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The Tigers are setting India ablaze with their tails a la Hanuman, which reduced Lanka to rubble millennia ago according to legend. Pro-LTTE lawmakers have locked horns with the Congress-led government and they are going at it hammer and tongs. The other day they demanded that External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee's statement critical of the LTTE be withdrawn. In Chennai, lawyers clashed with the police on Thursday, having attacked the Janatha Party (JP) leader Subramanian Swamy inside the Madras High Court earlier in the presence of judges for his opposition to the LTTE.
The 'advocates' of terror in Tamil Nadu are openly inciting sedition. After attacking the JP leader, they made bold to shout anti-India slogans inside the court house. It was only recently that they hijacked a public bus and smashed shops in Chennai in protest against Sri Lanka's military campaign against the LTTE on the pretext of humanitarian concerns. Such is the LTTE-infiltration of Tamil Nadu.
Sri Lanka's war on terror has stood India in good stead. Its fallout has exposed the separatist movement in Tamil Nadu. If India thought it had managed to neutralise the secessionist forces in Tamil Nadu by shifting the focus of Eelam campaign to Sri Lanka in the 1970s, it thought wrong. That state has remained a tinderbox ready to ignite all these years.
India has been perched on a bomb very complacently and luckily for it the LTTE's attempt to trigger an explosion has failed. Only the detonator has gone off. And the bomb remains to be defused.
What Prabhakaran wanted was not only a part of Sri Lanka as his dreamland. In his heroes' day speech 2006 he lamented that 80 million people were without a state, implying that he was their messiah. He was obviously dreaming of a land area much bigger than Sri Lanka in its entirety to accommodate such a huge population. He had in mind something akin to the sprawling Vijayanagar Empire of yore (1336-1646). Therefore, it is only natural that the Tamil Nadu political leaders who threw in their lot with Prabhakaran and hoped and prayed that he would succeed in laying the foundation of Greater Eelam by dismembering the State of Sri Lanka as the first step are so frustrated and furious. They cannot bear to see their dream project collapse before their own eyes.
India is refusing to intervene in Sri Lanka not out of any love for the latter. It is doing so for its own sake. Time was when India seeking to settle petty scores with Sri Lanka for spinning out of its orbit and gravitating towards the western bloc in a bipolar world pandered to the wily Tamil Nadu secessionist forces and blundered by creating and nurturing separatist terrorism here. But, no longer does India want to repeat that costly blunder, as it has realised the grave threat the Eelam project poses to its national security and territorial integrity. The LTTE emerged so powerful in India in spite of the Rajiv assassination and the attendant ban that it almost succeeded in holding the world's largest democracy to ransom through its Tamil Nadu puppets like Karunanidhi, Vaiko, pettifoggers et al. Luckily, Sri Lanka finally decided to eliminate the outfit.
India has no alternative but to help Sri Lanka abort the Eelam project by decimating the LTTE for the benefit of both nations. Let terror backers on either side of the Palk Strait go berserk or even commit self-immolation – which may be considered penance for their sins.
Swan song of Icarus
When the LTTE first unveiled its newly acquired crude air capability on March 25, 2007, its backers were cock-a-hoop. They thought Prabhakaran with his light aircraft would be able to rout the military operations that the government had launched in the Eastern Province at that time.
But, we in our small way, pointed out that Prabhakaran was fighting a losing battle and he would never succeed in his endeavour even if he were to pull many more rabbits from his hat. It was clear to any discerning observer that nothing was going to stop the armed forces making a determined effort to eliminate terrorism and Prabhakaran would finally pay for his military miscalculations dearly.
On March 27, 2007, two days after the LTTE's first ever air raid, we had this to say in an editorial comment titled, Flying with wax wings:
He [Prabhakaran] may recall that even Osama bin Laden, who landed a jet on the Pentagon and razed the US economic icon, Twin Towers to the ground with fuel laden jets, has got nowhere near his goal.
With the ground shifting under his dictatorial feet, it is high time he woke up to the need to resolve the conflict peacefully. He should remember the fate that befell Icarus, who tried to fly too high with a pair of wax wings, got too close to the sun in the process and went tumbling to a tragic end. The closer a candle gets to its end, the brighter its flame shines!
Today, the LTTE has come crashing down and Icarus of the Vanni has landed on his derriere. Last night, he sent two of his aircraft-perhaps the last two-to Colombo to launch suicide attacks on vital targets including the Air Force Headquarters. Both planes were shot down.
What last night's attack signifies is that Prabhakaran is desperately trying to put his military assets to some use before he loses them to the troops. Else, he would never have sacrificed his precious aircraft by sending them on so reckless a mission.
Hubris precedes downfall. Of turning the tables on the military, the Tigers have the same chance as a cat in hell. Prabhakaran must give up without wasting any more lives.
