India to express fears that Rajiv Gandhi has bitten off more than he can chew.
GERRY FOLEY
A
FTER THE LAUNCHING of the
Indian offensive against Jaffna, the major city of the Tamil heartland in northern Sri Lanka, the major Indian news magazine India Today commented in its October 31 issue:
"The initial assessment that the action would be over in five days was later revised to 20 days. The very fact that IPKF strength in northern and eastern Sri Lanka was doubled to an official 16,000 (unofficial sources put it closer to 30,000) and supplemented with squadrons of tanks,
APCs [armoured personnel carriers] and even a battalion of para-commanders who air-dropped over Jaffna, indicates that the
IPKF has literally caught a tiger by the
Furthermore, the Indian magazine quoted statements from Tamil moderates expressing concern about the political effects of the Indian offensive. Dr Neelan Tiruchelvam, described as "a leading Colombo lawyer" and a former MP for the Tamil United
Liberation Front (TULF, the Tamil parliamentary party, said:
"The action of the IPKF in launching its military offensive against the LTT [the Tigers] is a set-back to the whole peace process. It is alienating significant sections of the Tamil population, because a large section of the Tamil population had emotionally identified itself with the Tigers."
In its following issue, November 15, India Today's worries increased. "On October 26, Jaffna fell to the IPKF and the guns were silenced, but the war is far from over." Even taking the IPKF's figures on the Tiger casualties, it estimated "at least
1,500 Tigers have managed to evade the
IPKF noose and mingle with the locals or have escaped to other areas." It went on to point out: "The Tigers are certain to carry
International Viewpoint • December 7, 1987 on their guerrilla war using the hit-and-run tactics similar to the terrorists in Punjab. The only difference is that they will be facing the Indian Army who privately admit that they could be bogged down in northern and eastern Sri Lanka for at least another two years. In fact, according to top level defence sources, the Indian Army is in the process of setting up a reserve Southern Command headquarters sector in northern Sri Lanka under Lt-General Khajuria, a former director of Military Intelligence, which obviously means that they are prepared to stay around for some time."
The same issue carried an unusual report from behind the Tiger lines by correspondent Shyam Tekwani. He took note of brutalization and fanaticism of the youthful guerrillas. "Occasionally the blood lust came through, when they pulled out chocolates from the shirt pocket of a bloody corpse and passed them around while idly kicking at the remains of a human brain."
But he was also impressed by their conviction and the way that they had been hardened by a long war with the Sri Lankan security forces: "Their confidence, after two weeks of fighting, comes from their conviction that the IPKF is untrained in the kind of urban guerrilla warfare that, for many Tigers, has been their whole life. The trademark cyanide phials [for suicide, if captured] are no longer worn inside their shirts but flaunted openly." Tekwani was convinced that popular support for the Tigers remained firm: "There is no mistaking the complete identification of the Jaffna civilian with the LTTE fighters."
In its next issue, India Today expressed the fear that the Indian government was also getting bogged down on the Sinhalese front: "New Delhi's entanglement in the Sri Lankan situation is starting to drag it self was "now under siege from all sides."
In the latter respect, it referred to two main events, a bombing in Colombo attributed to Sinhalese nationalists and to a Supreme Court decision that two provisions of the package designed to implement the autonomy provisions of the accord were unconstitutional. Four of the nine judges considered the entire package unconstitutional, in contradiction to the unitary state enshrined in the country's constitution. The court ruling raised the spectre of a referendum on the accord, which politicians fear could create an explosive situation.
Jayawardene manages parliamentary majority
The Sri Lankan president, Jayawardene, managed to get a majority in parliament for his measures. "But still, the backdrop to the parliamentary drama was bloody. Apart from the bomb outrage, JVP [Janatha Vimukti Permuna, a Sinhalese nationalist organization] sympathizers staged strikes on campuses, burnt state buses, tried to derail trains and threw three southern towns into darkness by sabotaging power lines."
The liberal-left Colombo magazine Lanka Guardian made little direct comment of its own on the situation following the Indian offensive. It preferred to run two major articles by Indian observers. One, by Bhabani Sen Gupta, director of the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, ended with the following conclusion:
"What is needed on the Indian side is determination to secure the minimum objectives of the fighting in Jaffna — significant disarming of the Tigers - and quick withdrawal of the bulk of IPKF. No more than a few thousand Indian soldiers must remain in Sri Lanka on New Year's Day. This country has always opposed prolonged foreign military presence on the territory of a sovereign state, except in the case of UN peace-keeping forces. India can hardly make India an exception to one of the articles of faith of its own foreign policy." The other article, by Nikhil Chakravarty, editor of the influential Maintstream, ended with a conclusion that seemed to be a counterpoint to that of Bhabani Sen Gupta:
"The perspective before the Indian Army in Sri Lanka is fearsome. The scope of conventional positional operations is minimal: instead, it will have to grapple with full-scale guerrilla attacks by a determined, well-armed group, well entrenched in the support of the local population....Had the Indian authorities made a serious assessment of the type of adversaries they had to contend with, they would have realized the enormity of the disaster which our armed forces are being pushed into." *
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8
HE SUCCESS of Chesterfield was also a response to the third Tory victory in June this year, a victory which was at the same time a third defeat for the Labour leadership. The background to this lies in the defeat of the miners' strike, but the Tory victory was based — in part at least — on their ability to convince enough people that their economic policy was sound and could produce wealth enough to overcome mass unemployment and maintain the National Health Service and parts of the welfare state, despite clear evidence that they did not intend to spend money in these ways. The Labour Party's incapacity to develop a credible economic policy, despite popular manifesto commitments on social policy, partly explains their defeat.!
However, the world stock market crash and the continuing turbulence in the markets since has suddenly and dramatically undermined this Tory ideology of a "share-owning democracy". The flotation of British Petroleum shares was a fiasco, with the underwriters left to pick up a bill of several billion pounds.2 This leaves the privatization policy of the government in some doubt, as well as the future of projects such as the Channel tunnel, whose shares are due to be floated shortly.
Despite these events, the Labour leadership is hard put to it to make any gains out of the problems of capitalism. At the party conference Bryan Gould [Labour's trade and industry secretary] led the Labour leadership's capitulation to Thatcher's economic framework, calling for the workforce to be allowed to take shares in their companies — a policy which now looks like a call for the workforce to carry their share of the losses!
### Collapse into Tory consensus
This collapse into the new Tory consensus reveals very starkly the crisis of leadership, in the face of mass unemployment, falling living standards, the increasing unpopularity of Tory policies and growing resistance by the working class to the effects
This crisis also extends to the trade-union leadership. The majority of union leaders - with the honorable exception of Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the leadership of the Civil and Public Servants Association (CPSA, whose deputy general secretary is Militant supporter John MacCreadie) -have succumbed to the "new realism" of Trade Union Council general secretary Norman Willis. This is a "realism" that, as Scargill pointed out at Chesterfield, is neither new nor real but simply old-fashioned class collaboration.
Along with continued moves to the right on economic policy and defence at this autumn's Labour Party conference, there were increased attacks by the labour