38
A Change of Regime, 1977–94
When the Sri Lankan electorate is in one of its not very infrequent moods of disenchantment with the regime in power it gives vent to its displeasure with an exuberance and vehemence which all but obliterates the governing party—in terms of parliamentary seats. No defeat in the annals of the island’s volatile parliamentary history has been quite as comprehensive as that suffered by the rivals of the UNP in July 1977.1 The SLFP was reduced to a rump of eight seats (it had 90 in the previous Parliament), while every candidate of the Marxist left was defeated. The UNP won 140 out of 168 seats securing absolute majorities in 126 of these; and for the first time the winning party at a Sri Lankan general election obtained a clear majority of the popular vote. The TULF won 18 seats.
This general election marked the compulsory retirement from parliamentary politics of several dominant figures in Sri Lanka’s political elite whose careers had spanned the last years of British rule and the three decades since independence. All left-wing parliamentarians of that generation were rejected by the electorate, many of them quite decisively, while all the prominent politicians who had been swept to power in the victories of the Bandaranaikes in 1956 and 1960 lost their seats, with the exception of Mrs Bandaranaike herself and her deputy. The latter retained his seat by the narrowest of margins. It was as though some massive collective will was at work, sitting in judgement over those who had set the pace in politics since 1956, finding them wanting and sternly dismissing them. The election result could be, and was also, viewed as a decisive rejection of the undemocratic excesses of Mrs Bandaranaike’s regimes.
Jayewardene who was seventy-one when he won the elections of 1977, and had twice rebuilt the UNP from the ashes of defeat, once in 1956 and again after he took control of the party in 1973, appeared to be wearing the mantle of victory right through the last months of Mrs Bandaranaike’s UF regime, particularly throughout the election campaign.
J.R. Jayewardene
The island’s electoral system was such that when a major shift of political power occurred through the ballot, a new regime was returned to power with a far higher proportion of seats in the legislature than was warranted by the popular vote it received. Since 1959–60 the distortions of the electoral system had worked to the disadvantage of the UNP, but in 1977 the SLFP found itself with a mere 4.8 per cent of the seats though it obtained 29 per cent of the vote.
More extraordinary still, the TULF emerged as the main parliamentary opposition to the UNP. As a result of the peculiar demographic profile of the island, with a concentration of Tamils in the north and, to a smaller extent, in the east of the island, the TULF with about one-fifth of the popular vote secured by the SLFP had more than double the number of seats, namely 18 as against eight for the SLFP. For the first time since independence a Tamil became leader of the Opposition.
This distortion of the electoral process would by itself have given an unusually sharp focus to minority rights over the life of the new parliament, but the minds of politicians and the intelligentsia alike became concentrated on these issues much earlier and more urgently than would normally have happened when a minor incident in Jaffna town—a clash between the police and a section of the people there—precipitated a ferocious outbreak of communal violence between the Sinhalese and Tamils in mid-August 1977 on a scale comparable with the riots of the mid-1950s. These incidents were the direct result of causes whose roots lay in the atmosphere of communal mistrust stemming from the political attitudes and policies of the SLFP—dominated UF regime. The new government stopped the conflagration with a mixture of firmness and restraint, and more significantly, without resort to emergency rule. At the height of the disturbances it announced that a commission of inquiry would be appointed to examine the circumstances that had led to that outbreak of violence. A former chief justice was subsequently appointed as a one-man commission. On a more practical basis, a series of administrative measures were taken to meet some of the long-standing grievances of the Tamils.2
If these ethnic conflicts deflected the government’s attention from more pressing issues, they did not do so for very long. High among its priorities was a fresh and searching look at Sri Lanka’s constitutional framework. The far-reaching constitutional changes envisaged had been incorporated in the UNP’s election manifesto and had been a major point of controversy in the election campaign. The UNP treated its decisive victory at the polls as an unmistakably positive endorsement of its proposals for a major overhaul of the constitutional structure. The first steps in implementing these changes came in August-September 1977 in the appointment of a parliamentary select committee on constitutional reform and the adoption by the National State Assembly of a constitutional amendment establishing a presidential system of government. Under the terms of this amendment the prime minister, J.R. Jayewardene, assumed office as the first elected executive president of the country on 4 February 1978.3
1977, The government, in fact, deliberately set out to introduce a new tone in political life, altogether quieter and more relaxed, and with more respect than was shown by Mrs Bandaranaike’s regime for the delicate and intricate balance of forces which has ensured the survival of democracy in Sri Lanka. In October 1977 the Criminal Justice Commissions Law, perhaps the most controversial piece of legislation introduced by the UF government, which in its working had led to gross abuse of human rights and the harassment of political opponents of the government, was repealed.4 The most notable beneficiary of this decision was Rohana Wijeweera, the leader of the JVP, who had been jailed since early 1971 for his role in the insurrection of that year and was now released. Early in 1978 came a far-reaching amendment of the Public Security Act. This amendment ensured that, contrary to recent practice, the imposition of emergency rule would be debated and voted upon by the national legislature, the National State Assembly, on the first available occasion, while the extension of emergency rule beyond a period of ninety days in the aggregate would require a special majority of two-thirds of the membership of the house.5
The new constitution, which came into effect on 7 September 1978 was a blend of some of the functional aspects of Sri Lanka’s previous constitutions and features of the American, French and British systems of government—a presidential system designed to meet Sri Lanka’s own special requirements in the light of past experience in the working of previous constitutions. An underlying theme was the rejection of many of the authoritarian features of the constitution of 1972: by imposing more effective restraints on the powers of the executive and the state, by sustaining the rule of law and by strengthening the independence of the judiciary, the rights of the individual as against the state and—most significant in the context of the current crisis in relations between the Sinhalese and Tamils—the rights of the minorities. Among other important innovations was the introduction of proportional representation on the list system, in place of the ‘first-past-the-post’ principle of representation based on the British model.
The concessions made to the Tamil minority regarding the status of their language in the Sri Lanka polity were a fulfilment of a pledge given in the government’s first statement of policy in the National State Assembly on 4 August 1977, well before the outbreak of the communal disturbances later in that month. Two articles in the new constitution set the tone. Article 19 declared that Sinhala and Tamil shall be the national languages of Sri Lanka (with Sinhala remaining the sole official language), a major departure from the established language policy since the mid-1950s. Equally important, Article 26 abolished the distinction between citizens by descent and citizens by registration—an irritant to the Indian Tamils—and this removed the stigma of second-class citizenship attaching to the latter. Combined with the elimination, in December 1977, of the bar, in force since the 1930s, on plantation workers resident on estates voting in local government elections, this ensured that persons of recent Indian origin were treated on a par with Sri Lankan citizens by descent. The position of Indians resident in Sri Lanka was further improved by affording to ‘stateless’ persons the same civil rights as are guaranteed by the constitution to citizens of the country. No previous constitution, not even that of 1947, offered the minorities a more secure position within the Sri Lanka polity than does the present one.
The Indian Tamils responded more positively to these conciliatory gestures than the TULF. When S. Thondaman—leader of the Ceylon Workers’ Congress, the main political party-cum-trade union of the Indian plantation workers—entered the cabinet with the introduction of the new constitution in September 1978, it marked a major breakthrough in Sri Lanka’s politics, for it brought the Indian Tamils within Sri Lanka’s ‘political nation’ for the first time since the 1930s. The TULF, now very much a party of the indigenous Tamils, ostentatiously dissociated itself from the processes of constitution-making in its anxiety to underline a commitment to Eelam, a separate state for the Tamils. They appeared to lack the political strength for the bold initiatives which a policy of reconciliation called for. Above all, they seemed to be all too conscious of the challenge from a youth wing of the party and especially violent extremist groups who were the most committed adherents of separatism. Thus for the second time since the 1930s the pacesetters in Tamil politics were youth groups.
Jayewardene’s government inherited a stagnant economy and one in which, with the nationalization of the plantations, the state sector was in a position of overwhelming dominance. Unemployment was high and the country was affected by severe inflation. The first budget of the new government, introduced on 15 November 1977, announced the principal theme of the government’s economic policy—the establishment of a free economy after two decades of controls and restrictions. The second and third budgets in November 1978 and November 1979 were consistent with the first. Together they marked a purposeful bid to move sharply away from the conventional budgetary wisdom of the last twenty years. A free economy has remained part of Sri Lanka’s political system ever since, despite a change of leadership in the UNP in 1989–90, when Jayewardene’s second term as president came to an end and the victory of an SLFP-led coalition in 1994.
In 1976, during the last phase of Mrs Bandaranaike’s regime, tea and rubber prices had registered their first substantial improvement in the world market since the mid-1950s. This continued throughout most of 1977 and, even though tea prices declined somewhat in 1978 and 1979, they were still well above those of the early 1970s. Rubber prices, on the other hand, continued to rise steadily. In 1977, Sri Lanka enjoyed a favourable balance of trade for the first time in about fifteen years and the country’s foreign exchange reserve was at its highest level since the days of the Korean War boom. The remarkable transformation in the position of the foreign exchange reserve was sustained over 1978–79, even though the balance of trade had returned to its pre-1977 pattern of being an adverse one. The country’s economy was growing much faster (an 8 per cent increase in the GNP in 1978, 6 per cent in 1979 and 5.5 per cent in 1980) than for a decade past.
Although the government’s adherence to a mixed economy remained firm, its economic strategy was also avowedly designed to breathe new life into private enterprise. This strategy bore fruit in an expansion of both economic activity and employment opportunities in the private sector. The government’s initiative in establishing an industrial processing zone in an area of approximately 518 sq. km to the north of the city of Colombo designed to attract industries manufacturing for export was one of the key features of the new economic policy.
There was no strong urge to reverse the process of state control over large areas of the economy—not indeed because it could not be done but because, especially with regard to the plantations, it was perceived as something for which there is no compelling need. Both productivity and managerial efficiency in the plantations had declined with nationalization, but while the government treated the rehabilitation of the plantations as a matter of the highest priority, the results of its efforts in this regard were, in the initial stages, decidedly meagre. In other areas of the state sector, a change of management and new managerial techniques did result in a marked improvement in productivity. In some of the large state-owned textile mills management was handed over to private-sector firms, and this experiment—the private sector acting as a leaven to reinvigorate the proverbially sluggish and inefficient public sector of the economy—was seen to hold out hope of success.
In regard to unemployment, however, it was to the resuscitation of traditional agriculture and the revitalizing of industry in that order that the government looked for effective solutions. One invaluable result of the economic and political bankruptcy of the early 1970s was the new respectability conferred on traditional agriculture. At that time a realism born of desperation triumphed over ideological preconceptions and sterile rhetoric, which had long relegated agriculture to the status of a poor relation of industry. Support for traditional agriculture was thus no longer a matter of controversy. In the agricultural policy of the new government there was an obvious continuity with that of the previous UNP government of 1965–70 and nowhere more than in the pride of place given in this sphere of activity to the development of the irrigation and power resources of the Mahaveli Basin.
The gigantic Mahaveli Project was by far the largest and most intricate irrigation enterprise attempted in the island’s history—the most complex irrigation project since the days of the Polonnaruva kings. The government sought to force the pace of development by accelerating the completion of some of the key projects of this scheme in five to six years instead of twenty as originally envisaged and J.R. Jayewardene succeeded in doing so.
By their very nature these initiatives in industry and irrigation would bring results only on a long-term basis. On the other hand, the removal of import controls on most items of consumption and some capital goods which the government introduced with its first budget in November 1977 had immediate benefits. Its impact on unemployment has been referred to earlier in this chapter. There were other beneficial consequences as well. It has served to dispel the air of austerity, to eliminate scarcities of food and other consumer goods and the queues that were endemic over the two decades of the 1950s and 1960s in Sri Lanka. In addition, this change, as remarkable as it was unexpected before November 1977, had mitigated considerably the effects of rising prices which were the inevitable consequence of a devaluation of the Sri Lanka rupee in November 1977, the escalation of oil prices which came in 1978–79 and the inflationary impact of the government’s development programmes in industry, housing and irrigation. Bumper paddy harvests in 1977–78, 1978–79, and 1979–80 also helped to keep the prices of locally grown food items relatively low. These favourable economic conditions largely explained the government’s success in the management of the ‘political market’, in retaining the initiative in politics and keeping its rivals at bay despite high unemployment and severe inflation and a policy of systematically reducing subsidies on food and other essential items of consumption, as well as on public transport.
The Mahaveli Scheme
In the elections to municipalities and urban councils in mid-May 1979 (the first to be held since 1969–70) the government won as decisive a victory as it had achieved in the general elections of July 1977. The SLFP came a very poor second while the ‘old’ left were routed once again. Only the TULF and, to a lesser extent, the ‘new’ left had cause for satisfaction.
By the middle of 1979 the activities of an extremist youth group among the Tamils of the north brought the country to the brink of another round of communal violence which was averted by the same blend of firmness and conciliation used in quelling the race riots of August 1977. Special legislation modelled on the British Prevention of Terrorism Act was rushed through parliament, a state of emergency was declared in the north of the island with a military commander to coordinate security arrangements and to stamp out terrorism there. These measures had the desired effect of restoring law and order and in paving the way for political initiatives designed to restore communal harmony on the island. The most notable of these conciliatory political initiatives was the appointment of a ten-member Presidential Commission to report on the decentralization of administration through district development councils. The commission completed its work in mid-February 1980 by which time the state of emergency imposed in the north of the island had been lifted. In August 1980, legislation based on the commission’s report was approved by parliament thus paving the way for the establishment of development councils as a measure of democratic decentralization, which were expected to help blunt the edges of separatist aspirations among the Tamils and give the restive Jaffna Peninsula a durable peace.
The government benefited substantially from the continuing and total disarray of its opponents. The decline of the ‘old’ left was a notable factor in Sri Lanka’s political scene. The ‘new’ left with the factionalized JVP in the vanguard was as hostile to the traditional left and the SLFP as it was to the government. It was thus vocal and vigorous but politically ineffective as an anti-government force. Its dismal electoral performance, both at the parliamentary and local government levels, seemed to indicate that the SLFP was not yet in a position to mount a serious political challenge to the government. With Mrs Bandaranaike’s expulsion from Parliament on 16 October 1980 after a Presidential Commission of Enquiry had found her guilty of ‘abuse of power’, the party faced a long and debilitating leadership struggle in which Mrs Bandaranaike skilfully retained her power as the effective leader of the party. In this situation the government had much greater room for manoeuvre to deal with economic problems such as severe inflation and high unemployment than it would have had if it had confronted a cohesive opposition under a leadership with a reputation untarnished by association with the events of the early and mid-1970s.
Had economic growth provided more jobs, the growing unrest among Tamil youths may not have made separatist groups so attractive to them and they may not have turned so readily to violence. Among the Sinhalese the ultra-left and ardently nationalist JVP may not have become the deadly threat to state and society they turned out to be, first in 1971, and then again in the years from 1986 to 1989.6 It was the JVP that led the first attempts at a violent overthrow of the government which they did in 1971. Although the attempt was a dismal failure, the example they set won them imitators among the radicalized youth in the Tamil separatist parties in later years, including most notably the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), when they began their campaign of violence.
Sri Lanka’s rural areas are free of the grim poverty seen in many parts of South Asia, and caste oppression seen in many parts of India. Agrarian reform has been more of a success in Sri Lanka than in other parts of south Asia. Yet, the Sri Lankan countryside has spawned the JVP and LTTE, two of the most ferocious radical movements in any part of the world in recent times.
Ethnic Conflict
Our main concern in this part of the present chapter is with Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict, not with the JVP. With regard to the country’s ethnic conflict a decisively important fact in the late 1960s and early 1970s needs special emphasis:the conversion of many political groups in the north of the country to the advocacy of separatism. The leadership in this came first from the Federal Party which, in a deliberate attempt to bring the rival Tamil parties together, converted itself to the core of the Tamil United Front (TUF), and later the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) to give the separatist cause a powerful political institution. By the late 1970s, however, the TULF’s dominance in the politics of the Tamil areas in the north of the country had become more apparent than real. As with similar movements in other parts of the world the ‘moderates’ cultivated radicalized youths, who were treated as foot soldiers in their separatist campaigns. In just over five years, these roles were being reversed with the foot soldiers now setting the pace and controlling the agenda of the separatist movement and driving their mentors, the TULF, to exasperation and, by 1986–87, to a more restricted role in Tamil politics than in the mid-1970s—not exactly as foot soldiers but something close to that. A similar life cycle in the leadership of separatist movements could be observed in many parts of the world and in India as well.
The general election of 1977 was a major landmark in the country’s history, not merely because of the UNPs overwhelming victory in the areas of the country but also because of the equally emphatic victory in the Tamil areas in the north of the island for the TULF,7 a victory that celebrated Tamil separatist aspirations. Efforts of the UNP government to reverse many of the policies associated with the SLFP did result in a period of quiescence in relations between the two main ethnic groups. In the late 1970s and up to 1983 significant changes were made in language policy: the controversial university admissions policy of the previous SLFP-dominated government was modified to make it more equitable for the Sri Lankan Tamil minority; above all, a second tier of government between the Centre and local government bodies was introduced in 1980, something previous governments had been unable or unwilling to do, a policy initiative which came fifty-two years after such a scheme of devolution had first been mooted and one which Tamil groups had insisted on since the mid-1950s. The economic policies of the 1960s and early 1970s were abandoned and a more liberal policy adopted in its place. This led to an immediate revival and rapid expansion of the economy.
But it became clear very soon, that the response to these changes from the Tamils was determined more by the radical activists than the moderate leadership of the parliamentary party, the TULF. The latter were being rapidly overtaken by separatist groups bent on violence against the state. The state responded to this with violence of its own. These confrontations became more frequent and increasingly more violent. Youth groups soon saw themselves and persuaded others to regard them as more committed and credible adherents of the separatist cause than the TULF. The latter’s presence in parliament—indeed, the fact that its leader was leader of the Opposition—placed them in a position of great ambivalence, balancing the need to adhere to the norms and practices of parliamentary life while in the legislature, with the compulsion of recognizing the pressures of political change in the electorates in order to retain their continuing commitment to the separatist cause. By the early 1980s, the separatist cause had been taken over by youth groups belonging to various small and bickering political parties.8 In time that bickering became explosively destructive and internecine conflicts among separatist groups became one of the principal features of politics in the Jaffna Peninsula. These conflicts persisted despite a common opposition to the state’s security forces stationed in the Jaffna Peninsula. One such attack by the LTTE, a relatively minor one in retrospect, triggered the most ferocious episode of ethnic violence in Sri Lanka’s recent history, the anti-Tamil riots of July 1983.
The Indian mediation/intervention which is dealt with in later pages of this chapter had a profoundly disturbing effect on Sri Lankan politics during Jayewardene’s second term as president. One aspect of this was the second JVP insurrection (1987–89).
Acts of commission on the part of Jayewardene himself contributed to the problems of this period. One of these was undoubtedly his decision to substitute a referendum for a general election to parliament in 1982. This gave him a continuation of the massive five-sixths majority he had in parliament since 1977. But there was no mistaking the fact that while the referendum was constitutional, it was no genuine substitute for an election to parliament.
Despite all the disturbing features of the politics of the 1980s, the national economy still reflected some of the buoyancy seen in Jayewardene’s first term as president. All the headworks of the Mahaveli irrigation system were completed during his second term as president. This would have been a substantial achievement even in the less disturbed times. It became much more substantial in the context of a very disturbed decade.
During Jayewardene’s first term as president there were signs of a change in the structure of the economy which has continued to the present day. In 1977, at the time Jayewardene came to power, the traditional sources of foreign exchange for Sri Lanka—dominated by plantation products—were as much as 81.3 per cent of local exports. By 1996, this had decreased to 23.5 per cent. Non-traditional exports had increased from 18.7 per cent to 76.5 per cent. Textiles and garments accounted for 63.2 per cent of industrial exports.9
It is largely because of this transformation of the economy that the Jayewardene regime could finance heavy defence expenditure and the completion of the Mahaveli head works without too much of a strain.
In his last years in office, Jayewardene piloted the legislation required for the establishment of provincial councils through parliament. The elections to these councils were held during his presidency.
In 1989, he presided over the transfer of power to R. Premadasa, the new head of the UNP. The latter won the presidential election of 1989 defeating Mrs Bandaranaike. Under Premadasa the UNP won a comfortable victory to parliament, in the first general election under proportional representation.
Indian Concern, Indian Intervention And Mediation
With the anti-Tamil riots and disturbances of 1983 a qualitative change transformed Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict, from a relatively low-intensity one to an increasingly violent one and from being a generally localized business to a conflict with regional ramifications. There was a more emphatic radicalization of politics in the Tamil areas in the north of the country. While the TULF remained in the political arena, the principal actors were the radicalized political groups and factions whose demands were expressed with an intensity and urgency that the TULF could not show. These militant or activist separatist groups sought to enter the political bargaining process on their own as the authentic representatives of Tamil opinion and were eventually accommodated in that process under Indian auspices in the mid-1980s. However, the most important factor, by far, in the transformation of the conflict was the unilateral intrusion of a regional actor, India, into the politics of Sri Lanka. India sought to manipulate if not dominate, the processes of negotiation, as a mediator, over the next seven years from 1983, with its own political objectives in these negotiations.10 This botched intervention had incalculable adverse consequences for Sri Lanka and the governments of the country have had to struggle since 1990 to deal with them.
Ranasinghe Premadasa
India’s interest in the problems of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority—the Sri Lankan Tamils—emerged and grew in the 1970s and 1980s with India reaching into her neighbourhood in the role of regional hegemon, especially after her dramatically successful intervention in the separatist campaign in what is now Bangladesh.11 The separatist agitation in Bangladesh had a profound influence on the thinking of Tamil separatist groups in Sri Lanka in terms of their political objectives as well as the process through which it could be achieved.
India had three roles in Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict. The first, which was intensified with Mrs Gandhi’s return to power in 1980, was that of a covert supporter of Tamil separatism; several groups of separatists were operating in Tamil Nadu. This covert support continued until 1987. The second, the Tamil Nadu factor, forms an important aspect of India’s role in Sri Lanka’s affairs. The third of India’s roles, that of mediator, began under Mrs Gandhi as a calculated political response to the anti-Tamil riots of July 1983 and continued under her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi. A version of that third role, that of active participant, began late in 1987 and continued to the middle of 1990 by which time J.R. Jayewardene had given up the presidency.
The Indian intervention of 1983 was an exercise in realpolitik. Despite the fact that similar violent ethnic conflicts were a familiar feature in many parts of India at that time, in Punjab, for instance, and particularly in India’s north-east, India sought to intervene in Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict invoking the political strengths of a regional hegemon. During the years of the Indian intervention/mediation, the Indian governments sought, desperately, to prop up the TULF as the principal spokespersons for the Sri Lankan Tamils, although most of their leadership who lived in Tamil Nadu—after 1983—no longer retained the support of the electorates they once dominated. The struggle for the control of these electorates was being conducted by the more radical and more violent separatist groups. The eventual winners of this conflict were the LTTE who had clearly established their position of primacy among them by 1986. Through a ruthless resort to force, the LTTE killed virtually all their rivals to leadership among such groups, and had reduced its mentor, the TULF, to a merely marginal role in Tamil politics in Sri Lanka. From 1986 onwards, the LTTE was a powerful influence on negotiating processes in regard to Sri Lanka, even if the Indian government preferred to sustain the TULF in an unrealistic leadership role.
Throughout the period 1983–90, India never abandoned her role of being a principal in the dispute, as the presumed protector of the interests of the Tamil minorities on the island. The result was that India was at once a negotiator and an advocate. After the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987, the mediator found itself in the role of an active participant and continued in that role to the middle of 1990, during which it fought the LTTE in the north-east of Sri Lanka, a unique example in the history of mediation in ethnic conflict where the mediator took on the role of combatant and the presumed guardian of an ethnic minority waged an eventually unsuccessful military campaign against the principal political group of that minority and its military wing which India and Tamil Nadu had helped to build. Attempts at management and settlement went awry, in an unpredicted and unpredictable succession of blunders.
India had other roles as well, one of which was in internationalizing the conflict through the use of her diplomatic missions in the more important capital cities of the Western world and in initiating or lending support to moves at the United Nations and in subcommittees of the United Nations to espouse the cause of Sri Lanka’s Tamils. There was, above all, the Tamil Nadu factor. Seldom has a constituent unit (a province or a state) of one country influenced the relationship between it and a neighboring country with the same intensity and persistence and to the same extent that Tamil Nadu did in the case of India’s relations with Sri Lanka in the 1970s and 1980s. The India-Tamil Nadu-Sri Lanka relationship was thus a unique one in international affairs. Admittedly, the Indian Central government’s own role in regard to the Tamil problem in Sri Lanka, from the 1980s to the present day, is more complex than merely reacting to the pressures of domestic politics in Tamil Nadu. Nevertheless, concerns about the latter have always been an important consideration. The state governments in Tamil Nadu have provided Sri Lankan Tamil separatist activists with overt support by way of sanctuaries, training and bases. These were apart from financial support, moral support and political pressure on behalf of Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka, within the national political system in India. Not only did the Central government—under Indira Gandhi and her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi—connive in the provision of such facilities by Tamil Nadu, it also tolerated the provision of training facilities and the existence of camps and bases in other parts of the country. This began with Indira Gandhi in the early 1980s, that is to say, well before the riots of July 1983 in Sri Lanka. The extent of that support dropped sharply in the late 1980s when the Indian army moved to the Tamil areas in the north and east of Sri Lanka during 1987–90 under the terms of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987, but so far as Tamil Nadu was concerned it did not disappear entirely.
In the mid-1980s, the Sri Lankan government resorted to a two-pronged policy in dealing with the threat posed by the Tamil separatist activists. A military response was often accompanied by political negotiations, while the priority given to one or the other of these depended on the success achieved or the political pressures exerted by and from India. Throughout the period 1984 to 1986, negotiations for a political settlement continued sporadically against the background of regular outbursts of ethnic violence, especially in the north and east of the island, and conflicts between the security forces and Tamil guerrillas and terrorist groups.
Just prior to the eventual signing of an accord in Colombo in July 1987 by the president of Sri Lanka and the Indian prime minister, there was a brief period of a few months during which the two governments were at loggerheads when the Sri Lankan government attempted to re-establish control over the Jaffna Peninsula. The Sri Lankan army inflicted a number of defeats on the LTTE and had them on the run. At this stage the Indian government threatened direct intervention, that is, an invasion, in the event the Sri Lankan forces attempted to enter Jaffna, the administrative capital of the Northern Province. This threat sufficed to save the LTTE from an emphatic defeat at the hands of the Sri Lankan army, but restraint on the part of Sri Lanka did not prevent Indian intervention, shortly afterwards, in the form of a deliberate violation of Sri Lankan air space by Indian military aircraft which engaged in dropping food in Jaffna town and its neighbourhood in an unmistakable demonstration of India’s sympathy for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority.
The Indo-Sri Lanka accord of July 1987 was signed in Colombo by President Jayewardene and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. This, the most prominent of the diplomatic occasions in Indo-Sri Lankan relations after the Indian intervention in 1983, soon lost much of its aura when it began to look so much like the other well-publicized accords negotiated by Rajiv Gandhi in Punjab and Assam, both of which failed in nearly all their objectives. The Indo-Sri Lanka Accord did not fare better as was evident in the consequences that flowed from it, both immediately and on a relatively long-term basis: the failure to pacify the Tamil areas in the north of the island, stretched over two years or more; a more immediate flaw was that it precipitated a serious political crisis in the Sinhalese areas of the country. The signing of the accord led to violent protests, in and around Colombo and parts of the south-west coast, riots that were among the most serious episodes of anti-government violence seen since independence. The government forces took three days to a week to quell the riots and they were able to do so only because of the rapid transport by air (by the Indian air force) of several thousand Sri Lankan troops from Jaffna. Rajiv Gandhi himself narrowly escaped serious injury, if not death itself, at a guard of honour prior to his departure from the island. He had come to Colombo for the signing of the accord. Although the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) was never seen outside the north and east of the island (save perhaps in the North-central Province on its way to the east coast) its shadow lay across the country’s political landscape. Its presence in the country was exploited, politically, against the government by a combination of the SLFP and the now revived JVP but most of all by the JVP, for whom opposition to the IPKF became the catalyst for violent political agitation and sporadic but calculated acts of violence in the Sinhalese areas of the country.12
With the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka accord on 29 July 1987, the IPKF arrived on the island. They came, in the earliest phase, as peacekeepers but soon became combatants, against the LTTE forces and their allies, when the latter sought to resist the IPKF and actually engaged in violent confrontations against it. These confrontations saw the IPKF growing from a small peacekeeping force of 5,000–7,000 men which it was initially, into an Indian army of around 1,00,000 men, almost as large as the Soviet army then in Afghanistan and bigger than the British content of the Indian army of the Raj in its heyday in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The Indian army had intervened in the Bangladeshi independence struggle in the late 1960s and early 1970s to secure the success of separatism; it initially intervened in Sri Lanka in 1987 to prevent the Sri Lankan armed forces from inflicting a decisive defeat on the Tamil separatists, principally the LTTE, and regaining control of the disaffected areas in the north and east of the island, at a time when the LTTE itself had suffered a number of defeats and were fleeing in disorder. Having secured the immediate objective of thwarting the Sri Lankan forces, the IPKF then found itself fighting the LTTE for a little over two years as part of the Indian government’s own political agenda of opposition to the establishment of a separate Tamil state, for fear of its ripple effects on India itself, then engaged in struggles against separatist movements in Kashmir, Punjab and the north-east. Over a period of two years the IPKF drove the LTTE out of Jaffna and the Jaffna Peninsula but did not achieve its objective of weakening the LTTE to the point of making it more receptive and subservient to India’s regional strategic objectives.
New Delhi’s eight-year involvement thus provides a classic study of the flawed performance of a regional power seeking to manage and exploit ethnic conflict in a neighboring state to its own advantage; the principal flaw, and here the Indian intervention was unique in the history of external interventions by regional superpowers in ethnic conflicts in small states, was the external mediator’s unintended transformation into a combatant. It entered the dispute with the avowed objective of protecting the interests of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, but the Indian army soon began fighting the LTTE, the principal representatives of Tamil separatism, on Sri Lankan soil in the north and east of the island. Coercive intervention, with its ambiguous and eventually contradictory objectives, failed in almost all of its aims. Far from resolving the island’s ethnic conflict, the failure of the Indian enterprise greatly aggravated it and Sri Lankan governments of the future have had to cope with the consequences of this. As a result of its two-year conflict with the LTTE, the Indian intervention elevated that organization to an unquestioned leadership role among the Tamil separatist forces.
J.R. Jayewardene’s government was called upon to pay a heavy price in the erosion of its bases of support in the country. He had arrived in power in 1977 on a massive wave of popularity. He had lost much of this latter at the time he left office in 1989.13 India’s intervention in Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict was the cause of much of this change in his fortunes.