Taste of Humbug, Risk of Danger : By Aiding Tamils, India May Be Snapping Its Own Bonds

By intervening, albeit feebly, in the Sri Lankan communal struggle, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi is fighting for his own political survival. There are more than 50 million Tamils in India, and he is under intense pressure not to “stand idly by” while the Tamil minority across the straits is coerced by the Sri Lankan armed forces.

But for the Sri Lankans themselves, the issues are far more fundamental. There are only about 16 million of them altogether, the great majority Buddhists. They have a long history of wars with the Hindu mainland, whose people are divided from them by a deep chasm of religion, race and culture. The Hindu Tamils have been infiltrating Sri Lanka for centuries, crossing the straits in small boats and settling in the north of the island.

During the last three years their resistance fighters, the Tamil Tigers, have openly demanded a separate sovereign country in the north, reinforcing their demand by a merciless campaign of terrorism. The majority Sri Lankans fear that this enclave would be turned into a bridgehead, bringing a steady influx of millions of Tamils from poor, grossly overcrowded India into their relatively rich and underpopulated island. Their nightmare vision is that within a generation or two they would become a minority in their own country and the Tamils would take over.

Such demographic transformations inspire fear and violence. In Fiji the indigenous islanders, who have watched Asian immigrants overtake them to form 51% of the population and finally secure power through the ballot box, staged a military coup last month. They intend to rewrite the constitution to bar the Asians permanently from getting a parliamentary majority.

Throughout Southern Asia, from the Karakoram Himalayas in the northwest to the borders of Thailand in the southeast, political frontiers cut across religious, racial, linguistic and cultural divides. Every state has a large minority--often many, usually militant. In medieval and early modern times such anomalies were resolved by war and massacre or forcible conversions, or by stripping minorities of all rights.

The spread of Great Britain’s liberal empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, based on the abstract principle of the rule of law and equality before it, imposed a real if brittle multi-ethnic peace on this vast area. It did not matter to the British whether their subjects were Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim, which of the 500-plus languages they spoke or whether they were high- or low-caste, light- or dark-skinned--they were all “natives.” The British were not settlers (they retired to Britain), and so were impartial. They ran India with a mere 5,000 administrators and a British army that rarely numbered more than 60,000, so British rule was clearly by consent until modern Asian nationalism eroded it in the 1940s.

When the British left, Burma and Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) got their independence and the subcontinent split into Muslim Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India. And at once all the old minority problems re-emerged, with no neutral paramount power to arbitrate them. Burma cut itself off from the outside world, and has set about its own minorities with muffled ferocity. That option was not open to Sri Lanka. It is small, peaceful, poorly armed, and anxious to be democratic. Its efforts to find a solution to the Tamil demands for autonomy that fall short of partition, efforts usually supported by the Indian government, have been rebuffed by the Tigers. Last month Sri Lanka finally took the all-out military option. India has responded with an air drop of supplies to the Tamils, escorted by supersonic fighters.

India’s action, in view of its consistent and vociferous support at the United Nations for the peaceful resolution of disputes, has a smack of humbug. It is not uncharacteristic, however. India regards itself as the successor state to the British Raj, the regional superpower, and has often resorted to force. It invaded and still occupies most of Kashmir, where there is a Muslim majority. It took over Goa, whose inhabitants were allowed no rights of self-determination. It tried to settle its frontier disputes with China by force, and resorted to force to help the Bangladeshis break away from Pakistan. It would not be surprising if India used its considerable navy, as well as its air force, to browbeat the Sri Lankan government.

But there are dangers for India in such a policy. It has already aroused fierce criticism from Pakistan and rumblings from China. India is in no position to criticize Sri Lanka for trying to use its army to suppress a minority resistance movement. The Indian army is constantly employed in such tasks, notably in the Punjab and Assam. India has more minorities than all the other states in the area put together, some of them enormous. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Indians are killed in communal disputes every year. If it uses its state power to interfere in the internal problems of neighboring states, India exposes itself to retaliation, which could be devastating. Indeed India, of all large states, has the most to gain from a general and scrupulous observance of the rule of law, both internal and external. For India is a huge bundle of races, cultures, religions and regions, held together not by any natural ties but by the fragile bonds of law and democratic custom. Once these bonds finally snapped, India would become a vast theater of communal strife, making the troubles of Sri Lanka seem petty indeed.

India’s only sensible policy is to put its weight behind a compromise solution that leaves Sri Lanka intact, because in the long run that is the only way to preserve India’s national integrity, too.