नितिन गोखले एनडीटीवी के रक्षा मामलों के रिपोर्टर हैं . उन्होंने अपनी पुस्तक ‘ फ्रॉम वार टू पीस ‘मैं इसका खुलासा किया है की कैसे श्री लंका ने भारत की गुप्त मदद से लिट्टे के आतंकवाद का खात्मा किया . मुख्यत भारत की नौ सेना ने लिट्टे के आतंकी जहाजों मैं जो सामग्री रखी थी उसके बारे मैं लंका की नौसेना को जानकारी दी और उसने सुदूर ऑस्ट्रेलिया के तटों के पास जा उन जहाजों को डुबोया . भारत ने डीएमके को नाराज न करने के लिए खुल कर लंका का साथ नहीं दिया परन्तु परोक्ष रूप से भारत पूर्णतः लंका के साथ था . चीन व् पकिस्तान तो खुल कर लंका के साथ थे .यह राष्ट्रपति राजपक्षे की बड़ी कुटनीतिक कामयाबी थी . उसके पहले भी लंका के राष्ट्रपति जय वर्धने ने भारत के सैनिकों को इस लड़ाई मैं झोंक दिया था और हमारे २००० सैनिक मारे गए थे . इसके बदले भारत को क्या मिला इस का जिक्र कोई नहीं करता . आज श्री लंका मैं चीन की पन्दुब्बियाँ तैनात हैं . वह पाकिस्तान का ज्यादा मित्र है . परन्तु लिट्टे के खात्मे मैं भारत का भी बड़ा योगदान था.
Rediff के इस लेख को लिंक पर क्लिक कर पढ़ें
Nitin Anant Gokhale, NDTV’s Defence and Strategic Affairs Editor, has been reporting on military affairs and militancy from hostile terrains like India’s north-east, the Kashmir valley and the Naxal heartland.
His latest book Sri Lanka: From War to Peace is based on his reportage of the 33-month civil war in Sri Lanka. Gokhale chronicles the details of an unprecedented military campaign by the Sri Lankan armed forces and analysis the reason for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s decline.
In this exclusive excerpt, he details how the Indian government, bound by domestic political compulsions, covertly helped the Sri Lankan army and navy to scour out and destroy the LTTE.
By the end of November 2008, the script was no longer in LTTE chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran’s hands.
It was being written by the Sri Lankan forces tacitly supported by India and openly assisted by China and Pakistan.
Since December 2005, when Mahinda Rajapaksa made his first visit to New Delhi less than a month after he took over as Sri Lanka’s president, India was aware of his intention to take the LTTE head on.
Although in the initial days he was advised to seek a negotiated settlement with the Tigers, New Delhi saw merit in Rajapaksa’s argument that the LTTE was only biding its time to regroup and rearm itself and that war was inevitable sooner than later.
And if the LTTE was preparing for a showdown, Rajapaksa did not want to be caught off guard either. His armed forces needed to be ready for any eventuality.
The president therefore sent his brothers Basil and Gotabaya to New Delhi with a shopping list for essential weapons and equipment that the Sri Lankan armed forces needed. The shopping list included air defence weapons, artillery guns, Nishant unmanned aerial vehicles and laser designators for precision-guided munitions.
Initially, New Delhi was non-committal.
Top officials involved in the talks on either side told me that in its typical bureaucratic style, New Delhi neither said yes nor said no to the visiting Sri Lankans. So the two brothers went back slightly disappointed but were still hopeful of getting Indian help.
Outwardly, India did adopt a hands-off policy vis-a-vis the Sri Lanka conflict. But that was because of domestic political compulsions born out of the fact that the ruling United Progressive Alliance government in New Delhi was dependent upon the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party from Tamil Nadu for its survival in Parliament.
Aware of DMK chief M Karunanidhi’s soft corner for Prabhakaran, the UPA did not think it politically prudent to annoy the DMK patriarch by openly supporting the Sri Lankan government against the LTTE.
So, publicly India maintained that it would not give Sri Lanka any offensive weapons.
Excerpted from Sri Lanka: from War to Peace, by Nitin Gokhale, HarAnand Publishers, 2009, with the publisher’s permission.
Image: Protesters hold portraits of slain LTTE leader Prabhakaran during a rally against Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Chennai.
Photographs: Babu/Reuters
New Delhi didn’t want to annoy the DMK
Last updated on: August 21, 2009
|
|
Yet, in early 2006, India quietly gifted five Mi-17 helicopters to the Sri Lankan air force. The only Indian condition was: These helicopters would fly under Sri Lankan air force colours. New Delhi clearly did not want to annoy UPA’s Tamil Nadu allies like the DMK unnecessarily.
The Mi-17s were in addition to a Sukanya Class offshore patrol vessel gifted by the Indian Coast Guard to the Sri Lankan navy in 2002.
Sri Lankan defence sources later told me that these helicopters played a major role in several daring missions launched by the Sri Lankan air force to rescue the army’s Deep Penetration Units and the eight-man teams, whenever they were surrounded by LTTE’s counter-infiltration units, or when injured soldiers had to be airlifted from deep inside LTTE held territory.
As a senior Sri Lankan army officer confided in me, “Our soldiers operating behind enemy lines functioned with greater degree of confidence and efficiency in Eelam War IV since they knew these helicopters were always on hand to come to their rescue whenever necessary. This was surely one of the key factors in our Special Forces delivering spectacular results.”
But hampered by domestic compulsion, New Delhi could not go beyond such meagre and clandestine transfer of military hardware. And publicly all that India was willing to acknowledge was the supply of low-flying detection ‘Indra’ radars to the Sri Lankan air force since this equipment was considered a defensive apparatus.
Colombo, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly restless since an all-out war with the LTTE looked inevitable. Domestic political pressure had also stalled the signing of a Defence Cooperation Agreement between India and Sri Lanka. Although both sides had publicly committed themselves to such an accord in 2004 itself, the DCA never materialised.
Insiders in Sri Lanka’s defence establishment reveal that India’s insistence on securing exclusive rights to the use of Palaly air base in the Jaffna peninsula was the most contentious point between the two delegations.
Colombo saw this demand from India as downright insulting and symptomatic of India’s hegemonistic mindset. So the DCA never got off the ground. Ironically, three months after the Eelam War IV ended, India decided to fund the repair and restoration of the Palaly air base in north Sri Lanka.
Excerpted from Sri Lanka: from War to Peace, by Nitin Gokhale, HarAnand Publishers, 2009, with the publisher’s permission.
Image: An IAF Mi-17 helicopter
Photographs: Courtesy: The Indian Air Force
The Rajapaksa regime was nothing if not shrewd. It knew the past history. It was aware of the dynamics that determined India’s domestic politics in the context of Tamil Nadu. It was also conscious of India’s anxiety in losing strategic space in Sri Lanka.
But above all, the Rajapaksa brothers were pragmatic enough to realise that Sri Lanka needed India’s support in the prosecution of the war against the LTTE, total support from China and Pakistan notwithstanding, simply because India was Sri Lanka’s next door big neighbour. Colombo could ignore India but only up to a point.
So Mahinda Rajapaksa hit upon an idea of setting up an informal exchange mechanism between New Delhi and Colombo. The president nominated both his brothers Basil (a member of parliament and presidential adviser) and Gotabaya, the defence secretary, along with his own secretary, Lalith Weeratunga, as members of an informal yet powerful delegation that would update the Indian government on the latest developments as frequently as possible.
India too reciprocated immediately.
India’s National Security Adviser M K Narayanan, Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon and Defence Secretary Vijay Singh formed the Indian trio. The two teams interacted frequently both on the phone and by visiting each other. The Sri Lankan trio in fact visited New Delhi at least five times between 2007 and 2009. The Indian delegation made three return visits in the same period.
Most of the interactions were low-profile and discreet except the Indian team’s June 2008 trip to Colombo that attracted huge attention mainly because of its timing. That time Sri Lanka’s military operation was pushing the LTTE out of its north-western coastal areas in the Mannar district.
And two months later, Sri Lanka was supposed to host the 15th summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation.
When Narayanan, Menon and Singh arrived in the Sri Lankan capital in a special Indian Air Force plane, almost unannounced, military analysts, both in India and Sri Lanka, were speculating a massive retaliatory strike by the LTTE.
Indian intelligence agencies apparently had credible information that such a counter attack could be aimed at the 15th SAARC summit that Colombo was hosting on August 2 and 3.
The Indian officials wanted to ensure foolproof security for the summit. New Delhi in fact persuaded the Sri Lankans to accept India’s help during the summit. After much persuasion and even a veiled threat that India may stay away from the summit if New Delhi’s suggestions on a security upgrade in Colombo was not met, Sri Lanka reluctantly allowed Indian naval ships, anti-aircraft guns and helicopters to be deployed in and around Colombo for the duration of the meet.
Excerpted from Sri Lanka: from War to Peace, by Nitin Gokhale, HarAnand Publishers, 2009, with the publisher’s permission.
Image: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Photographs: Kamal Kishore/Reuters
In one instance, accurate intelligence enabled the Sri Lankan navy to sail nearly 1,600 nautical miles southeast of the country, close to coasts of Australia and Indonesia, to destroy three ships in September 2007 and a fourth ship, which had escaped the initial action, three weeks later on October 7, Admiral Karrannnagoda said.
One of the LTTE weapons smuggling vessels was intercepted and destroyed by naval task units after a long pursuit in the high seas 1,700 km off Dondra Head, the southern extremity of Sri Lanka. At least 12 Tamil Tigers on board were killed in the attack.
‘We went near Australian waters and whacked the last four vessels,’ Vice-Admiral Karannagoda told Jane’s Navy International in March 2009. ‘Yet we are not a big navy; we had to improvise and use innovation and ingenuity to get our job done. The Sri Lankan navy does not possess any frigate-sized ships, so we used offshore patrol vessels and old tankers, merchant vessels and fishing trawlers as support vessels.’
What he left unsaid, according to sources in both Indian and Sri Lankan navies, was India’s hidden hand in providing vital intelligence and operational support to identify and locate these ships.
In March 2009, the Sri Lankan naval chief deliberately avoided mentioning India’s crucial contribution since electioneering in Tamil Nadu was picking up speed and Eelam War IV was in its final stage that month. Any public admission of India’s hand in destruction of LTTE assets would have created a furor in Tamil Nadu and further strained the already delicate relationship between Sri Lanka and India.
But the fact remains that in late 2007, the Indian Navy’s Southern Command deployed three fast attack boats and a missile corvette that patrolled the Palk Straits, searched and caught hold of LTTE fugitives.
Excerpted from Sri Lanka: from War to Peace, by Nitin Gokhale, HarAnand Publishers, 2009, with the publisher’s permission.
