A Vesak Day wish for Kashmir

Let the land of Buddha’s birth not turn its back on his wisdom, even as it preaches it to others in Sri Lanka

AS PRIME MINISTER Narendra Modi travels through Sri Lanka for the UN Vesak Day celebrations, he will speak and hear much about the teachings of the world’s greatest pacifist, Gautama Buddha. He is also certain to be mindful of Sri Lanka’s experience with war, victory, militarism, the challenges of conflict resolution, and getting to peace and reconciliation.

Eight years ago, almost exactly to the week, Sri Lanka was engaged in a brutal endgame against the LTTE. After a bloody victory that gave no space even for a civilian body count, the search for a resolution continues, egged on by the international community, including India.

Only two weeks ago, New Delhi expressed the “earnest hope” to the visiting Sri Lankan Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, that the United Nations Human Rights Council’s “recommendations on reconciliation in Sri Lanka would be completed with the stipulated timeframe of two years.”

That New Delhi should be advising reconciliation to a neighbour in a tough postconflict situation is interesting. In Kashmir, India has ruled out any movement towards reconciliation “until the violence and terrorism end”. Right now, it has been made clear, there will be no change in the “muscular approach”.

Sri Lanka’s Tamil question and the Kashmir issue are not similar, many will say. Yet, the same voices will admiringly point towards how the Sri Lankan military crushed the LTTE with sheer force to “end the terror, once and for all”, and ask why India is not following the same path in Kashmir.

But if there are lessons to be drawn, it is not from the take-no-prisoners battles of May 2009 in Mullaitivu, but in the six decades of independent Sri Lanka’s history that led up to the bloody climax of the conflict. The lessons are about how a country can sleepwalk into a full-blown war with its own citizens because of a half-century of missed opportunities and many historical mistakes; how a neighbouring power can, with the help of many devices at its disposal, including domestic politics, exploit a population across the border that feels alienated, bitter