O J's Corner : Reflections

Rajiv Gandhi’s killers

The confessions of Anton Balasingham, the ideologue of LTTE, that the terrorist organisation deeply regrets the assassination of Indian icon Rajiv Gandhi do not create a bit of pathos. The remarks do not generate feelings of sadness and sympathy.

On the contrary, his statement does provide moments of comic bathos. It has been a U-turn from the terrorist organisation’s assertions on the assassination. By doing so the LTTE has trivialised the most brutal elimination of the scion of a family that has been the heart-throbe of millions of people right from the pre-Independence days.

Some of Rajiv’s actions, committed out of political immaturity among the wily tribe of opportunists here and elsewhere in the world, might have been flawed.

Balasingham’s was not an outburst to the NDTV interviewer, but calculated tactics to involve India one way or other in the conflict causing conflagration in Sri Lanka these days. LTTE is at war with the Sri Lankan Government. That is its business. It thinks that this outfit alone is capable of protecting the Tamils in the island nation.

It may have its strengths, but a close confidant of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the chief of an outlawed outfit and wanted by India in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, making suggestions to draw sympathy from Rajiv Gandhi’s family and the people of India to fetch intervention for the terrorist organisation to wriggle out of the war in Lanka is far-fetched.

LTTE may want the hawks in Tamil Nadu to implead its case before the UPA Government led by Dr Manmohan Singh. That by being terribly sorry about the “monumental historical blunder” of eliminating the soul of Indian progress, it thinks that political parties in Tamil Nadu would clamour for India providing help to it.

Balasingham had said if the past was put aside and a new approach made, the possibility of India playing a positive role in bringing a resolution to the conflict in Lanka would be available.

The LTTE did not want India to intervene militarily. Neither did it want India to play a mediator’s role as long as it kept LTTE outlawed.

India banned LTTE as a terrorist organisation in 1992 and Prabhakaran is wanted in the country for Rajiv Gandhi’s killing.

India should persuade Sri Lanka politically and diplomatically to seek a negotiated settlement as made out by Balasingham.
Dr Manmohan Singh had urged Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse to keep the armed forces at bay from killing innocent civilians. Also there should be ways to provide some form of regional autonomy.

Tamils’ plea for honorable living conditions in Sri Lanka cannot be faulted. That there should be or should not be armed conflict, terrorist operations and guerrilla warfare for achieving their objective is their look-out.

I don’t think LTTE would come to terms with anything short of a separate Tamil eelam in the long run, whatever its professions on the contrary when confronted with short-term solutions. It is already a country within a country.

America will not condone its terrorism anymore. On that strength, Pakistan’s  ISI cannot contribute much to its kitty.

Let us better be hands off Lanka, for LTTE cannot be trusted. Its emissaries had met Rajiv Gandhi early in May 1991. Within a fortnight, it had killed India’s most promising Prime Minister.