India stars in Sri Lanka polls too close to call

Sri Lanka's presidential polls on January 26, between incumbent President Mahinda Rajapakse and the combined opposition candidate Sarath Fonseka, may be surprisingly too close to call, even as it has emerged that Rajapakse did the Congress party a favour during the Lok Sabha elections in Tamil Nadu last year by withdrawing the use of heavy weaponry against pro-Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebels in the last days of the war.

Conversations with both Indian and Sri Lankan analysts have revealed that Rajapakse, who advanced the date of the presidential polls by two years because he wanted to take advantage of his victory in the 25-year-long war against the LTTE, is surprisingly being given a run for his money by his former army commander and retired general, Sarath Fonseka.

"It is a very tough fight, whoever wins will win by a whisker," said an Indian analyst recently returned from Sri Lanka, who sought anonymity. While Fonseka had cut into Rajapakse's traditional Sinhala base, he said, the Sri Lankan president's campaign was also being hurt by "rumours", including one in which Rajapakse's two brothers, Basil and Gotabhaya, his advisor and defence secretary respectively, are supposed to have fled the country. "They haven't, they are just campaigning in two different parts of Sri Lanka," said the Indian analyst, dismissing the rumour.

As little as two months ago, Fonseka was the rank outsider—about whom it was said that none other than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh warned Rajapakse last year, when he was still the army chief, that he could overthrow the president in an armed coup — and Rajapakse was the inveterate insider.

But over the last few weeks, the large Tamil minority (about 13 per cent) in this Buddhist Sinhala-dominated nation of nearly 21 million people, seems all set to play the role of kingmaker, changing the shape and character of an election that Rajapakse had hoped would be little more than a walkover.

Meanwhile, as Sri Lankan leaders flew into India to seek support—Fonseka is believed to have come on a secret visit to Mumbai earlier this month, while the pro-LTTE Tamil National Alliance (TNA) was in Delhi last week and met Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao—India is once again becoming publicly embroiled in the island's domestic politics.

At the centre of the election campaign is the question over whether Sri Lanka's Special Forces fired upon LTTE leaders bearing white flags in the penultimate days of the war which ended on May 19, 2009. Fonseka says he was not on the scene at the time, but in China to source more ammunition, and that the order to fire upon the surrendering Tamils came from none other than defence secretary and the President's brother, Gotabhaya Rajapakse.

A hardline Sinhala Buddhist himself, Fonseka—who, in a 2008 interview said of the Tamils that "they must not try, on the pretext of being a minority, to demand undue things"—has been assiduously courting the Tamil vote and succeeding in persuading the TNA, as well as ideologically disparate parties such as the extreme left-wing Janatha Vimukti Peramuna, the Sri Lankan Muslim Congress and the Western People's Front, besides former PM Ranil Wickeramasinghe's United National Party, to support his candidature.

"All these parties have different ideologies but one objective, which is to unseat Rajapakse," said Satyamoorthy of the Observer Research Foundation in Chennai. While India had stated that it would work with whoever came to power, Satyamoorthy admitted that Delhi was uncomfortable with the JVP, that, indeed, few people in the region knew who Fonseka was and what he stood for, and were also somewhat uncomfortable about the fact that "yet another army commander" could take over the reins of a key South Asian nation.

Interestingly, several key countries like the US and Norway—a peace broker between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE until the accord was abandoned in 2008—have issued statements that are being interpreted in Colombo as favouring Fonseka.

Meanwhile, as Fonseka's statement accusing the Rajapakse brothers of killing surrendering LTTE civilians in cold blood looked like it was back-firing upon him, the Rajapakse side fired another salvo. It unleashed its top bureacrat, Presidential secretary Lalith Weeratunga, to tell the Daily Mirror newspaper in a televised webcast about a fortnight ago, that India had requested the Sri Lankan president to tone down his fight against the LTTE last year.

According to Weeratunga, on the eve of the parliamentary polls in Tamil Nadu, on April 25, 2009, a "very high-level delegation" from India—consisting of then national security advisor M K Narayanan and then foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon, who has now been named to succeed Narayanan as the NSA—flew into Colombo to meet Rajapakse and request him to stop using heavy weaponry against the LTTE, because of the negative impact this was having on the Indian Tamil population in Tamil Nadu.

"They had a very important initiative. Elections were being held in Tamil Nadu and if the government of India did not do something to stop what the rest of the world thought was the massacre of the Tamils, as it was wrongly termed, the Tamil population in Tamil Nadu wouldn't have voted for the Congress party," Weeratunga said in the webcast. Apart from the President, Weratunga said, he and Gotabhaya Rajapakse were present in the meeting with the Indian visitors.

"They had come to tell (the President), please stop this, please stop this," Weeratunga quoted his Indian guests as saying, adding, "He (the President) was very emphatic. We have suffered heavily for 30 years and can't allow the LTTE to now go scot free, 300,000 Tamil civilians are being held hostage by the LTTE as a human shield, and we are trying to liberate them."

Over the course of the interview, Weeratunga conceded to the Daily Mirror journalist that with 6 million Tamils in their country, "India has a well-meaning interest in Sri Lanka." And after the conversation went back and forth for some time, Rajapakse asked what he could do to help.

Weeratunga also conceded that it was this "understanding" and "empathy" for each other that "made India and Sri Lanka come together." Two days after the meeting with Rajapakse, the Sri Lankan national security council issued the order, on April 27, that no heavy weaponry would be used against the Tamil civilian population.

Indian analysts concurred in the belief that the timing of the Weeratunga interview, in the run up to the January 26 presidential polls was significant, and that it had been given because the Rajapakse government wanted to send out the message that Delhi and Colombo were united in their fight against the LTTE and remained committed in the fight against terror. "If Rajapakse can signal to his people that India is on his side, then it could make a big difference between winning and losing," the Indian analyst said.