brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

As Sri Lanka heads for yet another civil war, Tamil refugees have begun fleeing the fighting and taking shelter in Tamil Nadu.

They call it Black July. The date: July 23, 1983. What happened that day changed the face of Sri Lanka forever. It marked the beginning of full-scale ethnic war — an armed struggle between the minority Tamils and Sinhalese majority. Approximately 3,000 Tamils were killed, thousands of homes destroyed and a wave of Tamils forced to seek refuge in other countries.

Little has changed since. There has been on-and-off civil war, mostly between the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who want to create an independent nation of Eelam in the north-east part of the island. According to estimates, this war has left 65,000 dead, apart from drastically damaging the economy.

In February 2002, a Norway-sponsored peace accord was put into place. However shakily, it lasted just four years. Peace talks now supposed to take place in Oslo have almost broken down. Fearing war yet again, the people have begun to flee.

In the last month alone, more than 2,000 Sri Lankan Tamils have crossed over to India. The distance from Thalaimannar in Sri Lanka to Dhanushkodi in Rameswaram, India, is a mere 18 kilometres. It is a hazardous 18 kilometres though. The refugees have to dodge the Sri Lankan and Indian navies, apart from dealing with the many dangers nature poses.

To go into the sea in pitch darkness — with no navigating lights, radar or modern gadgets — requires either courage or desperation. Here, it is desperation that drives these people across with their families. There are many reasons for their coming over, but the primary ones are the proximity and a common language — Tamil.

R Ramesh is a 26 year old who has been married for two years. Scared of the Sri Lankan army, he left his home in Triconamalee and came to India with his wife and 2-year old child.

“On the pretext of looking for LTTE cadres or sympathisers,” he says, “anyone can be arrested there at any time.”

He alleges the Sri Lankan army is capable of planting weapons in the neighbourhood, and then arresting you for possession.

Ramesh covered the 18 kilometres from his village to Thalaimannar by bus. The fare was around Rs 200, but the bus was checked by the army and, eventually, each person had to pay Rs 10,000 to get across the Palk Straits. The short distance took four-and-a-half hours to cover.

After their arrival in India, the refugees were taken to the nearest police station, registered and sent to the Mandapam relief camp. While Rameswaram is an island, Mandapam is on the mainland, about 20 kilometres from Rameswaram.

At the camp, Ramesh was interrogated by the police again, and then given quarters to live in. He is hoping to find a job, but has been unsuccessful so far. Back home, he worked as a fisherman. His family owned a motorised boat. His elderly parents and brother still live there. He arrived in India with two sovereigns of gold and Rs 2,000 in cash.

Ramesh’s wife Sumita is a graduate in economics. She was educated in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, as was her husband. He came to Tamil Nadu as a 10 year old in 1990 and stayed on until 2004, although he studied only till Class 10. At the time, he lived in a camp in Tirunelveli. He thinks it will be easier to find a job at the old camp, than at Mandapam.

S Selvaraj is a shopkeeper from Trinconamalee. He had a rough landing on the shores of Rameswaram as the boat he was in was spotted by the Indian Navy. All aboard were asked to get out in chest-deep water and walk, he says, and they lost most of their belongings in the process.

Selvaraj first came to Tamil Nadu in 1985 and went home in 2004 after peace returned to Sri Lanka.

During his last stint in Tamil Nadu, he stayed at camps in Mandapam, Madurai and Tiruchi, making his living as a real estate broker. All his four children were born in India. His brother-in-law asked them to return to Sri Lanka in 2004 and also sent them money for the trip. He has now admitted his children to a school inside the camp. They study in classes 10, 8, 6 and lower kindergarten respectively.

G Gnanaganesan, 62, is a fisherman from Trincomalee. He has come with his wife, son and daughter. He was in India from 1985 to 1988, after arriving by boat at Nagapattinam. He was happy with the peace accord while it lasted. According to him, fighting accelerated after the new President Mahinda Rajapakse came to power.

As his family lived in an army-controlled area, they always feared reprisals. “If there was any disturbance elsewhere and army men were killed, they would come and shoot us. If they lost 10 people, they would kill 10 of us,” he says. Another reason he left was because fishing was not allowed, for security reasons.

R Sashimary, who comes from a small village near Vavuniya in Sri Lanka, has just completed her Class 12 here. She came to India in May 2000 and has been studying here from Class 7. She was accompanied by her mother and elder sister, and cannot recollect her father.

Her elder sister works for a non governmental organisation in Chennai. Sashimary is learning computers and hopes to get a job after completing the course. Her mother works on building sites as a labourer. The teenager has no intention of going back and says she likes it here.

S Masilamani taught tailoring in Thalaimannar, Sri Lanka. To augment her income, she used to sew dresses. She came to Tamil Nadu in 1989 with her husband and four kids. Her daughter went back first, followed by her husband and two children. She has stayed back with her son, who is in his third year at an engineering college in Andipatti, Tamil Nadu, former chief minister J Jayalalithaa’s constituency.

“I plan to go back when he finishes college,” she says, “but Sri Lanka should become peaceful.” She continues her work as a tailoring teacher at an NGO and phones her family regularly.

Denied security in their homeland, they lead lives in exile. They spend their days trying to build their lives. At night, they dream of peace.

New Delhi/Chennai – Sri Lankan Tamils are continuing to flee by sea to India to escape the violence in their country and a senior Tamil activist based in Tamil Nadu says the inflow is unlikely to stop soon.

‘People will keep coming because they don’t think there is going to be peace in Sri Lanka; they think it is going to be war,’ said S.C. Chandrahasan, a Sri Lankan Tamil who heads OFFER, an NGO that looks after the welfare of Tamil refugees.

‘The people who are coming feel this (Sri Lankan) government is not going to protect them (from Sinhalese mobs) and there is no single person they can turn to for protection,’ Chandrahasan told IANS on telephone from Tamil Nadu.

He complimented the Indian authorities for taking care of the arriving Tamils and said large numbers were waiting in Sri Lanka’s northwestern Mannar district after selling off all their belongings to illegally cross the sea to India.

By Sunday night, the number of Sri Lankan Tamils who have made it to Tamil Nadu fleeing direct and proxy fighting between the military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was nearing 2,500.

Most of them are from the eastern district of Trincomalee where attacks on their settlements by Sinhalese gangs have spurred the refugee movement. They moved over to Mannar in the northwest by bus or through the forests.

‘Larger numbers are waiting in and around Mannar trying to get boats,’ he pointed out, though the outbreak of monsoon has made crossing the sea dividing Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu much more hazardous.

One woman who landed a week ago was nine months pregnant who was repeatedly tossed in the air as she made it to the Tamil Nadu coast in a crowded boat, fully drenched and barely able to breathe.

‘We asked her why she took the risk of travelling in this condition. She had a simple answer: ‘I want my child to live’.

‘You need to see the faces of those who are coming over. They are scared. They have lost faith in the (Sri Lankan) government. The hardcore ones have gone to (LTTE areas), the others to Mannar and then to India.

‘They have sold off everything they had and paid boatmen 6,000 to 12,000 (Sri Lankan) rupees depending on the number of people in a boat and depending on whether or not the Sri Lankan Navy is patrolling the sea.’

Chandrahasan said India had been magnanimous in taking care of the refugees.

‘Sometimes the boatmen dump these refugees on sand banks and little islets off Rameswaram,’ he said. ‘The Indian Navy and Coast Guard pick them up and really take care of them.

‘We have opened an office along the coast. We provide them drinking water and meals on their arrival. After which they go to refugee centres and get themselves registered.

‘The commissioner of rehabilitation (department in Tamil Nadu) and the collector of Ramanathapuram have been gracious. They have allowed the children coming over to get into schools in Tamil Nadu.’

Chandrahasan, whose outfit also runs offices in Colombo, Mannar, Vavuniya and Batticaloa in Sri Lanka, said the only answer to end this humanitarian crisis was to create conditions in the island so that Tamils did not feel they had to leave their country.

‘Relief centres also need to come up in Mannar where the refugees can live without being disturbed by the security forces or the LTTE. If these happen, then people won’t come to India. Otherwise they will.’

Can the establishment succeed in imposing reforms in religious institutions? Is it in keeping with the secular nature of the establishment? Is it ethical to single out a particular religion for such reforms? Is there a mandate for it? Is it one of the priorities of the administration especially when the solemn promises made during the run-up to the polls are so many that one full term of 5 years is not enough for implementation?

The atheist Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu Muthuvel Karunanidhi will have no answer to these questions when he has ordered, within days of his taking over the reins of the administration in the conservative state of Tamil Nadu, that the priesthood in all the 36,000-odd temples of the state will be open to “qualified” people of all castes.

On the face of it, the order appears to be noble in its professed intentions in removing social inequities, especially in the majority community that is hopelessly divided on castelines. It is also quite logical to think that such a move would help fostering unity and social upliftment of the castes oppressed for centuries. It can also be argued that the caste system, scourge of Hindu society, may also go away in one stroke, if not in stages.

Tamil Tiger rebels say they will not meet the Sri Lankan government for
more peace talks because of a recent surge in violence in the
Tamil-majority areas. The already postponed talks were due to be held in
Geneva, Switzerland next week. More than 60 people have died in bombings
in Sri Lanka in the past week. The Tamil Tigers want autonomy for minority
Tamils in the north and east of Sri Lanka. More than 60,000 people have
died during two decades of conflict.

When India’s Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram presented the government’s budget this past February, he trumpeted the country’s vault into modernity. Economic growth is 8.1% and is projected to rise as high as 10% next year. India has completed its “Golden Quadrilateral,” a multi-lane highway that links New Delhi in the north, Calcutta in the east, Chennai in the south, and Mumbai in the west. The collective wealth of India’s 311 billionaires jumped 71% in the last year.

“Growth will be our mount,” the Minister told the Parliament, “equity will be our companion, and social justice will be our destination.”

But for India ‘s rural and urban poor, the chasm between them and the wealthy only got wider and deeper. Last year, India slipped from 124 out of 177 countries to 127, according to the United Nations Human Development Index. Life expectancy is seven years less than in China , and 11 less than in Sri Lanka . Mortality for children under five, according to a United Nations Development Report, is almost three times China ‘s rate, almost six times Sri Lanka ‘s, and greater than in Bangladesh and Nepal .
Disconnect and Division

The divide is best summed up in a searing editorial by Palagummi Sainath , India ‘s leading independent journalist. In an April 1 opinion piece in The Hindu , Sainath contrasts the two worlds that increasingly make up the second most populous nation on earth.

“Farm suicides in Vldharbha crossed 400 this week. The Sensex (stock exchange) crossed the 11,000 mark. And Lakme Fashion Week issues over 500 media passes to journalists. All three are firsts. All happened the same week. And each captures in a brilliant if bizarre way a sense of where India ‘s Brave New World is headed. A powerful measure of disconnect. Of the gap between the haves and the have-mores on the one hand, and the dispossessed and the desperate, on the other.”

For more than a decade, the Mumbai-based journalist has criss-crossed India by train, bicycle and foot, chronicling the daily lives of the poor. He writes about people like Ganesh Bhimrao Thakre, a small farmer in Vidharbha who struck hard times. His daughter got cholera, his wife had an eye operation, and his son was forced to drop out of college for financial reasons. Desperate and unable to get a loan, he played Bhishi, a sort of Ponzi scheme where farmers pool money to try and win a monthly jackpot.

He lost.

So he committed suicide. Most farmers kill themselves by drinking pesticides. Thakre hung himself.

There are literally thousands like him in the countryside, where in states like Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Bihar the “average” income is considerably below the national rural poverty line of $650 a year. Stories like the death of Ganesh Thakre do not make Sainath a popular man in the corridors of power, where “India Shining” is the slogan. The government is less interested in helping the poor, as it is increasing military spending and building a “blue water” navy.

India has launched a 30-year program to build a fleet capable of projecting power into the South China Sea and Indian Ocean . It has purchased Jaguar bombers from Britain and is negotiating to purchase 66 Hawk fighter-bombers for $1.43 billion. The price of a single Hawk could supply a lifetime of clean drinking water to 1.5 million people.
Skewed Priorities

The new budget is a case study in skewed priorities.

Under the former right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, social support networks were systematically dismantled, and social expenditures declined from 22.9% to 19.7%.

But the center-left Congress-UPA government’s budget is only marginally better. Social expenditures will rise just 1.2%. Education will jump a paltry 0.4%, and health funding will go from 4.4% to 4.9%. According to the Finance Minister, “Growth is the best antidote to poverty.”

The “growth” formula is the so-called “Washington Consensus” of open markets and foreign investment, which has accelerated the divide between rich and poor from Terra del Fuego to West Africa . Latin America is presently in the process of dismantling much of the neoliberal “consensus” that dominated economic systems from Mexico to Argentina throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s

In India , “growth” has been restricted to a relatively narrow band of industries, like high tech. In the countryside, where 75% of the population lives, living conditions have worsened. A World Bank study in 2004 found that while the number of Indian millionaires rose so did the number of poor. According to a UN Development Report, inequality in India has grown faster in the last 15 years than in the last 50 years. The Report also found that rural poverty alleviation schemes generally ended up being used in the interests of the wealthy.

In his searing book Everyone Loves a Good Drought , Sainath exposed how the elites manipulate rural aid to enrich themselves and impoverish small farmers. Wealthy landowners used government aid during a drought to dig wells so deep that they drained off the water small farmers were using. In exchange for water, the small farmers had to grow what the wealthy farmers wanted them to grow, generally export crops like cotton and rice.

Most small farmers quickly found themselves squeezed between low prices for their crops and high prices for seed and fertilizer. Many had no choice but to turn to the local sahukar , moneylenders who charge usurious rates of 60% or higher. “Banks don’t loan money to small farmers,” says Sainath, “although you can get all you want to buy a Mercedes.”

In 1991, 26% of rural households were in debt. By 2003 that had jumped to just under 50%, although in some states, like Andhra Pradesh, four fifths of the farmers were in arrears. Tens of millions of small farmers ended up losing their land and became landless laborers. If they were lucky and had a union, they made $1 a day. If they were not, they made as little as 33 cents a day.

In contrast, each of those 311 billionaires takes in about $17.5 million a day.

Since the government has cut back on irrigation aid and dried up most of the money for small loans, more and more farmers have little choice but to use the sahukars . The lenders—who many times are big landowners—forced many farmers to sign a document “selling” their land to the sahukar . According to Sainath, many times those documents are not torn up even after the debt is paid.

While some farmers who lose their land become agricultural day laborers, large numbers migrate to the cities in search of services and jobs. But services have been cut, and the jobs are mainly for the literate and the well schooled. In rural areas, 38% of males, and 57% of women are illiterate.

The miserly increase in health spending is particularly burdensome to the rural poor. Medical care is the second most common cause of rural debt, and close to the 25% of the population do not seek medical care because they cannot afford it.

As a share of its GDP, India spends less on health care than countries like Cambodia, Myanmar, Togo, Sudan, Guinea, and Burundi. According to a UN Human Development Report, “Some of India’s southern cities may be in the midst of a technological boom, but one in every 11 Indian children dies in the first five years of life from want of low-technology, low-cost interventions.”

The medical situation is deepened by the food crisis that many Indians endure. A study by Professor Utsa Patnaik found that per person food availability is lower now than it was during the horrendous Bengal famine of 1942-43.

It is common for rural family members to alternate days when they eat. The result is that 46.7% of Indian children are underweight, and 44.9% of them are growth stunted. In comparison, in China—which also has a wide and growing gap between rich and poor—those figures are 10% and 14.2%, respectively.

Ganesh Thakre’s wife, Rekha, told Sainath that the family had reached the point, “Where when we take our household wheat to the mill, we leave it there until we can pay the miller the tiny amount it takes to grind the flour.”

Urban slum dwellers fare little better. In the same week that the fashion shows and the stock market were doing well, almost 5,000 urban shanties were torn down in Mumbai.

“In the village we demolish their lives,” writes Sainath, “in the city their homes.”