India and Pakistan

(The 2007 Sri Lanka cricket team.)

Sri Lanka is (sadly) accustomed to violence.  So is Pakistan.  But yesterday Sri Lankans– specifically members of the national cricket team– were attacked by gunmen in Pakistan.  The team escaped unharmed, but five Pakistani police died. 

Experts say the attack resembled the Mumbai attacks earlier this year– but so far, no one knows who attacked or why.  And that’s where it gets strange.

LTTE does have a reputation for supplying weapons to militant groups around the globe.  Al Queda-affiliated groups are likely customers.  Does this attack suggest a deepening link between tactic-similar but target-divergent terrorist groups?  Only time will tell.

(BBC photo.)

Bowing to political pressure from Tamil groups in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, India has agreed to send food aid to the Tamil population of war-torn northern Sri Lanka. 

This is an interesting political development: in the early days of the conflict, India supported the LTTE as a hedge against the Sri Lanka government.  However, as it became clear that the LTTE was a real threat to Sri Lanka’s unity, India ceased its support.  As a nation with separatist movements of its own– including one in Tamil Nadu– India can’t afford to let LTTE succeed.  (Plus it wants to convict and execute LTTE leader Prabhakaran for the murder of then-Indian-President Rajiv Gandhi.)

Indian Tamils have little in common with Sri Lankan Tamils, aside from a common language.  Indeed, those Indian Tamils brought to Sri Lanka as laborers by the Brits have been treated poorly by the Sri Lankan Tamil leadership (including the LTTE) and largely support the government.  However, the Tamil language does create a common bond at some level– Tamils in India would rather communicate in English, the language of colonization,  than in the national Hindi, a symbol of domination by the Aryan north.  (The language issue in southern India is complex.  A friend of mine who lived in Bangalore originated in Kerala and spoke Malayalim as a native tongue.  She spoke Kannada, the language of Karnataka where she settled, and Tamil which was spoken by her maid, and Telegu, spoken by her driver.  These are the four main Dravidian languages prominent in the South.  She also spoke fluent English.)

The seperatist movement in Tamil Nadu is politically influential, but far less potent than the LTTE.  It might be argued that Inida’s Tamils use the threat of seperatism as a lever for compromise by the Indian government– something the Sri Lanka government never did with its own Tamil minority.  Still, there is an ethnic bond between Tamils in the two countries, a humanitarian concern if not a political affinity.  And India’s central government, unlike Sri Lanka’s, has political considerations that require it to address the concerns of its ethnic minorities. 

And so 800 metric tons of badly needed food will travel to northern Sri Lanka, thanks to the democratic process in India.