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Home and the World

Why not be blunt about it? Our prime minister has cut a sorry figure while reacting to M Karunanidhi's proposal for a Czechoslovakia-type solution to the Sri Lanka problem. To suggest that the Tamil Nadu chief minister's views are "personal" is bizarre. The prime minister is obviously in a desperate bid to adopt a stance that, in his view, will give his government a face-saving formula to tackle the threat from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

The Tigers, like it or not, have travelled a long, hard distance since 1983, when the civil war began in Sri Lanka. In this period, the international community spurned them. There was a time when India thought it could establish its overlordship in Sri Lanka by taking advantage of the tussle between the Colombo regime and the Tamils clamouring for an honourable settlement that would grant them some quasi-sovereign status. Now that they have travelled a long, victorious road all by themselves, no doubt they are going to pitch their demands higher. Some kind of devolutionary arrangement will no longer satisfy them; they are now in search of honourable, full-scale sovereignty.

On the battlefront, they have got the Sri Lankan Army and navy cornered, which is why the Sri Lankan president has sought last-minute assistance from the Government of India. This show of initiative on her part is, however, likely to make her unpopular even amongst the local Sinhalese. They, as much as the LTTE, have memories of the misadventure Indian Army personnel were involved in after the agreement signed by Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister of India and then Lankan president, the late J R Jayawardene, in 1987. That was a sorry episode.

Gandhi's dream of establishing Indian dominance in South Asia was soon shattered. The India-Sri Lanka Agreement of 1987 was instrumental in causing more harm than good to both India and Sri Lanka.

The world at large may dislike the technology of terror the LTTE has evolved in the island and its neighbourhood. There is also intense universal distaste for the mode of recruitment and training of suicide bombers. The international community is, however, unlikely to poke its head to bring the LTTE round to civil behaviour. By now the LTTE has learnt that it has to fight its own battle and choose its own modalities, howsoever disagreeable they may appear to be. The Colombo regime must have also reached the conclusion that the LTTE at this stage is nearly unstoppable, which is why there was an outburst of desperate, last-minute appeals to India and others to bail it out.

Even if New Delhi were to reject the once-beaten-twice-shy formula, it can hardly ignore the shift in ground conditions that has taken place in the course of the past decade in the country's domestic circumstances. The Constitution, drafted in 1949, had assigned the task of shepherding the nation's foreign affairs exclusively to the care of the government at the Centre. Such was also the understanding for foreign trade.

But the Constitution is not a magic wand. Even if it be a written one, it has to give precedence to the realities that emerge over time. In the name of conserving the unity and integrity of the nation, those who have enjoyed formal power in New Delhi over the years have done things that have rendered the supposedly federal structure far more wobbly than it was in the beginning.

The Constitution had aimed at a patchwork of arrangements, whereby the federating states would willingly agree to set aside foreign affairs to the Centre's care. Jawaharlal Nehru -- who was the foreign minister besides being prime minister throughout his tenure -- had set up a tradition which has continued till recently. This has been so even when the prime minister was not formally in charge of external relations. The prime minister has worked out the major features of foreign policy in minute detail and the nation has gone along, despite occasional convulsions such as over the McMahon Line or the Line of Control in Kashmir.

But political dynamics asserts itself. Domestic developments of diverse kinds have cast their shadow on the formation of foreign policy. No Tamil party can hope to survive if it is not careful, at least ambivalent, in expressing its views about the LTTE. Two of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's close allies in the Tamil Nadu government are even more vocal in the declaration of their accord with the LTTE's hopes and aspirations.

An aura of romanticism attaches to the notion of an independent, sovereign Tamil entity which Indian Tamils cannot detach themselves from completely. So it is futile on the part of the prime minister to imagine that the Tamil Nadu point of view about a prospective Sri Lankan settlement can be ignored. Whatever the Constitution might say, the pressure of domestic politics will force the prime minister to redesign his Sri Lanka policy.

There is a further dilemma that globalisation has brought about. Foreign trade is no longer the absolute charge of the Centre. Foreign parties, including foreign transnational corporations, have, with or without encouragement from international financial institutions, exemplified considerable initiative to establish a direct relationship with state governments. The Centre has politely and tactfully left things to develop on their own. It could hardly do otherwise, given its repeated declarations to encourage direct foreign investment in the country.

The Constitution will rest in peace. The government at the Centre will have to accept the new environment in which the country's external policy has to be framed. New Delhi will also have to worry about the reverse phenomenon, the impact of domestic policy on international relations.

One of the essential concerns of domestic policy is to ensure that Inter-Services Intelligence agents from Pakistan are squeezed out. But while doing so, attention needs to be given to certain issues that cannot but have a substantial impact on external relations.

A short example will enlighten what we have in mind. Successive regimes in New Delhi have considered it expedient to annoy the Left Front government in Tripura by encouraging tribal forces to be on the rampage on the slightest of pretexts, or even without any pretext. Central Intelligence Bureau personnel have reportedly been in the lead to mobilise political groups opposed to the Left Front and see to it that they receive direct and indirect assistance from central agencies. They have achieved some success of late and the Left Front has been ejected from its majority in the territorial council.

But reports are currently afloat that harassment of the Left Front government in Tripura has reached a stage where there is an alliance between the opposition political parties, agents of Pakistan's ISI, and some branches of the Central Intelligence Bureau who have not been receiving up-to-date instructions from New Delhi. In the process there has been a certain waywardness in intelligence activities which has frustrated the objectives of the national government.

It is a mixed-up situation and unless the Centre appreciates some of the nuances of the new reality, foreign and domestic relations are in danger of coming to clash with each other, leading to confusion in the formulation of basic issues in both arenas.

Ashok Mitra