New Delhi, March 19: For over a decade, Sri Lanka’s Tamil “problem” has dogged India’s coalition politics and brought down governments at the Centre. And in each instance, the DMK was the catalyst that precipitated the downfall.
Ironically, the DMK’s role did not eclipse its dominance in Tamil Nadu politics for long. After a rout, it bounced back and regained its role as a king-maker. Which is why, despite the Congress’s brouhaha over the DMK’s alleged complicity in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination — an episode that impinged on the feelings of the Gandhis — Sonia Gandhi sought it out as an ally in 2004 and ensured it remained with the Congress in 2009.
In 1997, when the Congress, under Sitaram Kesri, propped up the United Front government, which had the DMK as a principal constituent, the coalition crumbled like a pack of cards once the Jain Commission report was tabled in Parliament.
Congress persons lost little time in drumming up a campaign against the Front and withdrawing support. The Congress’s 1998 election manifesto hardly minced words when it outlined the reasons for bringing down the government.
“The Congress was aware of the understanding between a section of the DMK party and the LTTE…All these facts were commonly known, but it is for the first time they have been brought on record on the basis of oral and documentary evidence, in the report of a Commission of Enquiry,” it stated.
Stating there might be a legal quibble of the extent of the DMK’s involvement, the manifesto alleged: “…it is beyond doubt that the LTTE could not have killed Shri Rajiv Gandhi without the support and assistance it received from the DMK-led government.”
In 1999, after a thundering comeback in the Lok Sabha polls, the NDA embraced the DMK. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, stung and tormented for over a year by the AIADMK chief J. Jayalalithaa, discovered that the DMK was reasonableness personified. The party was indulged to such an extent that when the late Murasoli Maran was terminally ill, Vajpayee retained him as a minister without portfolio and the government underwrote Maran’s long-drawn medical treatment abroad.
But, nemesis caught up with the NDA, too, in 2002 in the shape of the LTTE.
The Vaiko-led MDMK, also an NDA constituent, became a target of Jayalalithaa’s (then the Tamil Nadu chief minister) ire.
On July 11, 2002, she arrested him under Pota (the Prevention of Terrorism Act) for a pro-LTTE speech he made a month ago in a rally at Tirumangalam.
Jayalalithaa, who today is demanding stiff sanctions against the Sri Lanka government for its alleged human rights violations against the Tamil population, had sought act against another state party, the PMK for reportedly glorifying Dhanu, the suicide bomber who killed Rajiv.
Jayalalithaa threatened to ban Vaiko’s party.
The ruling BJP proffered half-hearted support to Vaiko, saying the arrest was “unwarranted”.
A little over a year later, in December 2003, the DMK sundered its ties with the BJP and cited the crackdown under Pota of Vaiko as a reason. M. Karunanidhi, the DMK leader, slammed the BJP for condemning his party’s agitation for Pota’s repeal. The DMK was pressured by its cadre to take a stand on Vaiko’s arrest.
Cut to 2013.
The DMK’s decision to pull out of the UPA government was not formalised in a day, although its leaders claimed the tipping point came on Monday night, when Karunanidhi saw the US’s draft resolution on Sri Lanka that will be put to vote in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 22.
In 2009, Sri Lanka waged its final assault on the LTTE strongholds around the time India went to polls. Tamil Nadu political observers believe that the “full impact” of the “war”, to the “last gory detail of killings and rape” were not revealed then.
By the time the Assembly elections happened in 2011, videos and CDs, largely consisting of footages from UK’s Channel 4’s documentaries on the alleged atrocities were circulated in Tamil Nadu.
People in the southern districts that lay close to Sri Lanka had familial ties with the Tamils of the Jaffna peninsula. They were so upset with the visuals that they conclusively voted out the DMK-Congress combine. The DMK was wiped out in Madurai, the supposed bastion of Karunanidhi’s son, M.K. Alagiri.
Nearly two years later, the spur for the DMK to dabble in pro-Tamil politics came when Channel 4 released pictures of the alleged cold-blooded murder of LTTE supremo V. Prabhakaran’s young son by the Lankan soldiers.
This time, Karunanidhi, realising that the DMK was issue-strapped, torn with family conflicts and “saddled” with the UPA “baggage”, went for the kill without looking back.
Influenced by the human rights groups, the DMK sources charged the Indian government with watering down the US resolution against Lanka. They claimed the draft bore resemblance to foreign minister Salman Khurshid’s recent speech on Lanka in Parliament.
Sources said they were “unmoved” by the Centre’s apparent fire-fight that included the possibility of bringing in a parliamentary resolution, as sought by Karunanidhi, and forcing stronger amendments in the US draft. “Too late because there is no sincerity in what the government’s doing. It is only to appease the DMK and not to help out the Tamils,” a leader said.
