Outsiders' stake in conflict zones

The Dravidian parties — the DMK, the AIADMK, the MDMK of Vaiko — have been exerting disproportionate political pressure on central governments at all times over the issue of Sri Lankan Tamils. The Congress has been more vulnerable on this issue because of its perceived southern political sensitivity. The BJP, too, has been trying to share the same empathy for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause as a means of boosting its own southern stakes. What is overlooked in this complicated political skein is the basis of the link between the politics of Tamil Nadu and the fortunes of the Sri Lankan Tamils. Most political experts and foreign policy wizards seem to think that the linkage is axiomatic and that it need not be examined or scrutinised, and that the challenge is to manage it at every turn of political crisis. For example, the debate on  whether Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should attend the CHOGM, the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, to be held at Colombo from November 15-17, clouds the real questions and the real issues at stake.The basic, preliminary question to be raised is whether Tamils in India or elsewhere can claim to have a concern or stake in the state of affairs of Tamils anywhere in the world, including in Tamil Nadu? The presumption seems to be that of some old historical connection and the cultural affinity it implies. It is the same kind of concern that the BJP extends to Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh and Fiji. The government in Pakistan and some of the member countries of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) make claims for their concern over the state of Indian Muslims. This transnational political claim based on cultural and religious linkages has to be rejected for the sake of sanity in international politics. The Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu cannot claim any justification to speak for Sri Lankan Tamils. The question belongs squarely in the domain of the domestic politics of Sri Lanka. Similarly, Indian foreign policy strategists need to be ticked off when they invoke concepts like strategic interests and extended neighbourhoods to look over the domestic issues of countries in the region. This has also led to the folly of training and arming some of the Sri Lankan Tamil groups on Indian soil with disastrous consequences.There are similar and apparently successful cases of outsiders looking into others’ affairs. A small example is that of some Indian Muslim groups, encouraged by the Congress and other Left secular groups, to identify the cause of the Palestinians as a Muslim question and the politics that was based on it, especially that of India’s relations with Israel. This line of politicking has receded in the last decade and more because the Palestinians have welcomed the strengthening of India-Israeli relations. The bigger case is that of the influential American Jewish community attempting to mould United States’ Israel policy. Many experts have persuasively argued that there is a clear link between the US’s Middle East policy and the powerful Jewish lobby. But a more objective examination reveals that what concerns the Washington policy-makers has more to do with the national interests of the US, rather than the sensitivities of the articulate, aggressive American Jewish advocates of Israel. The Arab governments have been trying to organise themselves like the American Jews into a powerful lobby for the Palestinian cause but they have not had much success. It is because most Arab governments are rather lukewarm about the issue of Palestine.There are three other examples when outsiders’ stakes in conflict zones go beyond mere lobbying. One of them is the support, in money and sympathy, of non-resident Irish Catholics, especially in the United States, for the Irish Republic Army, which was actively engaged in acts of terrorism in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to the middle of 1990s. It was American mediation which culminated in the 1998 Easter clandestine handshake between IRA’s Gerry Adams and then British Prime Minister Tony Blair that ended the murky chapter of an overseas lifeline for political terrorism.The second example is that of overseas Sri Lankan Tamils in Britain, Canada and some of the Scandinavian countries which threw the lifeline of finances and arms to the terrorist groups in Jaffna, especially that of the now decimated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Many liberals in Tamil Nadu, who are quite eloquent about the plight of Jaffna Tamils, were shamefully silent on this aspect. This support has been disrupted after the US and other Western governments changed their stance on political terrorism in other countries after the September 11, 2001, terror assault in New York and Washington. It is this change in stance of the Western governments that helped the Mahinda Rajapaksa government to make the successful and final military offensive against the LTTE in 2009.The third example of outsiders staking claim in a domestic conflict is that of the jihadis, supported unofficially by some of the Arab governments and Pakistan, in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Jammu and Kashmir. The jihadis were recruited from Algeria, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Afghanistan. The global jihadi network is snapping though it continues to erupt in spurts. Arab governments have found it to be unfruitful, though Pakistan still believes that it can be used as a calling card in international councils.This phenomenon of outsiders claiming cultural, racial and religious affinities across national borders and interfering in domestic political conflicts, however grievous, can only be described as underworld internationalism. This is a trend that needs to be actively discouraged by politicians and political parties in every country, whatever the short-term political and strategic dividends.The author is editorial consultant with dna