PRIME Minister Narendra Modi held talks with Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena in New Delhi on Friday. Contrary to the world community's expectations, the focus of the talks was not on what India can do to help Sri Lanka solve its ethnic problem, but the issue of fishermen straying into each other's waters. According to Indian officials, Sri Lanka currently holds 34 Indian fishermen and 96 fishing boats in custody while India has 13 Sri Lankan boats in custody and no Sri Lankan fishermen.
This was the sixth meeting between Sirisena and Modi during a short span of 15 months. Sirisena chose India for his first state visit after being elected early last year. Soon after, Modi traveled to Sri Lanka, becoming the first Indian prime minister to visit the island in 28 years. This is an indication of how deep are the ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious ties the two neighbors share. This also explains why the two also have a history of tumultuous relationship.
Sri Lanka's decades-old civil war involving Tamils was particularly sensitive to India, which has a large Tamil community concentrated in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. It was India's intervention in 1987 to solve the Tamil insurgency that led to the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The killing was the work of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which was fighting for a separate state for the island's Tamils in the north and east.
It was Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sirisena's predecessor, who ended a 37-year-old guerrilla war after defeating the LTTE in 2009. But the decimation of LTTE does not mean an end to the Tamil problem. Tamils have genuine grievances over education and employment. LTTE's terrorist excesses should not be used as an excuse to ignore them.
There have been some welcome changes in the attitude of the government toward Tamils after Sirisena came to power. The road blocks and military checkpoints in Tamil areas are gone; so are the restrictions on foreign tourists and journalists visiting the area. The military's engagement in day-to-day civilian life has lessened. But the Tamil residents say much more still needs to be done to heal the wounds of a long civil war.
Modi's talks with Sirisena centered on the issue of fishermen. While nobody questions the need “to find a permanent solution” to this issue, the world community was expecting the talks to produce a breakthrough in the search for a “permanent solution” to the Tamil problem in Sri Lanka which they consider even more urgent.
True, Modi approvingly noted the Colombo government's efforts to promote reconciliation in Sri Lanka. But reconciliation between the majority Sinhalese and the Tamils who constitute 16 percent of the population are impossible without addressing the problems, which drove the Tamils into the arms of LTTE in the first place.
Unlike LTTE, Tamils are now prepared for autonomy in a united Sri Lanka. So the government should renew negotiations with Tamils. It should also initiate action to resettle and rehabilitate hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians displaced by the war. The families of those who died, disappeared or were detained for long periods without trial need compensation. "We will have reconciliation when the government gives us real autonomy under a federal structure," says C. V. K. Sivagnanam, chairman of th
New Delhi is in a better position to put pressure on Tamils and the Colombo government to nudge them toward meaningful negotiations aimed at a solution to a problem, which has hampered Sri Lanka's development and poisoned relations between the country's Sinhalese majority and the Tamils as well as between India and Sri Lanka. The least Sri Lanka can do is to implement the 13th amendment to the constitution to give autonomy to Tamil areas as Modi urged in his visit to Jaffna in March 2015.
