It’s ironical that the fate of the IDPs should have become the centre-piece of politics of the kind. Worse still should be the comparison with the recent past, when ‘competitive politics’ in the south Indian State dictated that the political Opposition raised all those war-cries on behalf of the LTTE, only to be left out since.

For close to three decades, Sri Lanka, namely, the ethnic issue, has dominated politics in Tamil Nadu. Yet, it’s also the first time that Tamil Nadu politicians were visiting Sri Lanka in some substantive capacity – even if not as an official delegation authorized as such by the Government of India or the State Government.

Whatever political delegation that had traveled in the reverse route during the period had been limited to those from the affected Tamil community. There was none of the kind from the Sinhala polity, though it had faced the brunt of the ethnic politics in Tamil Nadu that was linked to Sri Lanka.

Prior to the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983, there was little movement even from the Tamil side in Sri Lanka to Tamil Nadu. Barring the substantive visit of the late S J V Chelvanayagam in 1960, there had been none until 1983. Even at the time, SJV received no great commitments from the ethnically-identified Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), which like his Federal Party had been founded in 1949.

However, it was also not the first time that the Sri Lankan leadership had made an earnest attempt to keep the Tamil Nadu polity in the loop on the ethnic issue. Before President Mahinda Rajapaksa, his predecessor, Chandrika Kumaratunga and then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had met Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa during their India visits.

In the case of President Rajapaksa too, it was not the first effort made by him to rope in Tamil Nadu. To consider however that he was either trying to ‘win over’ political Tamil Nadu to ‘his side’, should be seen as a product of political naiveté. As a political leader, President Rajapaksa, to say the least, would have been aware of the ‘competitive’ element in pan-Tamil politics of the south Indian State as much as any other.         

Before writing to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi, asking to send a team of State politicians to visit the IDP camps, President Rajapaksa had openly called upon the latter and also former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa to intervene in the ethnic war and facilitate possible surrender by the LTTE.

He had persistently approached Chief Minister Karunanidhi, through Upcountry Tamils leader Arumugan Thondaman ever since a new Government assumed in office in Tamil Nadu in May 2006, for the south Indian State’s involvement in the ethnic row. Thondaman was still in the political Opposition when President Rajapaksa sent him as an official emissary with an invitation for Chief Minister Karunanidhi to visit Sri Lanka. That was only a fortnight after Karunanidhi had returned as Chief Minister for the fifth time in four decades.

Earlier, during first foreign visit after assuming office in December 2005, President Rajapaksa also sought to meet Jayalalithaa, who was then Chief Minister. It is another matter that the meeting did not take place, but it was not for want of trying from the Sri Lankan side. It’s anybody’s guess if such visits and meetings would have produced any results on the national front, given in particular the intransigence of the LTTE leadership.

It is not as if the visit by a Tamil Nadu team to Sri Lanka is to help end the row, overnight. It’s far from that. The complexities of the issue are little understood in Tamil Nadu, and would require the knowledge and commitment of Sri Lankans, starting with representatives of Tamil political parties, for finding a political solution.

The fact also remains that bilateral relations even between the Tamils in the two countries go – and should – beyond the national issue. It’s just a beginning, and any furthering of such exchanges involving politicians from the two countries should go a long way in the mutual understanding of each other’s problems and positions on a variety of issues.

Granting that an amicable solution is to be found to the issue in the none-too-distant future, there is a lot that the politicians from the two countries, particularly those from Tamil Nadu and other southern States on the Indian side, could do through a better understanding of mutual positions and multifarious posturing by different stake-holders on either side.

From the Tamil Nadu side, future delegations could well include Opposition politicians and also State legislators. From Sri Lanka, there is an urgent need for the Sinhala political class going beyond those frequent visitors to temples, astrologers and god men in south India, for them to be able to shed their biases and see people and view their positions dispassionately. The reverse should also be true.

In the immediate context, a new angle is unfolding in the vexatious fishermen’s problem involving Tamil Nadu fishermen and the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN), with the attendant ‘Kachchativu issue’ adding to the complexities. Post-war, Tamil fishermen from Sri Lanka are re-entering the nation’s seas from which they were barred for much of the past 30 years. In the coming months and years, it is the Tamil fishermen from Sri Lanka who may have problems with their Indian counterparts allegedly poaching in their traditional fish belts.

It is becoming increasingly clear – however low profile such an understanding be at this stage – that for a final solution to the problem, fishermen from the two countries have to sit together and arrive at a catch-sharing formula, if anything has to work on the ground – or, in the seas, to be precise. A greater interaction between the Tamil Nadu politicians and the fishermen communities from the two sides could well lead to a possible de-politicisation of the issue beyond a point.

For now, the Tamil Nadu team would have had a taste of what awaits their people and Government when a group of fishermen from among the Tamil community in Sri Lanka submitted a memorandum to them. The demand, it is said, was for them to be allowed to fish in the territorial waters of Sri Lanka without interference by their Indian counterparts. It’s not as simple as that but then de-politicisation of the issue could go a long way in finding an acceptable solution based on livelihood concerns.

Even without the fishermen’s problem, the interplay of policies in the two countries and domestic politics in either or both of them is too important to be ignored – but too ‘unimportant’ to have been noticed in the first instance. It was thus that ‘free import’ of Sri Lankan farm produce like tea, rubber and coconut into India in the late Nineties caused a crash of domestic prices for the producers in south India. In political terms, it contributed in no small measure to the electoral defeat of the ruling parties in Tamil Nadu (DMK) and Kerala (Congress) in the simultaneous Assembly elections held in 2001.

(To be continued tomorrow)