Monday, May 18, 2009

Towards a new Sri Lanka

The war is over in all but name. The LTTE's giant killing machine has been destroyed and the fate of Prabhakaran and other key terrorists will be known before long.
It may not be hyperbolic that little Lanka's victory over terrorism is not second to the near impossible rare feats of humankind like man's landing on the moon. Her war had the trappings of a David-Goliath contest with all the western powers, save a few, unabashedly siding with a savage terrorist outfit they themselves had outlawed on their soil. Even the UN handled Sri Lanka's war as if the LTTE were a member state! It is a miracle that Sri Lanka managed to crush terrorism.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his government must be commended for courageously withstanding tremendous pressure even from the likes of US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and prosecuting the war with a single minded will to succeed; and the armed forces, their commanders, the police, the IGP and, most of all, Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa deserve high praise for steering the war to a successful conclusion.

Sri Lanka's war was not fought on the military front alone. The LTTE and its collaborators opened several fronts – political, economic, diplomatic, human rights and propaganda. Hadn't the enemy been effectively neutralised on all those fronts, perhaps the country's military campaign would have come a cropper.

Ironically, when the LTTE received a decapitating strike at the hands of the Sri Lanka army, India rejected Eelam politically at a national election. AIADMK leader Jayaram Jayalalithaa, who turned India's parliamentary election into a referendum on Eelam by asking the Tamil Nadu people to give her a mandate to carve out a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka, has been rejected. The Congress Party, which came under fire in the Lok Sabha for helping Sri Lanka defeat the LTTE, has scored a spectacular victory. The people of India have spoken loud and clear and it is up to the LTTE backers to figure out what they have said: India is not for Eelam, which is as dead as a dodo. The US, the EU and Norway ought to take cognisance of the Indian people's eloquent verdict.

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