With the DMK's base looking shaky, it's unlikely to pull out of the UPA.
The intelligence community in the US, UK, France, Australia and the Scandinavian countries is watching political events unfolding in Tamil Nadu with great interest. Unfortunately, the war in Sri Lanka has gone on so long that they’re the only ones still interested in it. Will the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) — credited with the assassination of at least two heads of government, more than a dozen ministers, about 500 leading political rivals and thousands of civilians including women and children — get another lease of life via the politics in
Tamil Nadu? Will Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu Muthuvel Karunanidhi cause the government to become a minority one on October 29, the day on which his deadline expires — if the government doesn’t intervene by then, he says all his MPs will resign. If this happens, what are the chances of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and its allies coming to power? Without the DMK, can the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) form a government again?
The background is this: For more than one year, President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapakse, has been drumming into Sinhala minds that a military victory over the ‘terrorist’ LTTE is not only desirable but also possible. As victory for the Sri Lankan Army in north and east Sri Lanka spells inevitable defeat for political forces in Tamil Nadu, the DMK, which is also a member of the UPA, is being asked the same question it had itself asked a few decades ago: Is India so emasculated that it cannot protect the rights of “our tholars (brothers) in Tamil Nadu ?”
Whether the answer is yes or no, the DMK is in a bind. A supremely disdainful Jayalalithaa didn’t even bother to go to the all party meeting of Tamil Nadu MPs he called to protest military action in the north and east of Sri Lanka and to call upon the Indian government to get Sri Lanka to declare a cease fire in 15 days (that deadline ends on October 29). All that the UPA government was able to do was call the Sri Lankan Deputy High Commissioner in New Delhi and give him a dressing down, followed by a statement by the prime minister and the foreign minister about respect for human rights that the Sri Lankans just waved away.
There is little scope for military action against Sri Lanka after the unfortunate dispatching of the Indian Peace Keeping Forces. All you can do it talk to Colombo (which incidentally is the capital of Sri Lanka and not Jaffna — a fact India tends to forget sometimes).
But conceding that would be tantamount to failure to protect Tamils. And for a Tamil, if you can’t protect the honour of a brother, it is better die — or at least threaten to resign from your Parliament seat.
The fact is that as general elections draw near, one of the DMK’s worst nightmares is beginning to come true.
In an assembly of 235, the 15 Left party MLAs who used to support the 95-member DMK are now out of the alliance over the Indo-US civil nuclear agreement. Angry at being insulted and reviled by the DMK, the 18 member PMK exited the state government some time ago. Now it is just the 35-member Congress that is supporting the DMK. If the DMK sends the Union government into a minority on October 29 citing atrocities on Tamils, the Congress will be only to happy to withdraw support from the DMK government in Tamil Nadu, sending it, in turn, into a minority. Thus the possibility looms large that in addition to general elections, Tamil Nadu might have to face an assembly election as well, almost three years ahead of schedule.
Things are not too good for the DMK-led government. The price rise and the power situation in Tamil Nadu have taken a toll. The DMK can do little about inflation, but the power shortage in Tamil Nadu is pretty much its own creation. Tamil Nadu is short of around 2000 Mw of power and there are no lights in virtually all of Tamil Nadu in the evenings when homes switch on lights while industry is running at the same time. Karunanadhi’s defence is that none of the independent power producers who had promised to set up power plants during the previous ADMK government, did so. He is now reduced to seeking power from industries that have captive power plants which run on diesel —– so desperate is he that he is willing to subside the per-unit difference in cost.
Against this background, it is unlikely that Karunanidhi will want to open up two fronts even at the cost of Jayalalithaa walking away with the propaganda advantage from the killing of Tamils in Sri Lanka. At the same time, a ‘Tamils in danger’ theme serves to distract from urgent development challenges faced by Tamil Nadu. Either way, the LTTE is safe and the rights of Tamils in Sri Lanka, just another casualty of politics in India.
