The visit of Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee to Colombo this week, hot on the heels of that of Indian Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon, has raised many eyebrows in political, diplomatic and military circles, leading to yet another round of speculation as to what the journey was all about.

There were quite a few reasons for such speculation to erupt. For instance, the Menon visit, although at a low level in terms of diplomatic protocol, was conducted at a leisurely pace with the visiting dignitary travelling to Kandy to meet with President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Mukherjee’s visit in contrast, was almost unannounced and carried out at lightning speed.

Already the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna has hypothesised its own conspiracy theory, saying Mukherjee was in Sri Lanka to pressurise Colombo into granting devolved powers to the minority communities, far in excess of those envisaged in the 13th Amendment. There has been no official response to this claim.

Instead, what we witnessed was television footage of President Rajapaksa, flanked by top officials and armed with maps, explaining to the visiting Indian minister what appeared to be the finer details of the military exercises that are currently in progress in the North.

The ‘official’ explanation for the hurry that Mukherjee was in, was that he was also deputising for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who was convalescing after heart surgery. But that gave rise to the query as to why Mukherjee then had to visit Sri Lanka at all, when what he discussed at his whistle-stop tour could have been done through a telephone call.

This question perhaps provides a clue to the mystery of the Mukherjee visit. He visited Colombo because he had to physically travel to Sri Lanka, to convey a message intended for interested parties in India: that New Delhi is indeed concerned about the crisis in Mullaitivu where the Sri Lankan military is poised for a decisive victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
But that message was two-fold: while India was indeed worried about the plight of civilians caught in the final conflict between the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and the LTTE, it was also in no mood to sympathise with the plight of the Tiger terrorists.

This, Mukherjee was careful to clarify, in comments made to the media prior to his departure from India. India’s concern is the safety of civilians, Mukherjee said, and added for good measure that the LTTE was still a proscribed organisation in India.
The unsaid message was that New Delhi couldn’t do much about the Tigers’ eventual fate in the on-going conflict.

Policy
Therefore, do we now have an idea on India’s broad policy framework regarding the Sri Lankan crisis? Is it the official policy of this Indian regime that it has washed its’ hands off the LTTE? Can we now rest assured that India will not intervene to thwart a final military thrust that will annihilate the Tigers as armed combatants, as it had done before, most notably during the Vadamarachchi operations in the late eighties?

The answer, at least for the moment, seems to be ‘yes’ and this must be considered a significant diplomatic victory for Colombo.
The Indian response, in fact, is the result of a coalescence of several factors: The LTTE’s complicity in the Rajiv Gandhi murder, the shift in the global attitude towards terrorism, a realisation that a continuing conflict in Sri Lanka is inimical to Indian interests and last but by no means the least, the recent Mumbai terror attacks.

But Sri Lanka will also do well to realise that India’s relative reluctance to actively involve itself in the current crisis, is not to be taken for granted. Indian policy is subject to the ebbs and flows of domestic politics, which is heavily influenced by the political currents in Tamil Nadu, and their impact on the affairs of the central government in New Delhi.

Then again, these are liable to change as India itself goes to the polls at which the Sri Lankan issue would undoubtedly be used by opportunistic politicians at state and national level, to woo the sixty six million Tamil population in India.

Thus, the current favourable stance from New Delhi must be viewed as a window of opportunity for Sri Lanka and not a license forever.

India’s ostensible decision not to pursue an adventurist policy in Sri Lanka - at least for now - provides Colombo the ideal launching pad to deliver the killer punch to the Tigers. In that sense, what Mukherjee did not do while in Colombo is probably more important than what he actually did.

But the government must also not forget that just as much as its military efforts are being lauded by the world at large which marvels at the remarkable progress made by the country’s armed forces against arguably the world’s most ruthless terrorist organisation, it still has an unenviable task ahead: that of decapitating the Tigers, while at the same time ensuring the safety of some quarter million civilians who now form a human shield for the LTTE.

The Sri Lankan Armed Forces, therefore, can take a bow. But they must also rise to the final challenge before them, because Indian intervention or not, the entire world is watching this painful denouement of Sri Lanka’s Eelam war.

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