Suddenly, overflowing with concern for Lankan Tamils and instant affection for LTTE chief Prabhakaran, Jayalalitha in a statement published on November 20, accused Chief Minister Kalaignar of trying now to ‘blame’ Prabhakaran for the plight of Lankan Tamils in the island nation ‘to escape the wrath of the Tamil race’. She had also said that in 2000, “the DMK had extended full support to the UPA government, which did not raise its voice against the killings of Tamils in Sri Lanka and if Kalaignar had withdrawn the support at the beginning of 2008, ‘the war would have been stopped’. ‘At a time when the Union government could have played a meaningful role, it maintained silence’ she had added.
From the year 1989 to 2009, Jayalalitha by performing shameless somersaults coming a full-circle on the issue of Lankan Tamils and Tamil Eelam in general and the LTTE and Prabhakaran in particular. Bereft of any consistency in principles or ideology, the only motivating force in her public life is opposing Kalaignar on whatever he says or does and attempting one-upmanship over him, all of which ultimately end in fiasco.
In this context of the LTTE and Prabhakaran, while Kalaignar, since 1981, had all along been urging the various Tamil militant groups to unite and avoid fratricidal fights, MGR during his rule, patronized and pampered only the LTTE as against other groups. He instigated Prabhakaran to boycott TESO conference at Madurai on May 4, 1986 organised by Kalaignar, in which national leaders like A.B.Vajpayee and George Fernandes participated and also not to accept the fund mobilized by Kalaignar for all Lankan Tamil militant groups. But for the policy of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to actively support the cause of Tamil Eelam and training given and arms supplied to these groups, MGR would not have had the courage to extend support to them. MGR announced in the State Assembly on April 27, 1987, that he would give Rs.4 crore to the LTTE, and paid it the same day.
Jayalalitha also selectively supported the LTTE and its leader Prabhakaran in 1989 and 1990 even after the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord. She made several statements in press interviews and at public meetings between 1988 and 1990 backing the LTTE, even in the presence of Rajiv Gandhi. On February 22, 1988, she admitted she had met LTTE representatives in Chennai. In March 21, 1988, she demanded that India immediately halt the military operations against the LTTE and call Prabhakaran for discussions. On the other hand, when an LTTE delegation led by Anton Balasingam wanted to meet Kalaignar in 1990, he told them to come through the proper channel (Government of India) and this was carried by ‘The Indian Express’. Kalaignar, in an interview to the Indian Express on November 16, 1997 said “I had abided by the Centre’s policy (on Sri Lanka) and acted accordingly. The then Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and V.P.Singh in the 1989-1990 period had asked me to hold discussions with the LTTE and others with a view to bring about a compromise and a smooth solution to the Sri Lankan Tamils issue. I had also told the groups that Tamil Eelam was not possible and that they must accept State autonomy. In fact, Rajiv Gandhi himself praised my stand at election meetings in Tamil Nadu on 6.11.1989.”
Jayalalitha, on the contrary, in her media interviews in 1988, 1989 and 1990, had openly supported the LTTE, as the sole representatives of the Lankan Tamils and demanded military action to intervene in the ethnic problem. She had specifically criticized Kalaignar for ‘doing nothing’ to help the LTTE, as Chief Minister in 1990. Within a few months of the assassination of EPRLF leader Padmanabha and others in Chennai on June 19, 1990, Jayalalitha gave an interview to the Indian Express (October 4, 1990) stating that the LTTE had not indulged in any criminal activity in the last two months that gave room for complaint in the State. To a specific question whether the DMK government was rendering help to the LTTE, though not to the same extent as MGR did, she had said: “I see no evidence of it!” (All these she said when V.P.Singh was the Prime Minister and the DMK was ruling in the State)
But after the fall of V.P.Singh government in December 1990, she changed her tunes and turned anti-LTTE with the sole purpose of getting the DMK government dismissed by the Centre. She submitted a ‘confidential’ 102-page memorandum to the then Prime Minister Chandrasekhar on December 20, 1990, detailing evidence of ‘Karunanidhi’s links with Prabhakaran gang’, which Chandrasekhar found sufficiently irrefutable to dismiss the government on January 30, 1991, in the absence of Governor’s report, which the then Governor Thiru Surjit Singh Barnala refused to sign. In fact, the 102-page memorandum submitted by Jayalalitha was ‘doctored by the Chandrasekhar government to prepare ground for the dismissal of the DMK government. The conspirators were the then Law Minister Dr. Subramanian Swamy and the Minister of State for Home Affairs Subodh Kant Sahay with whom she co-ordinated.
In the General elections in May 1991, Jayalalitha made political and electoral gain in the brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumpudur by an LTTE suicide bomber, accusing the DMK of hobnobbing with the rebels and facilitating a base for them in Tamil Nadu. Swept to power on the sympathy factor following the heinous act, and in total change of track over her past statements on and relationship with the LTTE, she claimed credit for the ban on LTTE by the Centre and extensions of the ban.
She also declared that she had totally driven out LTTE from the soil of Tamil Nadu, took severe action against those who were sympathetic to the ‘terrorist outfit’ and maintained the state as a ‘garden of peace’. Having ascended to power on the blood of Rajiv Gandhi, the ungrateful Jayalalitha instigated a third rate woman platform speaker – ADMK legislator to speak in the Assembly that their ‘Puratchi Thalaivi came to power only by her influence among the people and not by showing the portrait of a corpse lying upside down with only and undergarment in the waist.’ While she had been charging that the DMK was close to the LTTE, the Centre sent a communication to the Jayalalitha government on September 28, 1993, that it had received information that the ‘LTTE had planned to eliminate’ Kalaignar in order to promote V.Gopalsamy (now MDMK leader). The Centre also wanted the ADMK government then to make proper security arrangements for him. The Jaya government wrote to Kalaignar on October 2, 1993, on the report on LTTE threat and suggesting a security arrangement which he accepted.
Jayalalitha having conspired along with Chandrasekhar government for the dismissal of the DMK government in 1991 on the baseless charges of links with the LTTE, is now claiming that Kalaignar government was not dismissed on the Lankan Tamils’ issue but for ‘infringing the sovereignty of India’ (What does this mean?)
Even while she continued to sell her vicious propaganda against Kalaignar in her deposition before the Jain Commission inquiring into the conspiracy angle in Rajiv Gandhi assassination, the spat between her and Subramanian Swamy accusing each other of having prior information of the plot to kill the former Prime Minister, was well known. However certain questions still remain unanswered mysteries. They were, why Jayalalitha or even none of her party functionaries or cadre went to Meenambakkam airport on the fateful day to receive the leader of their alliance and why none accompanied his motorcade to Sriperumpudur? How and why Jayalalitha cancelled her joint campaign with Rajiv Gandhi scheduled at Poonamalle, Sriperumpudur and Krishnagiri even before his arrival at Chennai?
After coming back to power in 2001, Jayalalitha continued with her drive against LTTE supporters in the state. In the year 2002, in an unprecedented move, the Tamil Nadu Assembly urged the Centre to seek immediate extradition of Prabhakaran to stand trial for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In case the Sri Lankan Government was unable to capture the LTTE chief, the Indian Army should be sent to nab him after taking the Lankan Government’s permission, the Assembly stated in a resolution which was adopted on April 16. India’s silence on attempts by the Sri Lankan Government to portray Prabhakaran as a lover of peace and the sole representative of Tamils there could be misconstrued as India’s support to such moves, the resolution warned. Especially since Prabhakaran declared at his Press meet that his organisation had not given up the demand for a separate Tamil Eelam. Speaking while moving the resolution, Jayalalitha said there should not be any laxity in bringing Prabhakaran to justice in the name of having good diplomatic ties with Sri Lanka.
A few days prior to that, Jayalalitha said that even if the Centre allowed Tiger spokesman Anton Balasingham to come to India for treatment, Tamil Nadu’s doors were closed to him. The people were “greatly shocked” by Prabhakaran’s April 10 news conference at Kilinochchi, the resolution said, rejecting the advocacy of “forget-the-past attitude” with regard to Rajiv Gandhi’s murder. The resolution said that though the Centre has branded the LTTE a terrorist organisation, other pro-LTTE groups like the TNLA and the TNRT posed a threat to the country’s security. Jayalalitha even accused forest brigand Veerappan of being aided and abetted by the LTTE.
When the Congress and the DMK entered into electoral alliance for the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, Jayalalitha denied Tmt. Sonia Gandhi and questioned her ‘loyalty to her husband’. The Congress President snubbed her by her majestic indifference to such sub-standard woman’s babbles.
This year 2009 saw Jayalalitha turning topsy-turvy over the position she had been taking all these years since 1991, and going back to the 1999 stand. On January 17, she told journalists at her party office in Chennai, that the LTTE was using Tamils as human shield in the war against Sri Lankan army.
“The killing of the innocent Tamils can be avoided if the LTTE allows them safe passage,” she said. She argued that the Sri Lankan army’s intention was not to kill the Tamils. “But the killing of innocents is inevitable in a war. No country is an exception.” She even took exception to the usage, ‘Eelam Tamils,’ saying it could not be used since there was no separate Eelam. Instead, she preferred the word, ‘Sri Lankan Tamils.’
As for the demand for India’s intervention to ensure a ceasefire, Jayalalitha said there was a limit to how far one country could interfere in the internal affairs of another country. She said the fact remained that the LTTE was a terrorist organisation. “Many countries have declared the LTTE a terrorist organisation. It has been banned in India.” Jayalalitha said the fast observed by Viduthalai Chiruthaikal Katchi (VCK) leader Thol Thirumavalavan, demanding a ceasefire in Sri Lanka, was a drama and reflected the argument that the outfit was the sole representative of Lankan Tamils. Her statements were widely carried in the official website of Sri Lankan Defence ministry.
When Kalaignar penned an elegy condoling the death of LTTE’s political wing leader Tamil Selvan on 4.11.2007, Jayalalitha jumped heaven and earth and accused him of still patronizing the LTTE.
But suddenly on the eve of Lok Sabha elections, when the concern for ending war in Sri Lanka was on the high, Jayalalitha took up the cause with the calculation of reaping electoral gains and ‘vouched’ that she would secure Eelam for Tamils by sending army. Not only the pro-LTTE elements like Nedumaran, Vaiko, Dr. Ramadoss and D.Pandian uncritically and unquestioningly welcomed her somersault, but also the pro-LTTE websites started putting up her statements. Even while she was thundering Tamil Eelam slogan on the stages, when Kalaignar told NDTV on April 16 that he would regret the killing of Prabhakaran in the war but would say it was because of their fratricidal feuds, Jayalalitha spoke to the CNN-IBN TV the very next day at Madurai in the midst of her campaign and asked Tmt. Sonia Gandhi, as ‘widow of Rajiv Gandhi’ to come out against Kalaignar for ‘glorifying’ the killers of her husband. Surprisingly, the pro-LTTE leaders of Tamil Nadu not only aligned with and supported Jayalalitha but never questioned her on such occasions.
As a whole, Jayalalitha did not ever have any consistent stand on Lankan Tamils issue and their fight for self-determination, but it was dictated by political and electoral conveniences and exigencies. She displayed a set of outlook and attitude whenever she was in power and another when she was not and Kalaignar ruled the state. It is not that either those who are in her alliance or the so-called enlightened and well-informed media are not aware of her inconsistencies and somersaults; but do not criticize or question her in their antipathy for Kalaignar and the DMK, thereby justifying and still upholding the validity of the views of Thanthai Periyar on casteism, caste-hierarchy and casteist arrogance !
(29-11-09)
From the year 1989 to 2009, Jayalalitha by performing shameless somersaults coming a full-circle on the issue of Lankan Tamils and Tamil Eelam in general and the LTTE and Prabhakaran in particular. Bereft of any consistency in principles or ideology, the only motivating force in her public life is opposing Kalaignar on whatever he says or does and attempting one-upmanship over him, all of which ultimately end in fiasco.
In this context of the LTTE and Prabhakaran, while Kalaignar, since 1981, had all along been urging the various Tamil militant groups to unite and avoid fratricidal fights, MGR during his rule, patronized and pampered only the LTTE as against other groups. He instigated Prabhakaran to boycott TESO conference at Madurai on May 4, 1986 organised by Kalaignar, in which national leaders like A.B.Vajpayee and George Fernandes participated and also not to accept the fund mobilized by Kalaignar for all Lankan Tamil militant groups. But for the policy of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to actively support the cause of Tamil Eelam and training given and arms supplied to these groups, MGR would not have had the courage to extend support to them. MGR announced in the State Assembly on April 27, 1987, that he would give Rs.4 crore to the LTTE, and paid it the same day.
Jayalalitha also selectively supported the LTTE and its leader Prabhakaran in 1989 and 1990 even after the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord. She made several statements in press interviews and at public meetings between 1988 and 1990 backing the LTTE, even in the presence of Rajiv Gandhi. On February 22, 1988, she admitted she had met LTTE representatives in Chennai. In March 21, 1988, she demanded that India immediately halt the military operations against the LTTE and call Prabhakaran for discussions. On the other hand, when an LTTE delegation led by Anton Balasingam wanted to meet Kalaignar in 1990, he told them to come through the proper channel (Government of India) and this was carried by ‘The Indian Express’. Kalaignar, in an interview to the Indian Express on November 16, 1997 said “I had abided by the Centre’s policy (on Sri Lanka) and acted accordingly. The then Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and V.P.Singh in the 1989-1990 period had asked me to hold discussions with the LTTE and others with a view to bring about a compromise and a smooth solution to the Sri Lankan Tamils issue. I had also told the groups that Tamil Eelam was not possible and that they must accept State autonomy. In fact, Rajiv Gandhi himself praised my stand at election meetings in Tamil Nadu on 6.11.1989.”
Jayalalitha, on the contrary, in her media interviews in 1988, 1989 and 1990, had openly supported the LTTE, as the sole representatives of the Lankan Tamils and demanded military action to intervene in the ethnic problem. She had specifically criticized Kalaignar for ‘doing nothing’ to help the LTTE, as Chief Minister in 1990. Within a few months of the assassination of EPRLF leader Padmanabha and others in Chennai on June 19, 1990, Jayalalitha gave an interview to the Indian Express (October 4, 1990) stating that the LTTE had not indulged in any criminal activity in the last two months that gave room for complaint in the State. To a specific question whether the DMK government was rendering help to the LTTE, though not to the same extent as MGR did, she had said: “I see no evidence of it!” (All these she said when V.P.Singh was the Prime Minister and the DMK was ruling in the State)
But after the fall of V.P.Singh government in December 1990, she changed her tunes and turned anti-LTTE with the sole purpose of getting the DMK government dismissed by the Centre. She submitted a ‘confidential’ 102-page memorandum to the then Prime Minister Chandrasekhar on December 20, 1990, detailing evidence of ‘Karunanidhi’s links with Prabhakaran gang’, which Chandrasekhar found sufficiently irrefutable to dismiss the government on January 30, 1991, in the absence of Governor’s report, which the then Governor Thiru Surjit Singh Barnala refused to sign. In fact, the 102-page memorandum submitted by Jayalalitha was ‘doctored by the Chandrasekhar government to prepare ground for the dismissal of the DMK government. The conspirators were the then Law Minister Dr. Subramanian Swamy and the Minister of State for Home Affairs Subodh Kant Sahay with whom she co-ordinated.
In the General elections in May 1991, Jayalalitha made political and electoral gain in the brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumpudur by an LTTE suicide bomber, accusing the DMK of hobnobbing with the rebels and facilitating a base for them in Tamil Nadu. Swept to power on the sympathy factor following the heinous act, and in total change of track over her past statements on and relationship with the LTTE, she claimed credit for the ban on LTTE by the Centre and extensions of the ban.
She also declared that she had totally driven out LTTE from the soil of Tamil Nadu, took severe action against those who were sympathetic to the ‘terrorist outfit’ and maintained the state as a ‘garden of peace’. Having ascended to power on the blood of Rajiv Gandhi, the ungrateful Jayalalitha instigated a third rate woman platform speaker – ADMK legislator to speak in the Assembly that their ‘Puratchi Thalaivi came to power only by her influence among the people and not by showing the portrait of a corpse lying upside down with only and undergarment in the waist.’ While she had been charging that the DMK was close to the LTTE, the Centre sent a communication to the Jayalalitha government on September 28, 1993, that it had received information that the ‘LTTE had planned to eliminate’ Kalaignar in order to promote V.Gopalsamy (now MDMK leader). The Centre also wanted the ADMK government then to make proper security arrangements for him. The Jaya government wrote to Kalaignar on October 2, 1993, on the report on LTTE threat and suggesting a security arrangement which he accepted.
Jayalalitha having conspired along with Chandrasekhar government for the dismissal of the DMK government in 1991 on the baseless charges of links with the LTTE, is now claiming that Kalaignar government was not dismissed on the Lankan Tamils’ issue but for ‘infringing the sovereignty of India’ (What does this mean?)
Even while she continued to sell her vicious propaganda against Kalaignar in her deposition before the Jain Commission inquiring into the conspiracy angle in Rajiv Gandhi assassination, the spat between her and Subramanian Swamy accusing each other of having prior information of the plot to kill the former Prime Minister, was well known. However certain questions still remain unanswered mysteries. They were, why Jayalalitha or even none of her party functionaries or cadre went to Meenambakkam airport on the fateful day to receive the leader of their alliance and why none accompanied his motorcade to Sriperumpudur? How and why Jayalalitha cancelled her joint campaign with Rajiv Gandhi scheduled at Poonamalle, Sriperumpudur and Krishnagiri even before his arrival at Chennai?
After coming back to power in 2001, Jayalalitha continued with her drive against LTTE supporters in the state. In the year 2002, in an unprecedented move, the Tamil Nadu Assembly urged the Centre to seek immediate extradition of Prabhakaran to stand trial for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In case the Sri Lankan Government was unable to capture the LTTE chief, the Indian Army should be sent to nab him after taking the Lankan Government’s permission, the Assembly stated in a resolution which was adopted on April 16. India’s silence on attempts by the Sri Lankan Government to portray Prabhakaran as a lover of peace and the sole representative of Tamils there could be misconstrued as India’s support to such moves, the resolution warned. Especially since Prabhakaran declared at his Press meet that his organisation had not given up the demand for a separate Tamil Eelam. Speaking while moving the resolution, Jayalalitha said there should not be any laxity in bringing Prabhakaran to justice in the name of having good diplomatic ties with Sri Lanka.
A few days prior to that, Jayalalitha said that even if the Centre allowed Tiger spokesman Anton Balasingham to come to India for treatment, Tamil Nadu’s doors were closed to him. The people were “greatly shocked” by Prabhakaran’s April 10 news conference at Kilinochchi, the resolution said, rejecting the advocacy of “forget-the-past attitude” with regard to Rajiv Gandhi’s murder. The resolution said that though the Centre has branded the LTTE a terrorist organisation, other pro-LTTE groups like the TNLA and the TNRT posed a threat to the country’s security. Jayalalitha even accused forest brigand Veerappan of being aided and abetted by the LTTE.
When the Congress and the DMK entered into electoral alliance for the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, Jayalalitha denied Tmt. Sonia Gandhi and questioned her ‘loyalty to her husband’. The Congress President snubbed her by her majestic indifference to such sub-standard woman’s babbles.
This year 2009 saw Jayalalitha turning topsy-turvy over the position she had been taking all these years since 1991, and going back to the 1999 stand. On January 17, she told journalists at her party office in Chennai, that the LTTE was using Tamils as human shield in the war against Sri Lankan army.
“The killing of the innocent Tamils can be avoided if the LTTE allows them safe passage,” she said. She argued that the Sri Lankan army’s intention was not to kill the Tamils. “But the killing of innocents is inevitable in a war. No country is an exception.” She even took exception to the usage, ‘Eelam Tamils,’ saying it could not be used since there was no separate Eelam. Instead, she preferred the word, ‘Sri Lankan Tamils.’
As for the demand for India’s intervention to ensure a ceasefire, Jayalalitha said there was a limit to how far one country could interfere in the internal affairs of another country. She said the fact remained that the LTTE was a terrorist organisation. “Many countries have declared the LTTE a terrorist organisation. It has been banned in India.” Jayalalitha said the fast observed by Viduthalai Chiruthaikal Katchi (VCK) leader Thol Thirumavalavan, demanding a ceasefire in Sri Lanka, was a drama and reflected the argument that the outfit was the sole representative of Lankan Tamils. Her statements were widely carried in the official website of Sri Lankan Defence ministry.
When Kalaignar penned an elegy condoling the death of LTTE’s political wing leader Tamil Selvan on 4.11.2007, Jayalalitha jumped heaven and earth and accused him of still patronizing the LTTE.
But suddenly on the eve of Lok Sabha elections, when the concern for ending war in Sri Lanka was on the high, Jayalalitha took up the cause with the calculation of reaping electoral gains and ‘vouched’ that she would secure Eelam for Tamils by sending army. Not only the pro-LTTE elements like Nedumaran, Vaiko, Dr. Ramadoss and D.Pandian uncritically and unquestioningly welcomed her somersault, but also the pro-LTTE websites started putting up her statements. Even while she was thundering Tamil Eelam slogan on the stages, when Kalaignar told NDTV on April 16 that he would regret the killing of Prabhakaran in the war but would say it was because of their fratricidal feuds, Jayalalitha spoke to the CNN-IBN TV the very next day at Madurai in the midst of her campaign and asked Tmt. Sonia Gandhi, as ‘widow of Rajiv Gandhi’ to come out against Kalaignar for ‘glorifying’ the killers of her husband. Surprisingly, the pro-LTTE leaders of Tamil Nadu not only aligned with and supported Jayalalitha but never questioned her on such occasions.
As a whole, Jayalalitha did not ever have any consistent stand on Lankan Tamils issue and their fight for self-determination, but it was dictated by political and electoral conveniences and exigencies. She displayed a set of outlook and attitude whenever she was in power and another when she was not and Kalaignar ruled the state. It is not that either those who are in her alliance or the so-called enlightened and well-informed media are not aware of her inconsistencies and somersaults; but do not criticize or question her in their antipathy for Kalaignar and the DMK, thereby justifying and still upholding the validity of the views of Thanthai Periyar on casteism, caste-hierarchy and casteist arrogance !
(29-11-09)
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