India Moving to Curb Tamil Separatists

The recent sudden deportations of three key Sri Lanka Tamil separatist leaders by the Indian government has frightened other underground Tamil militants and stirred fears that India will prohibit the rebels from operating on the Indian coast against the Sri Lankan government.

The deportations of S. Chandrahasan, A.S. Balasingham and N. Satyendra also sparked anti-government demonstrations here in India’s Tamil Nadu state. All schools and universities were ordered closed by the state government afterstudent protests.

The United News of India news agency reported the arrest of 2,500 people Thursday on the eve of a planned nonviolent train stoppage called for today by opposition leaders.

Chandrahasan, an attorney and international fund raiser for the militants, was allowed back in the country Thursday after he appealed personally to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Earlier, Indian officials put Chandrahasan on an airplane bound for New York. However, he refused to seek admittance to the United States on the plane’s arrival.

2 Petition to Return

Attorneys for Balasingham, spokesman for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and Satyendra, a lawyer who represented the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization in the now-stalled peace talks with the Sri Lankan government, have petitioned several Indian courts for permission to return. Both men are in London, where Balasingham was once a university professor.

The deportations demonstrate India’s growing impatience with the Sri Lankan Tamils, who they feel are blocking efforts initiated by the Gandhi government to end the 10-year-old separatist conflict in Sri Lanka, an island nation of 15 million off the Indian coast.

The separatists seek an independent Tamil homeland, which they want to call Eelam, for the predominantly Hindu Tamil minority on the northern third of the island. About 80% of the island’s population is Sinhalese Buddhist.

Tamil sources in Madras said that Indian government pressure on militants began about three months ago with minor harassment.

The low point in the separatists’ increasingly hostile relationship with India apparently came Aug. 17 in Thimphu, Bhutan, after the peace talks broke down and Indian Foreign Secretary Romesh Bhandari went there to try to bring the parties together. During a visit with the Tamils, Bhandari got into an angry exchange with Satyendra, one of those later deported.

Government sources said that Balasingham was deported because he spoke openly against the peace talks, calling them futile. For his part, Chandrahasan had opposed the cease-fire.

“It would appear that these three fellows were bent on obstruction,” a high Indian official said in New Delhi, explaining why the three were chosen for deportation. After the men were served with deportation orders, the telephones in their offices here were cut off.

Militants Go Underground

In reaction, several other militant leaders, including the commander of Tamil Liberation Tigers, have gone underground, their associates here said.

Before the pressure began, the Tamil militants, grouped into the five main organizations, operated freely here in Tamil Nadu state, home for 50 million Tamil-speaking Indians who share religious and cultural ties with the Tamils of Sri Lanka.

Most groups maintained active political offices here, and the leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front, the Tamil’s main political party, is still given free lodging in the government guest house in Madras.

Several Tamil sources here asserted that at one time, the Indian government, through its foreign intelligence office, trained Tamil guerrillas in camps in remote areas of the state. The Indian government has repeatedly denied the existence of training camps.

Much has changed under Gandhi, who, since February, has been pressing steadily for settlement of the separatist conflict.

Gandhi announced in May that India would not allow a separatist Tamil state in Sri Lanka. He also said that if a Tamil state were established, it should have no more powers than a corresponding Indian state would have.

Gandhi’s reasons were obvious. India, with several separatist movements of its own, could ill afford the example of a successful separatist movement in a nearby nation, especially one that it was seen to have helped nurture.

“They (the Indian government) see the presence of the militants in Tamil adu as a danger to their integrity,” a Sri Lankan Tamil living here said. “You have to remember that in the 1960s, there was a fairly strong separatist movement here in Tamil Nadu (India).”