Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had made a very curious statement, just before the UNHRC resolution. Apparently the Indian Government feels anguish and pain over the Sri Lankan military’s alleged war crimes against unarmed Tamils during the final phase of the war against Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. India, she says, is committed to protect the rights of the Sri Lankan Tamils either forcefully or through persuasion.

It would be pertinent to recall who created the LTTE. It is India, as Indian diplomats as JN Dixit and Shivashankar Menon candidly admits to this despicable act in their much publicized memoirs.

Dixit explains that Sri Lanka’s experience of terrorism was simply collateral damage as India was balancing its adverse internal and external forces. Expressing concern for Tamils, India was merely pushing for Indian interests in Sri Lanka.

In 1965, he explains, the first Indian state to threaten to secede was Tamil Nadu. Since then, Central Government had been distracting the TN politicians professing concern for Sri Lankan Tamils. He notes that it was important for Indira Gandhi to have “positive political equations with MG Ramachandran,” who led the ethnic Tamil political party, AIADMK, that governed TN.

In Sri Lanka, for their own political survival, the Sinhala politician divides the nation on economic class, the Tamil politician drives a wedge between ethnicities. Thus, by the ’70s, Tamil militancy – though in its infancy – was already a fact in Sri Lanka, tacitly supported by Gandhi, despite her good relations with the then PM Sirima Bandaranaike. This is overshadowed by the 1971 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna insurgency.

However, he notes, she was not sincere in her support as, “if India were to endorse the claim for the establishment of a separate state in the basis of ethnicity and religion causing disintegration of a neighboring multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual state, then India would find it difficult to maintain its overall unity and territorial integrity when facing the challenges of separatism in Punjab and Kashmir.”

When JR Jayewardena succeeded Bandaranaike in 1977, recalls Dixit, he “was of the view she [Gandhi] could not control the Indian-Tamil support to Sri Lankan Tamils.” Thus, “he established substantive defensive and intelligence contacts with the U.S., Pakistan and Israel.”

This was during the Cold War, he notes. Pakistan allied with U.S. for political, material and military support in turn for been a frontier state to further U.S. strategic objectives in Central Asia. India was also not good with China, who found a parallel interest with U.S. to contain Russia’s attempts to extend its area of influence in Afghanistan.

Aligning with Russia then, flexing its muscles, India stood isolated in the neighborhood. The mistake India did then and committing now is to try destabilize their neighbors to benefit from the resulting chaos. It should learn from China and try to make these countries into flourishing states, and so win the hearts and trust of the people.

Instead, India trained, armed and financed dozens of terrorist groups, just to intimidate Sri Lanka. Swaraj must seriously reflect the damage India did to the Sri Lankan Tamil community by planting seeds of terrorism within it.

Analysts have pointed out the terrorism we experienced was also a backlash of the oppressive caste system that prevails in the Hindu culture. However, the Hindu culture is much more than a caste system. It is also a matriarchal one. The traditional Hindu woman is devoted to her religion and its many gods. Thus, she is the spiritual light in a Hindu home.

It is these women, who were plucked from home and transformed into killing machines. Deliberately having taken all light from their lives, they were indoctrinated with hate. In the Gonagala massacre on 18 September 1999, over 50 men, women and children were hacked to death by the LTTE. Infants were smashed to the ground, cracking their skulls open. This massacre however gained notoriety, more than for its brutality, because it was carried out by mostly the women cadre.

Likewise, men, women and children of this God-fearing society was transformed into psychopaths and turned into marauding murderers. It is extremely distasteful that their victims, comprising from all ethnicities including Tamils are taken out of the equation by self-proclaimed human right defenders as Swaraj.

This was how terrorism desecrated the Hindu society in Sri Lanka, from which India cannot dissociate itself. Today, most of these women have returned home and are trying hard to rebuild a long lost life. As such, India must do much more to help them overcome their struggle.

India has not only failed in this regard towards war-affected Tamils in Sri Lanka. They have also failed to properly look after the Sri Lankan refugees, most who had been living for in India for decades.

Paramita Ghosh writes to Hindustan Times, though the war against terrorism has ended in Sri Lanka, that war is been kept alive in India. The Sri Lankan Tamils who sought refuge in TN are kept in either general camps and ‘special camps’.

“The first are open camps with restriction of movement. People can go out for work after three levels of police clearance. Special camp inmates don’t have the meager facilities that prisoners in regular jails do like parole, remissions, visits of relatives and friends, work with wages and access to a library. It is not unknown for state police to settle scores with Sri Lankan Tamils by implicating them in false cases and use that as an excuse to put them in special camps. The number of people who have been in ‘special camps’ for over three years, and without legal representation, is not known. Nearly 80pc of the criminal cases against the inmates end up in acquittals but by that time they have already spent about four years in special camps that are actually like concentration camps.”

According to People’s Union of Civil Liberties – a body fighting for Tamil refugee rights for over 20 years – inmates in both camps are under watch. Though those in general camps fare better, most of them, even those who had come in the ’80s and been living for 30 years, are not granted their citizenship.

Even Narendra Modi, notes Ghosh, who as Prime Ministerial candidate, had spoken about granting equal rights as Indian citizens to Pakistani Hindu refugees had failed to include the same for Lankan Tamils. Even Tibetan refugees born in India between 1950 and 1987 “can protest, even militantly so, on India’s streets against China,” but “for Tamil refugees, any evidence of assertion, forget violence, is counter-productive.”

“India,” Ghosh quotes Professor Ramu Manivannan, “is not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions of 1951 that recognizes the rights of refugees. India has also not enacted the model law of refugees drafted the the PN Bhahwati committed advising a provisional citizenship. A draft law has also been pending before parliament since 2006. Other countries that have accepted Tamil refugees and allowed them to live with dignity offer a contrasting picture. Rathika Sitsabaiesan is a Canadian MP of Tamil origin; two Lakh Tamils live in Canada as refugees with refugee rights.”

Swaraj states that India is committed to protecting the rights of Lankan Tamils. Yet, the biggest obstacle to the daily life of the Northern Tamil is not from the Sri Lankan military or due to the consequence of any alleged crime committed by them. It comes from the Indian fishermen, who flagrantly violate the Sri Lanka Maritime Boundary Agreement of 1974 and 1976, by which the Kachchativu island in the Palk Straits became part of Sri Lanka. Knowing very well, it is not the Sinhala or the Muslim fishermen, but only the very Tamil fishermen who India has vowed to protect that get affects, hundreds of boats and trawlers from TN comes to our waters and steals the day’s catch.

If war crimes is the issue, then Swaraj cannot ignore the atrocious conduct of the Indian Peace Keeping Force. IPKF raped thousands of Tamil women, even septuagenarians. The Jaffna Hospital massacre is just one infamous case that describes their brutality.

On 21 October 1987, Indian troops entered the premises of the Jaffna Teaching Hospital and engaged in a killing spree that ended only on the following day. Between 60-70 patients and staff were killed. This included Dr. Sivapathasundaram, a pediatrician, who along with three senior nurses, tried to surrender to the IPKF. They walked along the corridor with their hands raised up, shouting, “we surrender, we are innocent doctors and nurses.”

They were gunned down. An infant and few children who cried were shot as were the wounded patients, who asked for water. The IPKF burnt all the dead bodies. Soldiers responsible for this massacre or any of the other atrocities are yet to be investigated or prosecuted by the Indian government.

The final and the most important point that Swaraj have missed is that the final phase of the war was fought with the active participation of the Indian government. The Rajapaksa administration was keen not to give reason for India to interfere again as they did in 1987 and stop the annihilation of the LTTE. They thus created a mechanism between India, that circumvented the normal diplomatic communication channels. The Indian Foreign Secretary, National Security Adviser and Defense Secretary formed the Indian team. The Sri Lankan team consisted of Basil and Gotabaya Rajapaksa and President’s Secretary Lalith Weeratunga.

They constantly met and discussed how to address sensitive issues such as the TN factor that was putting immense pressure with the Indian elections coming up. Stop using heavy weapons during the last stages was one result of these meetings.

India by this time was aware of LTTE’s plans for creating a ‘Greater Eelam’, which consisted of TN, Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern provinces and certain Tamil populated areas of Malaysia and Singapore. Thus, they too were very keen to have the LTTE destroyed. They were however afraid to support Sri Lanka openly for fear of losing the TN votes.

Hence, they provided medical assistance to the rescued civilians quietly. The Indian medical camp was held in Pulmoddai from the second week of March 2009 to late May 2009, where nearly 7,000 war wounded were treated and at Menik Farm from late May 2009 to 31 August 2009. The then Indian High Commissioner, Alok Prasad, could brief Swaraj better about this mission’s work.

Clearly, the final battles against the LTTE took with the auspices of the highest Indian officials. Then, if any war crimes were committed against civilians by the Sri Lankan military, it is impossible for India to dissociate from it.

Thus, the UNHRC resolution against Sri Lanka is as damaging to India as it is to Sri Lanka. It is not the only fact that Swaraj had missed. She also have not understood that this resolution is driven by U.S. and not India.

This proves India is not a factor in South Asia. In their greed and hubris to assert itself by suppressing its neighbors, India has become an obsolete giant in its own region. Three decades ago, India riding on Russia’s coattails ended up creating a situation that forced Sri Lanka to transform its ceremonial forces into an outstanding military force, with an intelligence network equal to the best. Today, riding on the coattails of U.S., India is committing the same blunders.

India must get out of its archaic thinking and remodel its foreign policies. It must be transparent in its dealings, especially with its own citizens. Swaraj must realize that we have not forgotten the despicable role India played to destabilize our country. Yet, each successive Sri Lankan government had tried to focus on the positive aspects of India and done their best to forge good relations between the two countries.

As a nation also we do not want to hash up the past and embarrass another. Except for a few politicians and NGO-funded entities, most Sri Lankans – irrespective of ethnicity – wants to move forward and live in peace. Swaraj should not mistake our decency to amnesia.