"It is regrettable that India, instead of leaping like a tiger is cowering like a mouse before the Sri Lankan government."
(Statement by J Jayalalitha, July 14, 2012, tamilguardian.com)

In a rare show of unanimity, DMK president M Karunanidhi has accused the Manmohan Singh government in almost a similar formulation.

Both Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi want our cowering prime minister to support a strong US-sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka (SL) in the UN Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. To give both mercurial leaders their due, at least in the instant case, Colombo has been guilty of lies that the war stopped in April 2009. It hasn’t.

Why is our government abetting in this sham?

Karuna, it may be recalled, had ended a fast on April 27, 2009 demanding immediate ceasefire against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) only after the assurances of Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Our PM’s minders are now busy plugging that the US resolution has incorporated New Delhi’s suggestion that the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) takes Colombo into confidence while probing cases of atrocities.

The resolution thus seeks to ensure that “special procedure mandate holders” tasked to look into human rights violations, work only in consultation with and with the concurrence of Colombo. (Please see Pt. No. 5 in a supposed copy of the Resolution, printed in the SL press).

If Singh is indeed behind this sentence, we, the ordinary citizens, unwittingly will have blood on our hands. The line in Pt. No. 5 mentioned will effectively kill the resolution because president Mahinda Rajapaksa won’t touch any such investigation under the garb that it will violate the nation’s sovereignty.

Three possible causes of Singh’s statesmanship/cowering with my counter are presented for the reader’s critique:

• Our PM has respect for SL’s sovereignty
Hello, aren’t we a responsible power too? What else explains our intervention in Colombo or Male or Dhaka in the past? Mercifully, our PM’s in the past had more guts and we didn’t hide under the carpet citing the sovereignty argument of the countries concerned, or even our western neighbour? If Singh, not Nehru, was the PM in 1959, would he have hosted the Dalai Lama? Would he use the same “sovereignty” argument and defy the world and post an envoy in Pyongyang?

• Our PM has to factor how Beijing will see us meddling in Colombo’s affairs
A really bad idea if we notice how Beijing has scant respect for those who don’t respect themselves. If the matter was in it’s own swimming pool, ie, the South China Sea, would Beijing have even bothered to think what New Delhi felt? Conversely, Beijing is quite open to cooperate with New Delhi, at any rate, within the limited theatre of the Indian Ocean, if only we respected ourselves just a bit more.

• Why must the PM meddle with something that ain’t broke?
Colombo isn’t much of an all-weather friend. Only recently they did a blatantly hostile act of opposing an Indian judge to the International Court of Justice at The Hague (please see here). Our government’s weakness isn’t limited to Colombo. It’s shocking to see our openness to allow the Pakistani PM from visiting Ajmer Sharif. In this case, the insult is to the memory of soldiers who were beheaded just a few weeks back.