IPKF whitewashed in BJP strategy

Nearly 18 years after the war ended, Sri Lanka continues to be at the receiving end of UN and other organisations still upset about the LTTE’s defeat. The latest UN report on sexual violence during the conflict is its latest attempt to belittle Sri Lanka. The UN and other like-minded organisations conveniently fail to acknowledge the indiscriminate use of children in high intensity combat, deployment of women and children in suicide missions (Did a child suicide bomber blast Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991, just over a year after India pulled out its military mission). If Sri Lanka failed to bring the war to an end in May 2009, how many more innocent civilians, military, police and LTTE would have perished during the past 18 years? Perhaps, the UN and HRW can make an effort to ascertain loss of lives during this period. So we should be eternally grateful to former President Mahinda Rajapaksa for standing his ground when then French and British Foreign Ministers Bernard Kuchner and David Milliband were dispatched here in April 2009 to halt the war and to whisk away Prabhakaran and his hardcore terrorist band to safety.

- 

Against the backdrop of Mantri’s declaration that India recognised the IPKF at the National War Memorial in New Delhi, it would be pertinent to ask when that decision was taken.

The BJP must have decided to accommodate the IPKF at the National War Memorial in New Delhi recently. Otherwise Mantri’s announcement would have been made earlier. Obviously, Modi, the longest serving non-Congress Prime Minister of India, didn’t feel the need to take up the issue vigorously during his first two terms. Modi won three consecutive terms in 2014, 2019 and 2024. Congress great Jawaharlal Nehru is the only other to win three consecutive parliamentary elections in 1951, 1957 and 1962.

The issue at hand is why India failed to recognise the IPKF at the National War Memorial for so long. The first National War Memorial had been built and inaugurated in January 1972 following the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971, but under Modi’s direction India set up a new memorial, spread over 40 acres of land near India Gate Circle. Modi completed the National War Memorial project during his first term.

No one would find fault with India for honouring those who paid the supreme sacrifice in Sri Lanka, but the fact that the deployment of the IPKF took place here under the overall destabilisation project cannot be forgotten. India cannot, under any circumstances, absolve itself of the responsibility for the death and destruction caused as a result of the decision taken by Indira Gandhi, in her capacity as the Prime Minister, to intervene in Sri Lanka. Her son Rajiv Gandhi, in his capacity as the Prime Minister, dispatched the IPKF here after

Indian,trained terrorists terrorised the country. India exercised terrorism as an integral part of their overall strategy to compel Sri Lanka to accept the deployment of Indian forces here under the threat of forcible occupation of the Northern and Eastern provinces.