TSI
IPKF days: The War No One Wanted
This was a war where the Indian government left the Army to do all the dirty work

Colonel R Hariharan

Former head of Military Intelligence, IPKF, 1987-90.

“This is the man who killed our son,” the middle aged man had said pointing at me, as he introduced me to his wife in my Chennai home in 1989. My wife had seemed shocked – but I sensed his pain and did not mind.

I knew the couple well from Jaffna. Their house was the first I visited when I set foot in the troubled Sri Lankan province on August 5, 1987 as part of the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Their 18-year-old son – a handsome young Tamil Tiger of the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam – was also present there that day.

Then, some months later, our war with the Tigers began, and I was told that the youngster had been sent to Mannar to fight our troops. But I told my men to take him alive and not to kill him. “The Tamil Tigers always carry cyanide capsules with them. Catch him before he swallows one,” I instructed my troops.

And, well, he did just that – dropping dead well before the Indian troops got to him. Naturally, it was impossible to explain any of this to the inconsolable father – or how much such incidents hurt me in the three years I was India’s military intelligence chief in Sri Lanka.

My knowledge of Tamil was an advantage, but no cause for celebration, because of the incessant killings of Tamil civilians in large numbers. And the bloody experience scared me for ever after. For however much I may sympathise with the Tamil struggle for equal rights with the majority Sinhalas, I am dead against armed struggle for achieving the goal.

In Sri Lanka I was the senior most Tamil MI officer; and as some from my extended family lived in Jaffna and Colombo I was pretty familiar with what was going on there.

The Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement was conceived in haste and executed without thinking through a long term strategy. Ostensibly, it had two goals – to preserve India’s strategic security interests and help the Sri Lankan Tamils get their due, without threatening Sri Lanka’s unity. These were all political and diplomatic goals – not military ones. What made things a great deal worse was that the Indian Peace Keeping Force had no written mandate. Indeed, some of the oral instructions went well beyond our goals. For instance, we were told to ensure that Sri Lanka’s President, Jayawardane, would not become the target of a Sinhala backlash.

On reaching Chennai on August 2, 1987, the Southern Army Commander, Lt Gen Depinder Singh, told me that I had been tasked to secure implementation of the agreement. “You will be required to be there for about three days, I guess. But nobody really knows, for I have no clear mandate. Yet I expect Prabhakaran to follow the others and disarm,” he said.

So well, that was how I reached Jaffna three days later, with no more than two pairs of uniform. For his part General Depinder was proved wrong on both counts. Prabhakaran never fully accepted the agreement; nor did he abandon his goal of carving out an independent Tamil Eelam. And when three years later I returned to India, things were quite as bad as they had been when I arrived in Sri Lanka!

My first two months there were the most tranquil of all, despite the LTTE’s refusal to accept the interim administration that was proposed for the Northeast Province. But I could see that trouble was brewing. Indeed, even as we landed in Sri Lanka, Rajendra, a family friend and retired Sri Lankan civil servant who had served under Jayawardane, had warned: “Rajiv Gandhi is a baby in politics and absolutely no match for the wily Jayawardane. He’ll want you to take on the Tigers by October. You just wait and watch.” I passed on his assessment to New Delhi. As for Rajendra, he did not live to see his deadly forecast come true. He was killed in a bomb blast near his house in Jaffna in the first week of the war.

After India failed to implement the agreement the LTTE organised a series of anti-India protests all over Jaffna. But New Delhi chose to look the other way, and left the army to handle sensitive political and diplomatic issues – for which it had no expertise at all.

The breaking point came on October 3, 1987 when Sri Lanka’s Navy apprehended senior LTTE leaders Pulendran, Kumarappa and 13 others in mid sea off Point Pedro. President Jayawardane wanted them flown to Colombo to face criminal charges. (Pulendran was accused of masterminding the attack that killed 139 pilgrims in Anuradhapura.) Quite obviously, Jayawardene was trying to regain some of his lost popularity among the Sinhalas. And I knew there was no way he was going to release them.

TSI