and Defence Secretary Pradeep Kumar stopped in Chennai en route to their pre-scheduled meetings in Colombo. Mr. Menon met with Chief Minister Jayalalitha and assured her that he would raise in Colombo her concerns regarding Tamil Nadu fishermen and the Sri Lankan Tamils.


Whether Sri Lankan officials will emulate the favour and visit Chennai on their way to Delhi remains to be seen. It would be good diplomacy if not anything else notwithstanding ministerial musings in Colombo that sovereign Sri Lanka would only deal with sovereign India and not its minion states. Sri Lanka might be the world’s uniquely unitary state but we must not be innocent about how federal systems work in the rest of the world.


The Tamil Nadu resolution on Sri Lanka is not very different in the substance of its concerns from the concerns raised by India’s External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna in his Joint Statement with Minister G.L. Peiris. The main difference is that the resolution does not use any code words unlike the Joint Statement, and it explicitly refers to the UN Secretary General’s Experts Panel Report and calls on the Indian government to vigorously follow up on the report including an economic blockade of Sri Lanka.


In my earlier comment on the Joint Statement (Sunday Island, May 29) I focused on the current global and regional context as key to understanding the possibilities for a new, post-war, Indo-Sri Lanka engagement. The Tamil Nadu resolution has added an explicitly internal Indian dimension to this context. There is an intriguing part to the resolution that seems to have been less noticed in Colombo, and that is the directive to the Tamil Nadu Government to implead in a Supreme Court case that ultimately intends to retrieve the islet of Katchatheevu that India ceded to Sri Lanka under bilateral agreements in 1974 and 1976.


The case was filed in 2008 by Jayalalitha, as leader of the AIADMK, while in Opposition. Her contention is that the Union government did not have the authority to cede territory without a constitutional amendment and approval by both houses of the Indian parliament. It is part politics in that it is an explicit accusation that Karunanidhi, as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, did nothing and failed to take legal action to stop the 1974 & 1976 agreements. It is also a constitutional matter because of a Supreme Court ruling in a similar situation in the 1950s that declared null and void the Union government’s action to cede Beru Bari in Bengal to then East Pakistan. The successful court action at that time was initiated by B.C. Roy, West Bengal Chief Minister, against the Union government.


Where all this will end, no one knows. As Colonel Hariharan, the Chennai based commentator and formerly of the Indian army, has noted Katchatheevu is irretrievable after more than three decades, but by coupling the Sri Lankan Tamil issue and Katchatheevu, Jayalalitha has made it impossible for Delhi to ignore her in its dealings with Sri Lanka. The question is if it would make sense for Colombo to start dealing with Tamil Nadu both directly and in tandem with New Delhi. There is no shortage of misconceptions in Colombo about the status of Tamil Nadu in the Union of India, but there is no appreciation of the potentials for Sri Lanka given its geographical proximity to Tamil Nadu. Tamil Nadu, to say the obvious, is the closest human settlement, economic entity and political jurisdiction that Sri Lanka has. Do the two need to be so close, and yet so far apart?


Tamil Nadu and the Indian Union


There is a perception in Colombo that Tamil Nadu is being allowed to throw its weight around too much and that New Delhi should put the southern state in its place and let it know that foreign policy is not its business. No other Indian state, one pundit has opined, interferes in India’s foreign policy as does Tamil Nadu. The latter assertion is simply not true for there are nearly a score of Indian states bordering neighbouring countries and are implicated in India’s foreign policy in relation to those countries. V. Suryanarayn, Chennai academic and commentator, has listed them in a recent article: India-Pakistan relations have implications for Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat; China policy affects Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Uttar Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Jammu and Kashmir; policy towards Nepal has consequences for Bihar, Sikkim, Uttaranchal and Uttar Pradesh; India-Bhutan relations impact West Bengal, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim; relations with Myanmar affect Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland and Manipur; India-Bangladesh relations will impinge upon West Bengal, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura and Assam. In this continuum, Sri Lanka’s relationship with India has implications for only one Indian state, Tamil Nadu.


The perception that Tamil Nadu is being allowed to throw its weight around is also not correct. The 1964 Sirima-Shastri pact repudiated previous Indian positions on the citizenship status of the plantation workers in Sri Lanka and ignored opposition to the pact across the entire political spectrum in what was then the State of Madras. Similarly, the 1974 and 1976 agreements ceding Katchatheevu did not go down well in Tamil Nadu, especially among the fishing communities along the southern coast, even though the DMK government at that time chose to remain mute on the matter. Thirty five years later Ms. Jayalalitha is mounting a legal challenge against the agreements in the Indian Supreme Court.


Even in regard to what Suryanarayn has called the "twists and turns" in India’s policy and initiatives on the Sri Lankan Tamil question, it is a moot question whether New Delhi used Tamil Nadu for its purposes or has been wagged around by Tamil Nadu. There is no point trying to find a conclusive answer to this question because the files on the matter are still open in all three places – Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu and India, not to mention many other countries in the world. The point of my discussion is that the Jayalalitha government in Tamil Nadu is insistent on making Tamil Nadu count in India’s relationship with Sri Lanka in a more formal and powerful manner than any previous Tamil Nadu government has done. And it would be a mistake to attribute this insistence to the straddling Tamilness across the Palk Straits on electoral imperatives. There are other matters too that merit consideration.


For starters, Tamil Nadu has never been a hotbed of separatism. It has certainly been in the vortex of Tamil cultural nationalism long bandied by the DMK. But that nationalism is so systemic in the Tamil Nadu of today that it requires no specific political expression or extra-constitutional assertion. Chief Minister Jayalalitha has no truck with the cultural nationalism of the DMK and Mr. M. Karunanidhi might be its lone surviving relic. Not even his children who are in politics seem to bother about the nationalist aspect of their father’s legacy. They seem to be creating new legacies of notoriety of their own.


The enabling environment for the de-politicization of Tamil nationalism has three primary sources: India’s federal political system of which Tamil Nadu is a highly satisfied constituent partner; a thriving state economy that has made Tamil Nadu rank among the top three or five Indian states with respect to every economic indicator; and the egalitarian achievements of the DMK and the AIADMK governments that have significantly benefited every caste group that has been historically marginalized in South Indian Tamil society. These sources have helped Tamil Nadu raise its specific weight and status within the Union of India in a positive, durable and influential way. In other words, Chief Minister Jayalalitha has stronger props to stand on in her encounters with Delhi than the Tamilness of Tamil Nadu and electoral blackmailing.


The lessons for Sri Lanka should be quite obvious. The Sri Lankan government must rid itself of the chimera of Tamil separatism, especially the notion that Tamil Nadu, India and, God forbid, many others in the world want to foist on Sri Lanka a separate state that they do not want on their own soil. There is no rational basis for this delusion. It is in trying to prevent such an imaginary monster that conditions of oppression and retaliation are perpetuated. Instead, Sri Lanka should try to take advantage of its proximity to Tamil Nadu and its vibrant economy using the FTA (Free Trade Agreement) and CEPA (Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement) framework of that is already in place. This will create an entirely different dynamic for a new triangular engagement involving (in the alphabetical order) Chennai, Colombo and Delhi.



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