August 02, 2007	Thursday	Rajab 17, 1428

COLOMBO: Twenty years after the India-Sri Lanka peace accord, inked on July 29, 1987 amidst violent street protests and ending after heavy fighting with the Tamil Tiger rebels costing the Indian army over 1,200 lives and subsequently the life of the then Indian Premier Rajiv Gandhi at the hands of a LTTE suicide bomber, most Sri Lankan Tamils still believe India holds the key to resolving Lanka’s protracted civil war.

Acknowledging that the disastrous end of the Indo-Lanka accord is why Sri Lanka is now unable to get India to ‘actively’ help in reaching a political settlement with the LTTE, Tamil scholars and politicians today insist India is the only country which has a proper understanding about the Sri Lankan conflict and therefore capable of pushing the island to a much needed peace.

While opinion is divided as to the main reason why the peace accord failed, with the general understanding being that it was due to the LTTE refusing to disarm, some Tamils opine that it was because India had its ‘own agenda’ in the accord which has been described as India’s biggest diplomatic coup.

“The Indo-Lanka pact signed between Rajiv Gandhi and the then Sri Lankan President J. R. Jayawardena was a historical blunder. India acted only in its own interest, and did not bother to consider the aspirations of the North-Eastern Tamils”, says Tamil Parliamentarian, Mano Ganesan.

But even the fiercest critics of Rajiv Gandhi, including the LTTE who sent a female bomber to assassinate him, have gone on record stating that it was ‘only India’ who knew the aspirations of the Tamil people best and therefore should once again seek a prominent role to end the Sri Lankan conflict.

“Mistakes have been made and India should now forget the past”, the late Anton Balasingham, the LTTE’s theoretician and chief peace negotiator told journalists at the press briefing held by the guerilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran in April 2002.

But as the 20th anniversary of the Indo-Lanka peace accord passed quietly last Saturday, the question that is being asked is, does India care anymore if it is war or peace in Sri Lanka?

While analysts say India having learnt its bitter lesson from the India-Sri Lanka pact would now keep a stoic distance from the Sri Lankan crisis, the fact that India, despite it not wanting to be a part of Sri Lanka’s effort to reach peace, does not want the island to seek military assistance with other countries in the region is clear. This was spelt out when India’s National Security Adviser M. K. Narayanan declared in May that India did not wish Sri Lanka to approach Pakistan or China for its security needs.

“India cannot easily cut off its links with Sri Lanka. India needs to keep the pressure on both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government to get the two sides to stop the war. Part of the pressure on the Sri Lankan government to abandon a military solution and seek a political one is maintained with India not providing weapons to Sri Lanka”, says former Vanni district member of Parliament T. Siddharthan who adds that the Indo-Lanka accord was the ‘closest’ Sri Lanka came to finding a solution to its ethnic conflict.

“The accord is a dead letter. Certainly we do not expect India to repeat the 1987 episode. But ideally what India should be willing to do is to volunteer for a mediator or facilitator role akin to what Norway is involved in at present”, says Siddharthan who opines that no western country ‘can do much’ about bringing about a successful alternative to the Lankan war.