Gajalakshmi
Paramasivam
06 August 2021
IPKF WAS INVITED BY SRI LANKAN PRESIDENT
A
senior member of our family – Mrs Sivagami Ramalingam wrote on her Facebook
page:
[Bonding in society is
about group effort where each one's effort merges
With the other and
success becomes within reach]
When reading the above, I
thought of the sharing within a Tamil group – of the video at BBC News - The father and son transplant surgeons | Facebook
The message was headed ‘The
father and son Transplant Surgeons BBC’.
The body of the message made the simple statement:
‘SL's loss is UK's gain and how!’
The report was about Dr Oswald Fernando and
his son. As I watched I felt that I had been the provider as well as beneficiary of the service.
I thus felt the fulfilment as if it were mine. In turn I received the following
from a fellow Sri Lankan Neil Jayasekera, Managing Director – eLanka , about my
yesterday’s article:
[Superbly
written Gaja!.
Published on eLanka = https://www.elanka.com.au/valid-protests-in-democracy-gajalakshmi-paramasivam-2/
]
I forwarded it to the above Tamil group with
the message:
“Tamils' loss is Sri Lanka's gain - this
is how”
As per my
experience, each time I complete someone else’s work and/or mine the system
takes me to the next opportunity. Completing means realising the experience from
both sides – vertically or laterally.
The next
opportunity was in the article ‘Indo-Sri Lanka Accord
and IPKF: Pogrom-83 Anti-Tamil Riots’ by
Mr N Sathiya Moorthy and published by Ceylon Today – which came through Yoga
Joseph
I identify with
the essence of the following about Black July in 1983:
[If there is one occasion that the Tamil community
should be mourning year-after-year since then, it’s this one – even more than
the LTTE’s ‘Martyrs’ Day’. It is much more relevant to the Tamil memory than
even their continuing desire and failed attempts to recall the victims of the
last and conclusive war against the LTTE, at Mullivaikkal.
Barring a few editorial writers and columnists, academics
and NGOs/INGOs, there is not much use for the Tamil political class, in
mourning 1983 – or, so it seems! That they were all terrorised to observe a
memorial every year since then does not wash, as they could have done so when
they felt there was relative freedom, be it under the LTTE dominance of the
Tamil areas, or post-war. The reason for such a failure is unfathomable,
however. ]
The reason to me
is that Separatism won over Commonness. How did that happen ? Was it due to the
Lankan Tamil community value of being
clever and physically powerful like Goliath mattering more than ownership through
acceptance of inevitable pain and sacrifice of the self - to be common and own
the whole? As I wrote in response to my
family member Mrs Sivagami Ramalingam ‘When
we believe - that belief does the bonding’. Belief in the whole gives us
the power to forbear the pain of Opposition.
Mr Sathiya
Moorthy goes on to state:
[It may be easy for
contemporary Sri Lankan story-tellers to claim that IPKF was imposed by India.
It instead came at the express invitation of President J.R. Jayewardene.
Yes, it was facilitated by the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord that JRJ signed with Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi, again in July 1987, but the decision was JRJ’s.
The proof of the pudding was or is in the eating. Once
IPKF was in, JRJ withdrew the Sri Lankan Armed Forces from the LTTE front, for
the latter to take on the JVP, in what is now known as the ‘second insurgency’.
Going by conservative estimates, any number upwards of 60,000 Sinhala youth,
both boys and girls in the reproductive age-group, were massacred.
That the Government, using draconian laws, disallowed
head-count or any kind, and Media reportage, too, has provided cloud and cover
to this day. Yet, the international community, all of them already with
embassies in Colombo, and who all are protesting louder than ever now on ‘war
crimes probe’, looked the other way.
Did it mean that Sinhala lives were less valuable than
Tamils’? Or, it only had to do with the Cold War calculus, when JRJ’s Sri Lanka
aligned with the US-led West, unlike the left-leaning SLFP, whose
larger-than-life clone is the present-day ruling SLPP regime of Rajapaksa
Brothers? ]
There is another dimension to the above. As quoted by me on
02 July 2021:
[Prior to the 1977 elections, JR Jayawardene promised that he would
give the Police a week's leave so that his supporters could attack members of
opposing parties. After his victory, his Government launched unprecedented state
violence against the opposition, targeting supporters of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, and the People's Democratic Party. In particular, some
9,000 families of supporters of LSSP leader N.M. Perera in Yatiyantota were driven from
their homes, many of which were destroyed.] Wikiwand
The Common enemy of President Jayawardene seems to have been
communism. Hence the Tamil militants who also followed communism and the JVP
became his common enemy. That explains Mr Sathiya Moorthy’s declaration: ‘JRJ’s Sri Lanka
aligned with the US-led West’
Was this then the
motivation that drove President Jayawardene to invite the IPKF ? The ethnic
grouping into pro-China vs pro-India confirms this. The recent statement in
Parliament by the UNP candidate the Hon Ranil Wickremesinghe confirms this
diversity:
[“The Army Commander is a department head. Only the
Cabinet of Ministers can issue directives to ministry secretaries, who in turn
issue directives to department heads. The Cabinet has to answer Parliament in
return. That is how things should be done. But now, the Army Commander is the
Head of the COVID-19 control task force. He takes decisions regarding that, not
the Cabinet or the Premier. He even speaks at the economic forums. What is the
Government doing by assigning the Army Commander to everything like this?"]
Sri
Lanka Guardian editorial headed ‘The
most shameless moment of democracy in Sri Lanka’ that they received the above as
follows:
[As soon as Wickremesinghe came to Parliament, his target
was the current Army Commander, a man bigger than his life. Wickremesinghe's
ugly criticism against the Army Commander who is also serving as the Chief of
Defence Staff was not only aimed at achieving narrow goals, but also at
fulfilling the needs of those who worked to bring him to Parliament.
Wickremesinghe has resorted to this in an attempt to somehow save the country's
crumbling traditional political clique. It is a matter that goes beyond party politics.
That deal is between the families he represents and his friends, not between
political theories or parties. To them, countries or their peoples are mere
subjects. In other words, this is the most shameless moment in the history of
democracy in Sri Lanka. Some may think that Wickremasinghe's new play will help
save the so-called "elite", which is nothing but a farce not only in
the eyes of the country but also in the eyes of the world. ]
There was a time when the Sri Lanka Guardian
was highly critical of the Rajapaksa government – particularly of Mr Mahinda
Rajapaksa. Then it was still civil administration. The hierarchy of issues
would be different under a military command – due to the leader lacking the
skills to use non-military / civil pathway. The question then arises as to whether
this President came to power due to fear of foreign armed powers. Is the Sri
Lanka Guardian editor - the current form
of Naval officer Wijemuni Vijitha Rohana de Silva who attacked
Mr Rajiv Gandhi in 1987?
As per my
understanding of the philosophy of rebirth – we would be born again and again
until we realise truth and thus attain Nirvana / Liberation from Relativity.
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