India and Sri Lanka’s internal conflict Q & A: Part 4 Dispatch of IPKF and its role in Sri Lanka

Col R Hariharan |28 May 2018

[This is part 4 of the 9-part series of notes used in a telephone interview  with a civil society social group, which aims to “promote pathways for solving the ethnic issue under a federal solution” in Sri Lanka and to address human rights violations committed during the ethnic conflict by both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government. The interview was conducted in January 2017; its contents remain still valid.]

Q 5: At what specific point in time, after the IPKF were dispatched in Sri Lanka, did the LTTE turn violent?  

I had already answered about the role of IPKF as to ensure the implementation of the Accord by both Sri Lanka government and the Tamil militants to satisfy all the stakeholders. So a token force was initially sent the night after the Accord was signed; more troops were inducted subsequently to cover the two provinces. The LTTE failed to surrender the arms as required by the Accord. While it was dragging its feet, two events that happened indicated the LTTE was nearing the point of no return. The first was the death of the LTTE leader Thileepan, who was fasting to force India to comply with the LTTE demands. Prabhakaran was bitter with India’s laid back response to his coercive tactics.

The touch point came when Sri Lankan Navy apprehended a boat in Sri Lankan waters carrying 12 front line armed LTTE leaders returning from India; in contravention to the Accord they were carrying arms. President Jayawardane refused to release them in spite of India’s request. The IPKF did not intervene as per orders received from New Delhi. When Sri Lanka army tried to fly them to Colombo for further interrogation, they committed suicide. Both the events came as a shock to Sri Lanka Tamils who had high expectations from India.

The two events were also a big loss of face for Prabhakaran, who firmly believed he was the master of Tamil destiny. I remember when Sri Lankan army handed over the 12 bodies to the LTTE under the benign watch of IPKF, I told Mahathiya not to push Indian army to fight, using this as a pretext, because the Indian army could go on fighting forever. I gave the example of the fifty-year long operations against Naga insurgents. He sneered at me and said for every dead LTTE leader, Indian army would pay with 1200 lives (surprisingly at the end IPKF suffered 1250 dead) for the loss of those 12 LTTE men. That triggered the LTTE’s war against India and as a corollary the IPKF.

Q6: What was the relationship between the IPKF and anti-LTTE groups, namely, EPRLF, ENDLF, and TELO?  Why wasn’t the IPKF able to influence these three rebel groups to destabilize the LTTE?

We had good functional relations with EPRLF, TELO and ENDLF. They had supported the Accord as the best option for Tamils and surrendered their arms. (PLOTE was sulking under Uma Maheswaran for its own reasons because it was mending its relations with the Sri Lanka army). Qualitatively, they differed from the LTTE, which was ruthless and highly secretive and paranoid about its security. This probably insulated the LTTE from penetration by other groups. The friendly Tamil militant groups assisted our troops in the operations.  MI operated using sources within the LTTE; they were cadres and leaders unhappy over the confrontation with Indian forces and helped us. I was not privy to special operations of the kind you speak. Special Forces must have planned and carried out such operations.

Q 7: Also, why wasn’t the IPKF able to stop Prabhakaran from killing off leaders in rival factions? For example, the elimination of the PLOTE leadership in Batticaloa by the LTTE. 

During its existence, the LTTE had killed top Tamil political and rival militant group leaders like Sri Sabaratnam of TELO (ignoring the plea of his friend – the DMK leader Karunanidhi to spare his life) and the TULF leader Amirthalingam. This struck fear among leaders who opposed his approach; those who stood firmly against him went on exile or were eliminated. Thus it was an occupational risk for anyone who opposed Prabhakaran’s writ. And the leaders of other militant groups and Tamil political leaders, who supported the Accord were prepared to run this risk because they believed in it and the presence of IPKF reassured them to an extent. On a few occasions, I had passed on information about LTTE dispatching people to kill specific leaders to the affected leaders in advance. While some took precautions and survived while some leaders like Padmanabha were stoic about it, accepting it as part of the bargain for their beliefs.

Intelligence was not involved in organizing personal protection. Probably the Operations branch or formations responded to specific requests. So I would not be able to comment on it, as we had our hands full. However, during the hot war, MI had ensured security and protection by way of advance information to local non-LTTE Tamil militant leaders trapped in the operational area. (To be continued)

First, Right to Childhood

The Central and State governments, and the people as a whole, have to be involved in making the RTE Act work

by Col R Hariharan

HIGH expectations have been kindled with the coming into force of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 from April this year. Education Minister Kapil Sibal’s description of it as “a momentous step forward in our 100-year struggle for universalizing elementary education” summed up the hype built around it. Only, it should have come eight long years ago when the 86th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, ensuring children’s right to education as a fundamental right. Without the RTE Act, the 86th Amendment had remained where most of the other rights of Indians remain – on paper.

When the Amendment was passed, it was called “a historic milestone” in the country’s struggle for children’s right to education. If “a historic milestone” amendment is given teeth only after eight years, can we expect immediate change in the fate of millions of children deprived of this right?

Passing the RTE Act is not enough; for it to become effective, both states and Centre will have to take a whole set of “mundane” actions – political, legislative and budgetary. The process is somewhat like designing a concept car and marketing it as a viable model. A soothsayer would be as good as any bureaucrat or analyst in predicting when children will gain from the Act.

In certain States, run by feudal minded societies, the girl child is sentenced to die in bondage as a worker in fields, bonded labour or domestic help. Elected governments are reluctant to enforce existing laws to protect children due to the fear of offending rural vote banks. Caste panchayats continue to flourish as an extra-judicial authority to preserve exploitative practices. They pass death sentences and get away with murder 60 years after we proclaimed our fundamental rights. Vote bank politics is the only ideology.

To give form to RTE is a mammoth task on two counts – the sheer number of marginalized children, and the size and complexity of enforcing the Act in an amorphous federal system where the Centre and states rule over education. Sibal himself admits that though “over 100 per cent children are now in school, 98 per cent of our habitations have a primary school within one kilometre, and 92 per cent have an upper primary school within three kilometres,” there are “invisible” children outside this charmed circle. These are kids enrolled in school but who havedropped out to work in dhabas, petty shops or fields. In addition, there are a whole lot of children too poor to go to school or who live in remote areas where access to school is not there.

Realizing the complexity of the task, Sibal has spelled out a whole matrix of actions required to be taken by the various Ministries and governments both at the Central and state level. These are beyond Education Ministries; they range from Rural Development and Panchayati Raj to Women and Child Development departments because secondary initiatives are equally important to make RTE work.

Even within government schools, vast differences exist between Central and state-managed schools and between urban and rural schools. They range from inadequate infrastructure to insufficient staff and unrealistic policies that drive parents to seek private schools. That is why Sibal has attempted not merely to universalize education, but also to provide quality education and is seeking private sector participation. As the Act provides for 25 per cent reserved seats for poor children in all private schools as well as Central schools, private schools are up in arms.

States that are a little more “enlightened” on education like Kerala or Tamil Nadu have taken advantage of the Constitutional space provided to them in giving jurisdiction over education to States. Their literacy rates have increased dramatically. But the children of Tamil Nadu and Kerala also continue to drop out of school to work as domestic helps or in sweatshops and petty businesses. Tamil Nadu had gained notoriety for killings of girl children. Mothers are known to abandon girl children in government orphanages, creating a new genre of “cradle babies”.

Such aberrations exist as there is a large disconnect between legislative action and social perception. That is why many acts of redemption of children from hunger and poverty are announced with a lot of fanfare and then routinely ignored. At best, they taper into nothingness after handing out doles to kids, gestures meant more for photo opportunities for politicians than to make a difference in young lives.

Take the case of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme in Uttar Pradesh. It has been hit by a funds crunch from end-2009 onwards because the state government has not allocated any money for it. The reason: some districts have not submitted the last year’s expenditure report! So children everywhere in the state are going without nutritious food promised by the state. More than deprivation of nutrition, such callous acts reinforce in young minds the popular belief that governments generally don’t mean what they say. After all, Chief Minister Mayawati could find money to install a thousand statues of her mentor!

THE home truth is that everything in society and government is loaded against children’s right to childhood. Many a time, vengeful acts start at the foetal stage just because children belong to the wrong gender. And it has nothing to do with poverty or social status as female foeticide is as much practised by the educated in Punjab as the ignorant in Rajasthan. Not surprisingly, this has led to skewed gender ratios.

And there are other predators: child traffickers who turn them into prostitutes, beggars and petty thieves. Interstate child trafficking is a growing “business”, as illustrated by a recent case in Tamil Nadu in which 76 children between 12 and 14 years were rescued from Chennai and sent home to Manipur and Assam after a TV channel followed the trail of 200 children picked up in Manipur and sent to Chennai.

It will be a great achievement if we can give substance to the Right to Education for all children in the next five decades. So it is not only Sibal or the Central and state governments but the people as a whole who have to be involved in making the RTE Act work. And that has to be done in an environment VS Naipaul described as “chaos of uneconomical movement, the self- stimulated din, the sudden feeling of insecurity, the conviction that all men are not brothers and that luggage was in danger”.

Courtesy: GFiles Magazine, June 2010 issue.