By P.K. Balachandran, IANS
Colombo : A Sri Lankan ultra nationalist party has said that India is at the forefront of a big power campaign to intervene in small and weaker states in South Asia under the guise of protecting human rights and persecuted groups.
“India is leading the R2P (Right to Protect) pack in South Asia in relation to Sri Lanka,” said Somawansa Amarasinghe, the top leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), at a meeting with foreign correspondents here late Wednesday.
R2P is a concept propagated by an influential Brussels-based international NGO. It is centred round the need for the international community to intervene to prevent gross human rights abuses.
But it is viewed with intense suspicion in Sri Lanka because it is seen as a smokescreen to impose regional or global hegemony on the island country. Sri Lanka feels extremely vulnerable vis-à-vis R2P because of its inability to solve the problem of the Tamil minority either by political or military means.
Amarasinghe said that India was already intervening in Sri Lanka by forcing the Mahinda Rajapaksa government to fully implement the system of devolution of power envisaged by the 13th amendment of the constitution, which it said India imposed on the government in 1987 through the India-Sri Lanka Accord.
He described the accord as well as the 13th amendment as “illegal”. The JVP was against the 13th amendment and the decision of the Rajapaksa government to implement it in full, he stressed.
The JVP was also against the All Party Representative Committee (APRC), which Rajapaksa had set up to draft a devolution package based on consensus, he added.
The JVP’s views should be taken seriously because the Rajapaksa government needs that party’s 38 MPs to survive. The government has only a razor thin majority in parliament.
In JVP’s view, this is not the time to think of changing the Sri Lankan constitution though it feels that the present constitution, introduced in 1978, is also “illegal”.
The foremost task before the country was to defeat the “secessionist and terrorist” Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and not to meddle with the constitution, Amarasinghe said.
Once the LTTE is decimated, democracy should be restored in those areas of northern Sri Lanka liberated from the LTTE. The areas should be reconstructed. And only when all this is done, should the political parties come together to work on a new democratic constitution, he urged.
Amarasinghe said the JVP was confident that the LTTE would be militarily defeated. It is satisfied with the way the military is waging war. The LTTE would “crumble like a full blown pappadam (papad)” and LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran would “commit suicide like Hitler”, he predicted.
On the JVP’s attitude to the Rajapaksa government, Amarasinghe said his party would support its war effort. But he felt that the government was losing popularity because of economic mismanagement. He expected Rajapaksa to call for parliamentary elections at the end of this year.
The JVP was aligned with Rajapaksa when he was fighting for the presidency in 2005 but subsequently fell out with him and began to see itself as an opposition party. However, it continued to prop the fragile government in parliament, at critical junctures (as during the budget voting), in order not to precipitate a political crisis and hamper the war effort.
As Amarasinghe said: “The JVP holds the balance of power.”