Tamil, Terror and Tenacity

Tweet

My article published in Udai India
-----------------------------------

The nightmares of 2009 armed conflict in SriLanka have been revived now for political reasons. Students in TamilNadu are agitating for the cause of Tamil Eelam (a separate nation demand), the welfare of the Tamils in SriLanka, Prosecution of the SriLankan President Mahinda Rajapakse, Imposition of economic sanctions on SriLanka and severing of diplomatic ties with that nation. The war and the related crimes happened four years ago. The politicians in TamilNadu especially those who hold the Eelam cause high now, were docile, dormant and inert while having all the power with them to have made an effective attempt to stop the killing of innocents. The students were also there in 2009. All were docile when people were killed and shouting after 4 years which is akin to refusing donating blood for a dying patient but crying at the cemetery years after the death.

The political power and the pleasure of swindling crores of money were important for the ruling lot then. They were of the belief that throwing away a pittance worth of their swindle will get them the required number of votes to continue in power. Thus they announced a list of freebies to the general public if they come back to power, not to be given from their swindle, but from the taxpayer's money in the treasury.

Yet, they lost the elections miserably. The self styled leader of the World Tamils, Karunanidhi, ran to his native to contest elections rather than from the much boasted fortress of his DMK party, Chennai. Karunanidhi's hand held heir apparent M.K.Stalin had won from a suburb in Chennai but nature of that victory is very much debatable. DMK was routed in the elections with the rival AIADMK getting a thumping majority. AIADMK made a brilliant move by sticking to the Eelam cause rightly, as the terror organization LTTE was defeated in the 2009 war. The LTTE had declared to silence their guns after the war. The point was to help the common Tamil people in the SriLankan territory. They were put up in camps under some of the worst living conditions of the world. Most of them still are. The SriLankan Government was to be asked sternly to go in for the welfare work as the war was over and 

won. 

But India, being ruled by people without a vision for the national good for a while now from 2004, has sided with the SriLankan Government to the core that it did not bother to ask the right questions about the wrong doings. The ally from down South Karunanidhi was satisfied with his so called fasting between the hours of breakfast and lunch to protest against the killing of innocents in the war. It is a fact that death is part of any war, but not something like ethnic and cultural cleansing that has been happening  in SriLanka after the terrorists were eliminated. A ball park estimate says hundreds of thousands of unarmed common men, women and children were killed. This was after the false claim of Karunanidhi that the bombings were stopped after his farce of a fasting for a couple of hours.

When questioned about this while he was basking in the glory of his own party deputies praising him for ‘solving’ the Eelam problem. He simply blamed Pranab Mukherjee, the then External Affairs Minister of India, for giving him the wrong information. But no reactions for the wrong information which, when passed on, was instrumental in the death of hunderds of thousands of men, women and children who were unarmed and yearning for life. Karunanidhi did continue to support the UPA Government after this 2009 killing of innocents. He famously lamented that he was a slave and he was not in a position to help another slave in distress. 

He lost the elections to the State Assembly in 2011 and then felt the heat of the people's disbelief. He then tried to bring back to life the TESO (Tamil Eelam Supporters Organisation) which he killed decades ago unilaterally while the organisation was jointly headed by two other leaders one is K.Veeramani, a yes man of MK, and the other who still raises voice the Eelam Tamils' cause Pazha. Nedumaran, whom MK hates for opposing his fast changing stances on the issue depending upon his own family's political and business ambitions. 

Now that the TESO failed to take off and deliver the expected results, some kind of soap opera scenes were enacted to make people believe that the UN has been mooted for justice to Tamils. That too failed to impress the public, so MK announced that he would withdraw support for the UPA Government. This was done with an expectation of some assurances from the UPA top brass on meeting some of his expectations so that he can stay afloat politically in the wave of the recent Eelam Tamil protests and cling on to his self awarded title of Leaders of the Tamil creed. 

The recent Tamil Eelam protests have got a fillip with Channel 4 telecasting videos of killing of a teenage boy, Balachandran, by the SriLankan army. That boy happened to be the LTTE chief Prabakaran’s son. This is unthinkable by any human mind to kill an unarmed boy after assuring him of no harm and feeding with some snacks. The argument that Prabakaran has given guns in the hands of many teenage boys and girls while allowing his own children to have fun due for that age, will not justify by any means, the killing of this teenage boy. Killing of Balachandran is culpable homicide amounting to murder and punishable by any law assuring free and fair human life.

Now, let us look at the students protesting for the Eelam cause with fasting and a series of demonstrations. Some students even claim a 'Gandhian way' of travelling in trains without tickets. They also claim of organising a boycott of classes conveniently facilitated by the State Government by declaring a leave for all arts and science and law colleges. Engineering and medical students have been spared from this forced leave of study. What is the benifit the Eelam cause is going to derive from spoiling the studies of almost all students and ruining the health of some students in India? While they travel in trains without tickets would ruin the economy of India rather than strengthen the cause of Eelam by the worth of a pittance.

A couple of questions on the students' protest of 2013.

• What were they doing from 2009 to 2013?
• Why they didn't protest with a vigour in 2009 when the killing happened?
• Why are they boycotting classes and ruining their future?
• Why the parents are silent on this ruin of their kids' future?
• Who is in the back ground of this and what is their purpose?
• Many of the student protesters are not aware of the history of the SriLankan-Tamil bloody conflict from 1983 and how do they protest for something that is unclear to them?
• Their emotions are tickled and their future is toyed with. Who benefits from such stupidity?

A ready-made answer is kept ready by the protesters, or rather their masterminds, that the opposers of these protests by students are against the Eelam cause and hence anti-Tamil. They also say that the North Indians are not supporting this cause. While Pakistan is a national issue, Eelam is not. It is a fact. But why is Eelam not an issue of national importance like Pakistan or Bangladesh? We need to delve deep into the issue. The Eelam Tamils issue nor the attack on Indian fishermen by SriLanka was taken to the national stage effectively by any of the people who claim to work for the cause or even to do the supreme sacrifice. They simply play with the emotions of the locals and students, claiming that the Tamils are given a step motherly treatment by the North Indians. While Kerela fishermen can become national sensation, while an issue in Andrha Pradesh or Karnataka can become national issues.

Any of the States in the south of India are aligned with the mainstream national politics, but only TamilNadu is emotionally separated due to the diversionary tactics employed by the Dravidian outfits who aimed for a separate nation for themselves and their patriarch the EV Ramasamy Naicker had even observed the Independence of India as a black day. The Dravidian separatists demanded a Dravidian country encompassing the four southern States of TamilNadu, Kerela, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. While the other three States had got out the clutches of this evil while the Kannadiga EV Ramasamy Naicker and the Telugu bidda Karunanidhi have succeeded in making the Tamil speaking people believe that they are their saviours by following the lines of T.M.Nair, a Malayalee who started a movement to split 

Hindus along caste lines and remain in limelight based on those divisions. 

Their attack plan was to deride Hindu religion and thus cut the connecting emotional bond with the rest of the nation culturally. Their ammunition was movies with which they created a hatred towards Hindu culture and projected Tamil as if a separate atheist language, while a great deal of religious literature aging thousands of years were simply kept off the eyes of the a generation. Religion is projected as malice along the communist lines while the leaders who did such a projection with a vigor and violence did not even question their women folk going to temples for worship. They were so money minded that they started to loot the State at all fronts and nearly made the State a banana republic. 

The Tamils of Eelam were used by Karunanidhi and his cronies as a vote catching cause in TamilNadu on emotional grounds rather than a cause for bettering the lives of the so often claimed blood brothers on the other side of the Palk Straits. The Katchatheevu, a prime island on the Indian side, was given away to SriLanka by the Indira Government in the 1970s and Karunanidhi did not even raise his eyebrows for compromise of the welfare of the State's fisherfolk. But he has turned the blame on the Congress party of Indira Gandhi for ruining the lifelines of the fisher-folks with his master demagoguery. When the fisher-folks were killed by the SriLankan Navy for decades, MK who was in the power in the Union Government did not even grunt. 

To make the issue a national one, first off the issue has to be taken to the national level and not with such emotional outbursts of Tamils ignored by the Northies within the borders of TamilNadu. If North Indian ignore Tamils and are not trustworthy as claimed by the self styled leaders of Tamil creed, why the self styled champion of Tamil cause MK had been visiting Delhi to get power in the national Government? 

Some ideas to get the issue to the national mainstream:

• Get the BJP in as the leaders have shown concern over the killings, while Congress leaders were keen to satisfy self centric DMK.
• Get non political organizations with a national presence to make this a national issue.
• Stop blaming North Indians for apathy as the Tamil Leaders have been acting with a separatist mindset and not the Northies who have kicked the Tamils out.
• Attack on fisher-folks are reported in media as Tamil issues and not as an Indian issue, as if TamilNadu is separate from India.
• Eelam issue is seen as an international issue, but it is an issue of ethnic Indians being attacked by SriLanka. This was not made clear to justify an Indian intervention.

Without aligning the issue with the national mainstream thought blaming the North Indians or some sane thinkers as outcasts will not serve any cause worth a fight.

So, the need of the hour is for the people to stop falling prey to the self serving separatists and join the national mainstream to get the issue a support of the whole nation as we get against Pakistan's excesses, or for the Kerela fishermen or any other issues.