Prachanda, Prabhakaran hold lessons

Just days after the legendary abolition of Nepal’s monarchy, this writer went on a cloak-and-dagger ride out of Kathmandu. At an appointed signpost and like a relay race, our second pilot motorbike swerved off and we followed a third. Finally and in an abandoned guesthouse, one of South Asia’s most wanted underground rebel leaders, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known as Prachanda, gave the appointed interview. Till a year before that meeting, his Maoist rebellion had raged 10 years and seen 13,000 deaths. Prachanda was slated to be Nepal’s next PM but — obviously still reclusive. “As a rebel, I hardly had time for my family,” he said. “Now, my life’s going to get even more complicated.”

Five years earlier, I had traversed landmine-infested territory during an uneasy (and ultimately unsuccessful) ceasefire to meet South Asia’s other most-wanted armed rebel: Velupillai Prabhakaran of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka. He had waged a decades-long separatist war which had left more than 100,000 people dead.

At the press meet, the man who invented the suicide bomb and deployed child soldiers, was protected by multiple layers of Kalashnikov-bearing, cyanide capsule-wearing LTTE cadres. For decades, the Tigers had received arms and financial support from sections of overseas Tamils and the sympathy of the West as “freedom-fighters”. But 9/11 was changing the world. For the first time, Prabhakaran did not speak of “Eelam” but of “negotiations”.

Two fierce underground fighters, two South Asian neighbours linked by both religion and history but — two wholly different trajectories.

While a suited and manicured PM Pushpa Kumar Dahal last week strode past a guard of honour and broke bread with India’s political top brass in New Delhi, Prabhakaran, the man once revered by Sri Lankan Tamils as their “Sun God”, was killed while using civilians as human shields during his dastardly attempt to escape.

Both the Maoists and the LTTE had begun as crusaders against oppression, but soon turned armed underground fighters. Both enjoyed wide support in their early years and both had links, confirmed by the Maoists and the LTTE, with India’s underground Naxalites and with each other. Both were proscribed by the international community as terror groups on the heels of 9/11.

Both agreed to ceasefires at the behest of “third parties”: the Maoists with India’s cajoling, while the Tigers were handled by Norwegian mediators. After the 2002 ceasefire in Sri Lanka had collapsed and the war resumed, a newly-reformed Prachanda even had some advice to offer his erstwhile counterpart.

“Prabhakaran must stop his attacks on politicians and civil society,” he was quoted as saying in a Sri Lankan daily. “All South Asian countries must help Sri Lanka wipe out LTTE terrorism”.

There are dissimilarities too. While the Tigers were armed and funded primarily by rich, separatism-minded Tamil diaspora, the Maoists’ caches of weapons came either from smuggling across the India and China borders or, from looting police and Royal Nepal Army (RNA) depots.

If the Tigers were able to sustain the Sri Lanka civil war for 30 years, it was primarily because of repeated interventions by the West. All Sri Lankan Armed Forces (SLAF) commanders say that each time they were on the verge of defeating the Tigers, Colombo came under pressure from human rights groups and donor-nations and would call a ceasefire.

Today, ex-LTTE cadres themselves admit that each such lull in fighting provided them an opportunity for reinforcement and rearmament. It is only the government of former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa that decided against international “mediation” and gave the SLAF the unconditional go-ahead to decimate the Tigers.

But who tied the RNA’s hands, whose commanders must have surely experienced the same frustration as their counterparts in Sri Lanka Against common belief — it was neither the West, nor India nor even — China.

“Unlike Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa and ignoring even our national Security Council, the highest authority to recommend military action, our own former kings Birendra and later, Gyanendra refused to authorise the RNA to launch an all-out war on the Maoists,” says veteran editor, Yubaraj Ghimire. “Their position always was: it is our ‘raj dharma’ not to act against our own people.”

Mr Ghimire concedes that even the post-monarchy political scenario saw little unity among various parties over a matter of national interest and that the Maoists, unlike the Tigers, enjoyed nationwide penetration. But though the widespread Maoist network may have made the RNA’s task more difficult, it would not have been impossible to end the insurgency earlier and save thousands of innocent lives.

Unlike the Maoists whose attacks were mostly restricted to Nepal, the Tamil Tigers wrought terror across the subcontinent through suicide bombings and the assassinations of various political leaders, including Rajiv Gandhi. Thousands of civilians perished in LTTE strikes. But the LTTE coveted — and remained mostly restricted to — the North and East of Sri Lanka, which was also their chief support base.

Finally and unlike the political disarray in Kathmandu after the abolition of the monarchy, Colombo was unified in its determination to wipe out the LTTE, even if it caused an international outcry.

India’s own underground Maoist insurgencies have raged for nearly 40 years and more than 13,000 people are estimated killed. But because they are restricted to some states of a gigantic country, “more pressing” border threats from Pakistan and China continue to dominate both the headlines and public consciousness.

Much like the Tigers, it is predominantly support from Western NGOs and resident writers of the urban liberal elite — who maintain their lifestyles by romanticising ruthless guerrillas and winning generous global awards — that has kept India’s Maoists going. But whether the Booker Prize committee and organisers of various lit fests like it or not, successive governments in New Delhi have, in recent years, displayed greater resolve to take decisive action against the insurgencies.

As this column goes to press on the heels of the horrific attack on the Uri Army camp by Pakistan-based terrorists, we are seething and the demand to strike Pakistan has never been louder.

Which path will India choose One born out of national interest and public sentiment Or conciliation and tactical policy, keeping her place at the global high table in mind

However New Delhi decides, the trajectories of Prachanda and Prabhakaran hold lessons: both for those waging bloody sectarian wars as well as those entrusted with the responsibility of defeating them.

The author is the former South Asia bureau chief of Der Spiegel and a senior foreign correspondent