By M H Ahssan
Ethnic Tamil composer A R Rahman's Slumdog Millionaire moment on the Oscar stage lifted, momentarily, the gloom cast on the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu by the long shadow of the neighboring civil war.
The octogenarian chief minister of the state, M Karunanidhi, who had been reduced by a worsening civil situation around him to desperate fire-fighting from his hospital bed, seized on the opening.
Optimism was a scarce resource in these dire times, and here was a mood-lifter that came unannounced. What better topic of diversion, what more reassuring touch for the ethnic pride of the 3 million Tamils, could Karunanidhi hope to find? The ailing leader, himself a former film screenwriter known for purple oratory and canny realpolitik, lost no time in seeking to convert the Rahman moment into a much-needed balm for the battered Tamil ego.
Exhibiting as always a keen awareness of electoral math, he even acknowledged the composer as a "scion from the minority community". Rahman's own not-so-subtle statement, packaged along with the obligatory thank-you lines, at the 81st Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles - "All through life I have chosen love over hate and here I am ... ", gestured right back at the larger situation.
Especially since these lines shared front-page space the next day with a depressing prospect: Sri Lankan army chief Sarath Fonseca's claim that India - especially its southern states - could very well be the target of the next air strikes from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) .
The previous week had been marked by a sudden turn in the civil war that everyone thought was all over bar the shouting. In a show of desperate audacity, the rebel Tigers used a 140 kilometer road in the last area in its possession in the north (the Lankan army claims all four LTTE air-strips have fallen to them) to launch two Zlin Z-143s.
The difficult-to-detect light aircraft snaked their way under the radar all the way to Colombo. It was a characteristically extravagant show of defiance, but only partially successful. Precisely how the attack ended was disputed bitterly by the two sides.
Of course, Lieutenant General Fonseca's warning needs to be examined with due skepticism. The Tigers are certainly not above operating in India - the assassination of premier Rajiv Gandhi counts among its most spectacular strikes, although the LTTE denies a role in it to this day. Still, it strains credulity that the LTTE, even in its most desperate hour, would strike at population centers in south India - they constitute, putatively or otherwise, the only source of ethnic sympathy it has outside Sri Lanka.
"The Tigers are angry that the Indian side is only talking about human casualties, while abandoning the LTTE completely," said Fonseca. Could it strike India's government installations then? Or is this part of an attempt by Colombo to enlist India in the war against the LTTE and let it take some of the burden of casualties?
It is in this milieu of strife, uncertainty and denial that Karunanidhi found temporary refuge in the celebratory Oscar-winning mood. He saw a chance to re-channel Tamil sentiment, bruised over the continuous killings of innocent Tamils in Jaffna and Killinochi, in a different direction.
He was delivered a chance to script an escape from the realm of reality - to the dazzling, silvery images and festival sounds of cinema - that is, after all, his natural home. And did not Slumdog Millionaire hold out redemption for the hopeless? And, though a very different cinematic beast, did it not somehow stand in distant kinship with the rousing-wordplay-and-heroic-action-filled odes to the underdog that he himself wrote for Tamil films beginning in the late 1940s?
And so, the fact that a large section of his people seem to be seething in anger over what they feel is a "betrayal of the [Lankan] Tamil cause" by mainstream political parties of Tamil Nadu, especially Karunanidhi's Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), could be kept aside for the moment. Mindful of the national elections around the corner, where federal alliances spin around the "pro- and anti-" secularism camps, Karunanidhi deftly wove in a touch to the secular card to appeal to the larger domestic constituency.
It's just this savvy and craft that has always stood him in good stead. After all, he manages to share power with the Indian National Congress in New Delhi without sharing it in Tamil Nadu, though he is crucially dependent on them to prop up his minority government.
But this time, the crisis is real and looks beyond the healing touch of words and soothing gestures. In Sri Lanka itself, the LTTE's political chief Balasingham Nadesan communicated a ceasefire offer to the United Nations, but refused to actually lay down arms. This could be read in conflicting ways, an admission of near-defeat or a live capacity for regrouping.
The Mahinda Rajapaksa government was derisive of the offer and laughed it off, but after the Zlin strikes in Colombo the idea of an outright win against Velupillai Prabhakaran's LTTE seems as implausible as winning, say, permanent immunity from earthquakes.
And human-right groups say thousands of innocent Tamils are caught in the crossfire, one side allegedly using them as some sort of a human shield and the other ignoring their existence in the single-minded pursuit of annihilating the enemy.
In the proximity of these boiling waters, the state of Tamil Nadu is naturally having sleepless nights and, in more ways than one, lawless days. Exasperated over the business-as-usual approach of its two main political parties - the ruling DMK and the opposition AIADMK - lawyers in Tamil Nadu took it on themselves to strike work to protest the large-scale civil rights violations taking place in the war zone.
Things came to a head when irate, stone-pelting lawyers pounced on Subramanian Swamy, a political mischief-maker with some nuisance value in Tamil Nadu and national politics and a known LTTE baiter. Things have now taken a life of their own, with the debate swirling around the civil rights violations of lawyers. Lankan Tamils have ironically been temporarily relegated to the background.
What actually happened was that, in the midst of a heavy-duty protest demo by the lawyers, Swamy decided to land in the Madras High Court donning the black robes to fight an unrelated case. All hell broke loose. Already close to boiling point, the lawyers physically attacked Swamy, set a jeep on fire and in turn got brutally beaten up by city cops.
After first torching a police station, they are now on a Gandhian-style fast to get the state's two top police officials suspended. With uncomfortable echoes of the epic lawyers' protest of Pakistan - sparked off by then-chief justice Iftikar Chaudhry's dismissal and ending in the downfall of Pervez Musharraf's government - the situation has brought Tamil Nadu to a standstill.
No judicial court in Tamil Nadu is functioning, so even the Supreme Court of India has been dragged into the unprecedented controversy. It is now hearing the lawyers-versus-police case on a priority basis. Meanwhile, Karunanidhi, convalescing in the hospital after a tricky spine surgery, was left to try emotional blackmail. Until the Oscars came along, he was telling the legal fraternity in his state to give in and patch up with the cops, or else he himself would go on a hunger strike.
Such dramatic flourish might come naturally to someone seen as the last of the larger-than-life political leaders and upholders of classical Tamil chauvinism, but Karunanidhi is in a sense overcorrecting for earlier inertness on the Sri Lanka question.
There is really nothing much an Indian state chief minister can or must do in a situation unfolding in another country. But the ethnic continuum between the Lankan north and Tamil Nadu makes for a emotional boilerplate situation, and the local government is obliged to be seen "doing something" just to cool tempers. His achievement on this front has been slim: nothing much other than forcing Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee to rush to Colombo, a visit that managed the two-day truce at the end of January.
Later, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa threw a curve by inviting Karunanidhi to visit Sri Lanka to broker peace between the LTTE and the Lankan government; the old man just let it pass.
Advancing age, failing health and an impending succession war in his family have left Karunanidhi much weaker and dependent on Congress chief Sonia Gandhi. Therefore, he may have been able to arm-twist Mukherjee to visit Colombo to work out a ceasefire, but could not manage what he would have really liked: that is, to get the Manmohan Singh government to change its stand-offishness on Sri Lanka and actively get involved.
It is evident that New Delhi, wary of Colombo finding other sources of support in the Asia region, has let it have free rein to fight the LTTE.
Typically, in a situation as complex as this, you find New Delhi allowing pressure to be lifted by allowing all shades of opinion to co-exist. Union Home Minister P Chidambaram, whose constituency lies in Tamil Nadu, has to be sensitive to local concerns. Accordingly, at a recent political rally in his constituency, he adopted a soft tone, referring to Prabhakaran as Thampi (younger brother) and calling on him to lay down arms in another India-brokered peace.
But if Mukherjee's tough statements in parliament are to be taken as the baseline, the Indian government would not budge an inch in a direction that would give the proscribed LTTE any breather. Sending relief material to the besieged Sri Lankan Tamil population is the most the Congress-led government is willing to do.
Caught napping during the period when Rajapaksa created a complex web of half-truths to dismantle the arrangements for Tamil autonomy created under the 1987 Indo-Sri Lankan peace accord, the Indian side has little options. It had to perforce agree to give the Sri Lankan government a "free hand" to deal with the LTTE since it had already hailed the watered-down proposal of Tamil autonomy proposed by Rajapaksa as "a very positive first step".
Political compulsions make it impossible for the Congress-led government to acknowledge any covert military support to Sri Lanka and geostrategic factors (to wit, the fear of China taking over the agenda) do not allow it to entirely disengage or take a critical view of Colombo. Could the situation, then, be more piquant?
Rajapaksa's all-out war against the LTTE, which has rendered an estimated 200,000 ethnic Tamils homeless and vulnerable to a "concentration camp-like situation", is supported by a government in New Delhi that is partnered by some dyed-in-the-wool Tamil chauvinists of old, once seen to be LTTE sympathizers.
Even daily protest marches in Tamil Nadu where Sonia Gandhi's effigies are being burned cannot bring the Congress party out of its denial mode. Senior Congress leaders from the state hope against hope that Karunanidhi can perform some last-minute political magic or insist "[the war] will never be an election issue".
This argument is based on the logic that no political party can openly espouse the cause of Prabhakaran, who is an accused party in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, in a political campaign.
In 1989, in polls held after the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) operation in Sri Lanka was launched by the former Rajiv Gandhi government, Karunanidhi's DMK had a resounding victory. But in the 1991 election campaign, Rajiv was killed at a rally in Tamil Nadu and in the election that followed the Congress-All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) alliance swept the Tamil Nadu parliamentary polls.
The silver lining for the Congress, though, is that the opposition AIADMK chief J Jayalalitha is staunchly anti-LTTE. She, in fact, approximates the Congress position on the Lankan issue much more than the rival DMK and has been making overtures to the grand old party of Indian politics.
The party also takes solace from the fact that Prabhakaran's violent ways do not find many supporters among Tamil opinion-makers, who feel the LTTE has in fact harmed and betrayed the Lankan Tamil people by refusing to disarm. There is a feeling that the Tiger chief sought to undermine the 1987 peace accord primarily because of his own aversion to democratic elections.
His inclination to seek absolute power through the bullet rather than the ballot, they privately say, has left the quarter-century-long legitimate Eelam movement of the minority ethnic Tamil population in the island dispirited and bogged down.
What started as a secular, non-violent struggle of moderate Tamils got converted into a liberation war that has defied all attempts at resolution. The last attempt to collapse was the 2006 ceasefire brokered by the Norwegians. The political leaders in India would rather keep a safe distance from the avenging Tigers, provided the voters in Tamil Nadu allow them to.
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