India and the LTTE
Shivshankar Menon’s book on some of India’s major foreign policy decisions, Choices , gives the history and the reasons for India’s continually changing stance in the LTTE story in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s original Tamils are very different from the Tamils of India. Under Britain’s divide and rule policy, they were the favoured elite – the English-speaking class that was disproportionately represented in the civil services. Another big chunk of Tamils in Sri Lanka were brought in by the British to work on the plantations. After independence, a resentful Sinhalese majority declared the Indian-origin Tamils stateless, i.e., non-citizens, and changed the national language to Sinhalese. Tamils were next discriminated against in jobs. By the 70’s, the Tamils’ resentment boiled over and violent outfits sprang up. Amongst them, the LTTE went on to dominate. Tit for tat violence soon became the norm. In the 80’s, the growing violence in Sri Lanka raised 2 concerns in India: ...