Malaysian Tamils being sprayed with water cannons during Sunday’s protest in Kuala Lumpur

Chennai, Nov. 28: M. Karunanidhi has urged the Prime Minister to take up the cause of Malaysian Tamils, whose recent anti-government rally carried faint echoes of the early days of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict.

In a letter written to Manmohan Singh yesterday, Karunanidhi expressed pain at the way Kuala Lumpur police used tear gas and water cannons to break up a rally of 10,000 Tamils on Sunday and detained over 200 protesters. He asked Singh to take “appropriate steps” to “mitigate the sufferings and the bad treatment of the Malaysian Tamils”.

The people of Tamil Nadu are “disturbed over the happenings in Kuala Lumpur”, the chief minister added.

Although the letter is merely a logical extension of the DMK chief’s championing of Tamil expatriates — from Lanka to across the Malacca Strait — many have read in it a larger, domestic political motive.

The appeal to Singh comes days after Karunanidhi wrote a poem lamenting the death of a Tamil Tiger militant, annoying his main ally. The Congress considers the LTTE a pariah after it assassinated Rajiv Gandhi.

Since the 1991 killing, the DMK has distanced itself from the militant group, at least in public, although its leaders keep making remarks sympathetic to Lankan Tamils at large.

But after a Lankan air force raid killed top militant leader Thamilselvan on November 2, the chief minister eulogised him in his poem Selva, Where did you Go?

As LTTE sympathisers in Lanka patted Karunanidhi in the back, state Congress leaders expressed dismay. Many believe that the chief minister’s sudden appeal on the Malaysian Tamils’ behalf is at least partially a placatory message to the ally.

The message seems to be that his poem should not be understood as support for the Tigers but as an expression of his general sympathy for Tamil expats worldwide.

Karunanidhi risks little controversy by backing the Malaysian Tamil protesters, who carried the Mahatma’s pictures as they marched against the alleged marginalisation of ethnic Indians in their country. Tamils make up the majority of Malaysian Indians.

A pro-Tiger Tamil website in Lanka, however, has interpreted Karunanidhi’s poem on Thamilselvan as a “subtle message that the Tamils of Sri Lanka have not gone brother-less”.

It adds, rather embarrassingly for the chief minister, that his “emotion-filled condolence gains significance in the background of a prevailing impression that the Government of India is fully backing the war efforts of the Government of Sri Lanka”.

The website has also posted an alleged condemnation of Thamilselvan’s killing from Karunanidhi’s daughter and Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi.

Karunanidhi’s letter comes a day before a group of 34 Malaysian Tamil writers arrive in Chennai for a 16-day “literary tour” of historical and archeological sites in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.

They will meet scholars and writers and present papers at some universities on the evolution of Malaysian Tamil literature and the influence of Tamil Nadu on the expats’ culture.