On 19 May, the Ee­lam bat­tle for Tamil home­land came to an end. Rem­i­nisc­ing the day, WSN colum­nist Prab­h­dial Singh Saini re­flects on the role of the In­dian Peace Keep­ing Forces sent to Sri Lanka by then In­dian Prime Min­is­ter Ra­jiv Gandhi and how Sikh sol­diers were used as can­non fod­der. 

In the mid­dle of the Tamil Ee­lam con­flict with Sri Lanka, In­dian Prime Min­is­ter Ra­jiv Gandhi sent the In­dian Army to Sri Lanka un­der the garb of the In­dian Peace Keep­ing Force (IPKF). It was a move by Ra­jiv Gandhi, with­out even tak­ing his cab­i­net into con­fi­dence as ex­posed by then For­eign Min­is­ter K. Nat­war Singh and even by­pass­ing his ad­vi­sors.  Troops were sent with­out prepa­ra­tion what­so­ever only to pro­vide max­i­mum lo­gis­ti­cal as­sis­tance and back up to the Sri Lankan Army in its cam­paign of an­ni­hi­la­tion of Tamil Tigers.

In­stead of help­ing the Tamil peo­ple’s strug­gle in Sri Lanka for their home­land, he chose to send the eu­phemisti­cally-called In­dian Peace Keep­ing Forces, though he pre­tended and por­trayed to have links with Prab­hakaran and his lead­er­ship.

The Tamil Tigers were fight­ing a war against Sri Lanka for their home­land over which they had a le­git­i­mate his­tor­i­cal right and also to de­feat the geno­ci­dal acts of the Sin­halese-led gov­ern­ment of Sri Lanka against eth­nic Tamils.

At that point of time, MG Ram­chan­dran, -the CM of Tamil Nadu, was sym­pa­thetic with Tamil Tigers’ strug­gle against Sri Lanka. Know­ing this, Ra­jiv Gandhi over­stepped the state gov­ern­ment of Tamil Nadu.

The Tamil Tigers and their Supremo Prab­hakaran were no less brave than the Sikhs. It is widely be­lieved that till the geopo­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion turned the tide against the Tamil Tigers, Mossad -the se­cret ser­vice of Is­rael was as­sist­ing Ee­lam Tamils and that is why they were able to con­sol­i­date their hold and wage a re­lent­less war against the Sri Lankan army for more than a decade.

K. Nat­war Singh, in his mem­oirs, has said that In­dia lost 15,000 sol­diers for an un­wanted and un­nec­es­sary in­ter­ven­tion by Ra­jiv Gandhi. Sadly, most of them were Sikhs. It will not be wrong to say that Sikhs were used as can­non fod­der by In­dia, per­haps to pit one mar­tial race against an­other and to also score his per­sonal vendetta against the Sikhs, as most of the IPKF com­prised Sikh bat­tal­ions.

As Tamil ca­su­al­ties mounted, Ra­jiv Gandhi emerged as a sym­bol of state ter­ror­ism of Sri Lanka and In­dia com­bined to­gether and paid the price with his life.  Prior to the highly am­a­teur­ish ‘ex­cur­sion’ to Jaffna, Ra­jiv Gandhi and his close co­terie of Arun Nehru, Arun Singh, HKL Bha­gat, Ka­mal Nath, Saj­jan Ku­mar and oth­ers were con­firmed per­pe­tra­tors of a pogrom against Sikhs in No­vem­ber 1984.