New Delhi
22 December 2007
The leaders of Tamil Nadu should pass a unanimous resolution that
the ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka must be given powers equivalent to the chief minister of
the southern Indian state, according to Tamil United Liberation Front President V
Anandasangaree.
The endorsement of a federal solution by the likes of DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi and
AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa would be the first of a fourfold roadmap Mr
Anandasangaree will suggest the Indian leadership to consider. The remaining three
steps will entail facilitation by India, the backing by the international community, and the
start of political process.
Mr Anandasangaree is visiting New Delhi with Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation
Front leader Varadaraja Perumal, People's Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam and
Democratic Peoples Liberation Front President D Sithadthan and Eelam People's
Revolutionary Liberation Front (Pathmanabha) General Secretary Sritharan for talks with
the Indian leaders and officials. They are likely to meet with Foreign Secretary
Shivshankar Menon on Monday.
Mr Anandasangaree's roadmap is dictated by a belief that the 60 million Tamils living
across the Palk Straits, in Tamil Nadu, hold the key to the resolution of the decades-long
ethnic conflict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the majority
Sinhala community in Sri Lanka.
He insisted that the roadmap can work only if the initiative comes from Tamil Nadu. "We
must start with Tamil Nadu," he said, insisting that Tamil Nadu alone will ensure a
durable solution. "We want the solution in full once and for all. We don't want a solution
in instalments," he added for good measure.
Mr Varadaraja Perumal, in turn, explained that a united response from the Tamil Nadu
politicians will help to remove the suspicion with which the Sinhala community views
Tamils living in Tamil Nadu and dispel an impression that Tamil Nadu politics is anti-
Sinhalese.
Armed with that resolution, New Delhi can approach Colombo in what will be the second
step of the proposed roadmap, Mr Anandasangaree told this newspaper. He is confident
that Colombo will not reject the idea out of hand.
In the third step, the international community can give its full backing to the reasonable
solution mooted by India and Sri Lanka and ask them to move ahead with the process of
devolving powers to the ethnic Tamils.
The fourth and last step of the roadmap will be to lean on the LTTE to give up its demand
for a separate homeland and to embrace democratic processes, to be followed up by a
fresh cease-fire agreement.
"They must be told that separatism is a dream," Mr Anandasangaree said, adding that
the non-LTTE Tamil groups represented by him and the members of his delegation would
be prepared to give the LTTE one term to rule.
"We are prepared to give way for them," he asserted, suggesting that the tussle for
being recognised as the sole representative of the ethnic Tamils can be resolved later
through democratic means.
"Ill treatment from LTTE is the problem," Mr Anandasangaree asserted, suggesting that
the people of Tamil Nadu must not continue to believe that their Tamil brethren in Sri
Lanka are getting a raw deal from the Sinhala community. He pointed out that the LTTE
has stepped up forcible conscription of children and killings have become an everyday
affair. "The atrocities are so intolerant, people are so fed up with them, they hate them,"
he said.
Mr Anandasangaree's roadmap is not without its share of critics. Mr Sithadthan felt that a
federal solution can become worthy of consideration only if the two main political parties
in Sri Lanka today, the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the United National Party,
which is in the Opposition, decide to come together.
Sharing his "realistic, but not pessimistic" view, Mr Sithadthan said that the UNP and the
SLFP would never comes to a consensus on their own. "India must put pressure,
otherwise there can be no solution," he maintained. "War is imminent and definite," he
added, dismissing the possibility of immediate cessation of hostilities.
For its part, New Delhi has chosen to take a position that much will depend on the
sincerity of the government headed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, unity of the non-
LTTE groups, and whether Colombo will wipe out the Tamil cause in the guise of wiping
out terrorism. There is a view here that quality of devolution will be a factor of physical
capacity to inflict pain and armed resistance, of the LTTE kind, might be needed till a
devolution package is brought to the table.
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