"The rapacious West" was the epithet Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike flung at the West, feeding off the anti-imperialist fodder of the 1960s. That was during her first stint as PM and she chose the occasion of a State Banquet in Beijing to deliver the insult. J.R. Jayewardene, famous for his after dinner wit, would have cracked a few Chinese jokes. Not that anyone in the West significantly noticed, but the world’s first female PM provoked headlines in Colombo more in jest than in admiration.

JR himself would have chuckled at the spectacle, although he was then in his lonely eminence in his Ward Place residence. Years later, JR would show his contempt for Mrs. Bandaranaike’s foreign forays by breaking with tradition and passing on the External Affairs portfolio to a lesser person when he succeeded her as Prime Minister in 1977. And it was a massively mandated succession accompanied by full throated hosannas to the West and its economies, and one that crushed the SLFP and wiped the Left off the electoral map. What goes around comes around. This karma will not end.

After more than forty years the rapacious West is back in Sri Lanka’s black book. Another SLFP government under a different family rule is now railing against it. But unlike in the 1960s, the accompanying rhetoric of anti-imperialism is fake and surreal, a farcical encore in the tragic unfolding of a bloody war. It is the war against the LTTE and the unfounded assumption that the West was somehow trying to save the tiger bacon that gave the Sri Lankan government the excuse to whip itself into a patriotic frenzy.

The fact of the matter is that without the banning of the LTTE as a terrorist organization by India and the Western governments and the resulting crackdown on its international operations, the LTTE might not have been isolated and weakened to the point of imploding so spectacularly in the end. That the LTTE’s so called conventional military strength was highly overrated both by itself and by the government, but for entirely opposite reasons, is a different matter. What the Western governments, while not opposing the war targeting the LTTE, apparently wanted from the Sri Lankan government was its commitment to minimize the impacts on civilians and the assurance of a political solution after the war. No formal commitment was made and no guarantees remain.

The currently popular culture of disparaging the West and disrespecting the UN is in stark contrast to Sri Lanka’s positions more than twenty years ago, yes, under the UNP-JRJ government, when the fight with the LTTE began in earnest. In the 1980s India was the main outside supporter of Sri Lankan Tamils and a number of Indian government agencies both at the Central and the Tamil Nadu State level either directly or indirectly supported the various Tamil militant groups including the LTTE, in their mobilization activities using Tamil Nadu as base. In 1987, India forced the Sri Lankan government to abruptly stop its military offensive that had just got underway in the Jaffna Peninsula. Decrying India’s bullying and to countervail India’s pressure tactics the then Sri Lankan government pleaded for Western involvement and even for UN presence on the Island. How the tables have been turned in 2009?

Fast forward to Geneva

At the special session of the 47-member UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva immediately after the war, India was alongside China and Pakistan helping Sri Lanka thwart a resolution by mostly European and a few Latin American countries calling for an investigation of human rights violations by both the Sri Lankan Government and the LTTE. India gave all the help it could for Sri Lanka to successfully push through a counter-resolution that amounted to self-congratulation for defeating terrorism and insistence on international financial assistance for post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation. The efforts of even soft-power countries like Argentina, Czech Republic, Chile, Mauritius, Mexico and Switzerland, some of them recovering from their own histories of human rights abuses, to amend the Sri Lankan resolution to allow UN investigation of human rights abuses were also procedurally rejected thanks to India’s objections. Jawaharlal Nehru would have been proud!

In the Geneva debate, perhaps the high-water mark of his inconsistent political career, the Sri Lankan Ambassador to the UN in Geneva allegedly waxed eloquent on his government’s commitment to implementing the 13th Amendment that is already part of Sri Lanka’s basic law. Regardless of what was said or how it was said in Geneva, Sri Lanka could not have got a stronger endorsement of its commitment to the 13th Amendment from anyone other than India. For it was India that took a certain blame for forcing down the 13th Amendment on an unwilling Sri Lankan government, and it is again India that is now taking a different kind of blame for blessing a different Sri Lankan government to wage ‘unlimited war’ against the LTTE on the understanding that the 13th Amendment would be implemented after the war.

Strangely, one hears positively about the prospects of the 13th Amendment more in New Delhi than in Colombo. Even the alleged commitment to the 13th Amendment in Geneva entered the Sri Lankan news circles as a result of the attacks against it by JVP-JHU-NPM forces. Rather than praising the man who brilliantly saved his benefactor’s bacon in Geneva, the JVP-JHU-NPM attack dogs are criticizing him for what they consider to be an unnecessary commitment. The more transparent 13th Amendment plus or minus advocates within the Rajapaksa government are reportedly receiving worse treatment from the same attack dogs than the Ambassador in Geneva.

It used to be said that by raising the extreme separatist demand, Tamil politics had forced the Sri Lankan governments to seriously consider federalism as a constitutional option. The 13th Amendment came as a half-way compromise. Then it was said that with the LTTE around, nothing could be done, neither the 13th Amendment, nor plus or minus. So the LTTE had to go. It is gone now for all intents and purpose, unless you believe that it is not fully gone until every child, woman and man in the 300,000 interned in the Vanni is screened and cleared.

Even that should not prevent activating the dormant 13th Amendment. Not so for the JVP-JHU-NPM folks. What was killed as separatism at the front door should not be allowed through the backdoor as the 13th Amendment is their argument. The LTTE is gone, but old communalism has returned.

All the while, President Rajapaksa is sticking to the mute mode when it comes to saying something, anything, positively about a political solution to the Tamil problem. May be he has lapsed into the now common denial mode that with the LTTE gone, gone too is the Tamil problem. Even if he does not care a damn about the wretched Tamils, he could do something to save his moderate supporters from his extreme attack dogs. He is not all that mute when it comes to insisting on Sri Lanka’s unitariness, or in establishing his political lineage to the old kings of Sri Lanka.