Operation Pawan was a correct strategic call

between the IPKF and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which refused to disarm and join the political mainstream.

On October 11, 1987, the IPKF launched Operation Pawan to wrest control of Jaffna from the LTTE. Though the initial Heli-borne assault on the Jaffna University campus to capture LTTE leaders was a disaster, the Indian Army succeeded in wresting control of Jaffna after three weeks of intense fighting. The fighting undoubtedly was brutal; the LTTE was a determined foe and the Indian Army lost good men in that operation. The Indian Army had never experienced a war like this before. They were in an unfamiliar land against a recondite enemy that wore no uniforms, followed no Geneva Convention on ethics of war and yet carried lethal contemporary armaments and battled customarily from behind the cover of women and children.

What has, however, been deliberately overlooked in the tirade unleashed by some right-wing bigots, masquerading as commentators on strategic affairs, is the chicanery of the then Sri Lankan leadership that went to extraordinary lengths to undermine the IPKF and the Rajiv-Jayewardene Accord.

In January 1989, President Ranasinghe Premadasa got elected on a platform to throw the Indians out of Sri Lanka. He ascended to power in April 1989, giving the Indians an ultimatum to leave in three months. He even sanctioned a surreptitious

Rajiv Gandhi took the correct decision in 1987. The nub of the intervention undertaken in the fading years of the Cold War was indisputably to keep the US from gaining a foothold in Sri Lanka. covenant to resource the LTTE with weapons to fight the IPKF.

However, what was far more reprehensible than the conduct of Premadasa was the fact that the V.P. Singh-led Janata Dal government, supported by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left decided to withdraw the IPKF. They fig-leafed the decision in a legally-correct proposition that since the host nation wanted India to leave we had no business to stay. In reality, this was largely driven by the then foreign minister and later Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral’s obsession to get doctrines named after him.

The real seeds of that doctrine, however, germinated in the decision to withdraw the IPKF from Sri Lanka in December 1989. Both VP Singh and I.K. Gujaral were determined to establish that Rajiv Gandhi had erred in sending the IPKF to Sri Lanka and therefore, without caring for the consequences that it would have on India’s desire to establish a larger foot-print in the Indian Ocean region as well as the implications on the Indian Army’s reputation that it could be checkmated by an irregular guerrilla force, they ordered a hasty and ill-prepared withdrawal. The repercussions of that decision haunt us even today, making India a risk-averse nation, unwilling to put boots on the ground even when it’s strategic interests are clearly in play.

Rajiv Gandhi took a correct strategic call in 1987. The nub of the intervention undertaken in the fading years of the Cold War was indisputably to keep Americans from gaining a foothold in Sri Lanka. By attempting to brush the IPKF and its role in Sri Lanka under the carpet for partisan political reasons, India does itself great disservice.

The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal.