Essay-Indira Gandhi-Two pages

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Indira Gandhi's legacy: vying for mastery in South Asia Barbara Crossette 25.1 (Spring 2008): p36+. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Sage Publications, Inc.. Published for the World Policy Institute. http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/ When outsiders look back on the decades in which Indira Gandhi dominated Indian politics, from the late 1960s to 1984, they pay most attention to her domestic policies, and especially to the 1975-77 period of emergency rule that stripped Indians of their civil liberties and sent hundreds to jail. But Indira Gandhi was also a very large presence beyond India's borders, and her negative impact on other countries in South Asia--where no electorate could vote her out of power--has been longer lasting. In fact, its effects on regional stability are still being felt.

Although Indira Gandhi has been dead nearly a quarter of a century and subsequent governments have significantly reduced tensions with neighbors in recent years, the record of India's exercise of regional power is worth studying in respect to the future role the country hopes to play in world affairs. Upbeat attitudes toward India held in Washington and more widely in the West are not always shared by weaker nations in the shadow of this subcontinental giant.

Now regarded as a rising world power, India is seeking a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and certainly is not without credentials to back its bid. Globally, it has long been a major troop contributor to UN peacekeeping missions, most recently sending a unique all-women police force to Liberia in 2007, to aid Africa's first elected female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, as she struggles to pacify a violent society born of civil strife. In Cambodia, India has lent support to a UN-backed tribunal to try aging Khmer Rouge leaders now in custody in an Indian-financed detention center. The United States, which pressed the UN to set up the court, has refused so far to contribute to its costs.

India has expanded its diplomatic and economic reach broadly in Southeast Asia, deepening its involvement with the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The Indians (along with China) are seen as key to putting pressure on the military rulers of Burma, an ASEAN member along with Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Worldwide, India's diplomatic corps ranks among the best, not only in representing the country effectively but also providing special envoys for UN assignments such as guiding a transitional government in East Timor following that new nation's independence from Indonesia. Indians have also held high-ranking positions at UN headquarters since the organization's founding.

If India's fast-growing economy stays on track, the country is expected to exert considerable influence in international financial and trade organizations, often in far-reaching informal alliances with other emerging powers including Brazil and South Africa. India's voice is already heard frequently in institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. A largely buoyant annual survey published in early 2008 by the International Monetary Fund commended the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for its "sound macroeconomic policies and structural reforms," though it warned that economic growth would need to be more inclusive. It is not widely known that in social indicators such as health and education, India ranks closer to sub-Saharan Africa than to most of Asia, which by virtue of its huge population (now nearing 1.2 billion) pulls the entire South Asian region down statistically. There are negative implications for sustained future economic growth in a poorly educated work force and a society where nearly half of all children are malnourished.

Like any other major country, India, a nuclear power, has at times played a self-interested spoiler role on the international stage, refusing to agree to or trying to block disarmament agreements such as the nuclear nonproliferation and comprehensive test ban treaties. Indian officials and diplomats are skillful at covering up blots on its national reputation, from the uncooperative conduct of an Indian general on an African peacekeeping mission for the UN, to human rights abuses on minority populations, to government corruption (including bribes paid to a sitting foreign minister by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s through the UN's "oil for food" program).

Indeed, at the World Bank, India played a large role in forcing Paul Wolfowitz from the bank presidency in 2007, apparently mainly in opposition to Wolfowitz's tough anti-corruption policies and not his personal relationship with a bank employee. In the light of subsequent events, it seems clear that India had good reason to try to head off a campaign against graft. In early 2008, in one of the bank's biggest corruption scandals to date, New Delhi was accused of misappropriating or misusing hundreds of millions of dollars in bank funds for health projects. When The Wall Street Journal published details of an internal bank document on this large-scale theft in India (and related misconduct within the World Bank itself) the new president, Robert Zoellick, admitted in a news release that the bank probe had "revealed unacceptable indicators of fraud and corruption." Several dozen bank officials have been assigned to work with the Indian government to investigate abuses and rectify accounts.

A Pattern of Meddling

In general, India's mixed record of using its power internationally enhances the concerns of the country's South Asian neighbors, who do not always see India as a benign presence or a trusted spokesman for the region. In virtually every country on India's borders, Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party, using Indian intelligence agencies--the domestic Intelligence Bureau and, after the late-1960s, the new Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), developed for international operations--left a legacy of meddling, subversion, and mistrust. Not infrequently, smaller countries were effectively tipped off balance or crippled, which is apparently what she intended. Always on the lookout for outside (often American) threats--the "foreign hand"--Gandhi aimed to prevent neighboring governments from being drawn into the orbit of the West or, worse, China. Neighbors that moved toward free market economies, such as Sri Lanka, were also suspect, as India clung to a socialist-inspired more closed system of import-substitution and the heavy-handed, cumbersome state regulation that became known as license raj.

It is part of the Gandhi legacy that India only reluctantly agreed to the establishment of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, known as SAARC, which was proposed by President Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh in the late-1970s, but began to meet regularly only in 1985, a year after Gandhi's death. Since then, India has wielded its enormous power to keep the regional organization weak, occasionally preventing meetings from taking place or stalling the adoption of regional pacts--all the while, paradoxically, clamoring to be given a bigger voice in the more dynamic ASEAN farther to the east, which has been moving steadily if slowly toward regional integration. In Southeast Asia, India justifiably has an eye on China, its leading competitor for influence and natural resources such as timber, oil, and natural gas. Despite setbacks, the ASEAN countries have surged ahead in economic growth and human development, opening the prospect of trade for India. The SAARC countries are on the whole poorer, disunited and less developed, in some part because India has always preferred to deal bilaterally with its neighbors, rewarding or punishing smaller countries in line with Indian policies. India is not widely seen in the region as the promoter of development for development's sake.

Over the years since Indira Gandhi began her campaigns of regional destabilization, no neighbor has been untouched, and the smallest South Asian nations have been least able to resist Indian meddling. In 1971, Gandhi saw a chance to truncate Pakistan by training and supporting ethnic Bengali East Pakistanis fighting to break away from West Pakistan and form what soon became the independent nation of Bangladesh. The Indian army routed Pakistani troops and forced Pakistan to abandon its eastern sector. A few years later, in 1974, India set off a nuclear explosion (denying it was a weapons test) and provoked Pakistan into a deadly nuclear arms race that changed the face of the region. By then, Indira Gandhi had also aligned her government with the Soviet Union in a treaty of friendship that led to the Congress Party establishing close links with the Soviet Communist leadership (to the consternation of some Indian Communists, who felt sidelined).

By the mid-1970s Gandhi was on a campaign to undermine the independence of Sikkim, a Himalayan Buddhist kingdom on India's northern border that sat astride an important pass to China. Since independence in 1947, India had assumed a protectorate over Sikkim and Bhutan, another neighboring Himalayan kingdom, and was determined to keep the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, with its Hindu maharajah, within India, whatever the will of the Kashmiri people. The story of what happened to Kashmir after the British walked away in 1947 without a decision on its future is a long and complex tale. Suffice it to say that India's refusal to allow the Kashmiris, a cultural community that felt no kinship with the rest of India, to choose their future, and subsequent meddling in Kashmiri politics under Gandhi and her son, Rajiv, opened the way to the current unrest that has given Pakistan the opportunity to aid and abet violence there.

By 1975, an ethnic Nepali movement against the Tibeto-Burman Buddhist monarchy in Sikkim was encouraged if not manipulated by Gandhi to force out the king, Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal. Sikkim disappeared as an independent nation and became India's twenty-second state. The engineered takeover was burned into the memory of numerous regional nations, in no place more than Bhutan.

Bhutan: Messing with Paradise

In Bhutan, which never had been colonized by the British, post-independence India soon took charge of the nation's international affairs by way of the 1949 Treaty of Friendship, while acknowledging its independence in domestic matters. As Bhutan has opened increasingly to the world, the inability to have a free hand in foreign affairs has rankled. Not that Bhutan was ever a major regional or international power: the nation famously refused to calculate its gross national product in favor of a different metric--Gross National Happiness. Still, Bhutan is constantly under pressure to vote with India in the United Nations and other forums and is effectively prevented from having full diplomatic relations with the United States. Bhutan has no embassy in Washington, at India's request. The American ambassador in New Delhi is also accredited to Bhutan but there is no permanent American diplomatic mission in this last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom. The Indian military maintains a significant presence in Bhutan, in a defensive posture toward China beyond the Himalayan massif. (It must be said, however, that Indian army engineering work has contributed enormously to Bhutanese development through the building of roads and other infrastructure, for which the Bhutanese are genuinely grateful).

In Thimphu, the Bhutanese capital, international development workers seem to accept that the large Indian diplomatic mission is keeping a close watch on many Bhutanese activities and decisions. While Bhutan controls the entry of most foreign tourists through quotas and high compulsory accommodation rates for travelers, it cannot limit the movement of Indians in and out of the country nor force them to pay the premium prices that other foreigners face. The Bhutanese have also tried but mostly failed to curtail the influence of Indian popular culture, especially in films and television, which runs counter to the simpler rural life of a dominant Buddhist culture.

Only in recent years have Indian governments, under both Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, from 1998 to 2004 and Manmohan Singh of a Congress-led alliance since then, relaxed somewhat their obsessive hold on Bhutan and

helped the country weather a very controversial dispute with its ethnic Nepali minority--instead of encouraging an ethnic Nepali political movement to bring down the monarchy as in Sikkim. India blocked an attempt by Bhutanese exiles who claimed they had been forced out of Bhutan in the early 1990s to return illegally. This could have been a destabilizing advance guard of thousands of Bhutanese still languishing in refugee camps in Nepal while the United Nations attempts to sort out which people have legitimate claims to Bhutanese citizenship. India's helpful approach is a hugely welcome development for the Bhutanese, a majority of whom are Tibeto-Burmese like those in Sikkim.

The only potential Indian threat to Bhutan in recent years occurred in 2003 when New Delhi accused the Bhutanese of allowing rebels from Assam state in India's far Northeast to find refuge across the border in Bhutan's southern semitropical belt. The Bhutanese were essentially told that if the rebels were not pushed back, the Indian army would come and do the job. Bhutan, fearing that the Indians might come and stay, hastily assembled a military force of about 5,000 soldiers--half the national army--and led by the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, drove the rebels out of their bases (and presumably into the arms of Indian troops waiting across the border). The Bhutanese lost several dozen soldiers, but defused the crisis on their own terms.

Bhutan now has a democratically elected government for the first time in its history, with the monarchy in a constitutional role. In both India and Bhutan there has been talk of reviewing the 1949 agreement. Meanwhile, Bhutan has reached beyond South Asia to establish good working relationships with a number of nations elsewhere in Asia and in Europe as it pursues its own development policies, which have begun to produce social indicators in health, education, and other areas that surpass those of India.

Nepal

Another neighboring Himalayan kingdom, Nepal, which like Bhutan had remained free of direct British rule during the colonial era, has had its share of tension with India, even after Indira Gandhi's death. Relations between India and Nepal were first based on treaties and acts essentially written by New Delhi in the 1950s. Succeeding Nepali governments and monarchs have chafed under heavy-handed Indian influence over more than half a century since. The mountainous country, another buffer against China, was blockaded in 1989 by India after the Nepali government bought anti-aircraft guns from the Chinese. China had also won a contract to build a road in Nepal to ease travel to the Chinese border, and Chinese trade in consumer goods had begun to flourish in Nepali markets.

The punitive Indian blockade--which included a ban on the use of Indian ports and overrode earlier agreements that guaranteed Nepal trade and transit rights through India--sent messages to both the Chinese and Nepalese. Landlocked Nepal saw its right to be protected from economic strangulation abused and attempted to take its case to the outside world for support. Many hard-pressed Nepalese ran severely short of kerosene for heating and cooking as well as other staples of daily life. The dispute was not settled until a democracy movement that burst on to the streets of Kathmandu in 1990 overturned a party-less political system that had been installed by the monarchy and restored a multiparty elected government.

Relations with New Delhi improved in the 1990s, though political instability continued in Nepal despite the restoration of a parliamentary democracy. Most recently, Nepal was the target of a Maoist insurgency whose leaders operated from North India until the rebellion succeeded in fighting its way into a still tenuous power-sharing arrangement with non-Communist and unarmed leftist Nepali parties in Kathmandu. The power-sharing experiment has proved fragile, and an election in April 2008 to choose a constituent assembly appears to have given the Maoists considerable political power. The United Nations is now deeply involved in guiding the disputatious parties toward a workable compromise while monitoring the human rights situation and the disarmament of the Maoists.

There is no indication that India was involved officially in any way in backing the armed leftist rebellion--it has its own struggle with a growing Maoist insurgency in eastern India--but neither did Indian governments at either a national or state level make any move to find or deport the Nepali rebel leaders. This follows a pattern. For decades, Nepali opposition figures had sought and been granted refuge and support from India. This has also been true for opposition groups from other regional countries, some of them armed at Indian expense. As with Bhutan, however, India under its last two governments led by Prime Ministers Vajpayee and Singh has not engaged, or at least not blatantly, in fostering regional rebellions in Nepal or elsewhere.

Bangladesh

The birth of Bangladesh, made possible by Indira Gandhi, who saw an opportunity to split Pakistan and weaken the Muslim nation, might arguably be said to have been inevitable sooner or later. Pakistan, created as a country for Muslims by the British before their departure in 1947, was never a viable nation as designed by the British, with part of the country to the west of India and part to the east, 900 miles away.

Beyond the problems inherent in geographical distance, the two halves of Pakistan, while both Muslim-majority areas, were culturally and ethnically different. Much of West Pakistan lay on the military frontier of British India, populated by Pashtuns, Baluchis, Punjabis, and Sindhis. Only two of its cities figured prominently in the Indian imagination: intellectual Lahore in Punjab and commercial Karachi in Sindh. On the other side of India, East Pakistan was the home of Bengalis, many of them with close ties to the Bengali cultural, intellectual, and artistic capital, Calcutta, now Kolkata.

The Bengalis of East Pakistan resented rule by West Pakistan, which suppressed Bengali aspirations. By 1949, the Awami League was formed in East Pakistan to campaign for autonomy. In 1970, it won an election in East Pakistan, an outcome West Pakistan refused to recognize. Riots erupted and the Awami leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was arrested. An East Pakistani declaration of independence and a brutal West Pakistani military response caused millions of Bangladeshis to flee to India and gave the Gandhi government, which had been secretly training and arming East Pakistanis, a chance to intervene militarily.

Ironically, the close relations between Bangladesh and India were not to last. India's ally, Sheikh Mujib, was assassinated in an army coup in 1975 and though his daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, continued to lead the Awami League it was not until 1996, after a series of military and Nationalist Party governments that the League returned to power. Sheikh Hasina became prime minister and served a full five-year term before losing an election to the Nationalists, led by Begum Zia, the widow of a former military ruler. The political order more or less collapsed in 2006 and both Sheikh Hasina and Begum Zia were charged with crimes.

With years of military rule and Nationalist politics, the old Bangladesh of 1971, with its close ties to India, became a different country, and the two nations have since quarreled over the management of Ganges river water, illegal immigration of Bangladeshis into India, and other issues. In the 1980s, when the Awami League was on the political sidelines, India backed antigovernment guerrillas in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of interior Bangladesh. Reporters who met rebels in the hills were told that they had been coached at an undercover training center in Dehra Dun, in northern India, not only in the use of weapons but in also psychological warfare and propaganda. They were India's way of keeping Bangladesh off balance. There was no chance that the rebels could have seized power at the national level, but a passionate lobby of Bangladeshi writers and scholars continues to insist that it was no coincidence that the simmering Chittagong rebellion dating back to the late 1940s really took off when India's friends in the Awami League lost power in the mid-1970s, and that one of the aims of the separatist movement was to secede from Bangladesh and join India. Eventually, however, the rebellion tapered off and a peace agreement was signed after the Awami League returned to power in 1996. Little is heard of this rebellion now, though advocates of the tribal people of the Chittagong Hills who were involved in the separatist movement say that a coming national election must be closely monitored to insure that there is no hindrance to voting rights in that area.

Bangladesh is at this writing under a neutral caretaker government awaiting a new political order.

Pakistan

Pakistan, the focus of numerous Indian accusations, saber-rattling and occasional Indian-inspired acts of sabotage, was always too big and well-armed to be easily destabilized. If there was much Indian subversion, little is documented, making it difficult to measure with certainty. When an Indian investigative journalist, Dhiren Bhagat, was killed in a car crash in 1988 he had only begun to investigate reports that Indian agents were planting weapons allegedly from Pakistan among Sikh extremists in order to implicate the government in Islamabad. John Gunther Dean, who was American ambassador in New Delhi when General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the military ruler of Pakistan, was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1988 has said that he was told by a high-ranking official in Delhi that "rogue elements" of RAW, India's foreign intelligence agency, may have played a role along with others, in that death. In this case and others, however, material evidence, is often lacking in South Asia.

In general, Pakistan is more often blamed by New Delhi, especially in this era of Islamic militancy, of arming or instigating Muslim terrorism in India. Pakistanis have a record of cross-border incursions into India dating back to independence. The Indian- administered part of the disputed territory of Kashmir has been a perennial focus of Pakistani meddling. But even there, the hostility toward India of the Muslim Kashmiris, which gave Pakistan an opening to meddle in the 1990s, was in large part attributable to the high-handed and undemocratic interference in Kashmiri politics practiced by Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv, who rigged elections and dismissed elected state governments when they were seen as a threat to Congress Party domination.

Still, Pakistanis have built into their thinking and military planning a perennial preoccupation with vulnerability--they call it a "lack of strategic depth"--in the face of real or imagined Indian threats. They do not forget the dismemberment of Pakistan by India in 1971, when Bangladesh was created. When India exploded a nuclear device in 1974 under Indira Gandhi's watch, Pakistan was driven to match the achievement. When India tested bombs again in 1998, Pakistan inevitably did the same. The two countries have fought several wars and major skirmishes, mostly over Kashmir, which the United Nations still regards as disputed territory. New Delhi's championing of governments in Afghanistan not to Islamabad's liking have also been an irritant for decades and a source of Pakistani panic about being "encircled" by India and its allies.

The full story of India's relations with Pakistan is a much larger one that must also take into account India's concerns about Pakistani ties to China, and until recently, the perception that the United States favored Pakistani governments over closer links with India. But it cannot be denied that Indian pressures on Pakistan and India's overwhelming military might in the region have sustained some support for military governments. Decades of living with a closed border, which until recently, at India's insistence, prevented person- to-person contact, did not help to reduce Pakistani apprehensions about its neighbor. And, a constant drumbeat in Washington by Indian lobbies against positive U.S. overtures to Pakistan keeps Islamabad on the defensive.

Sri Lanka

Of India's neighbors, none has suffered anything like the unending tragedy of Sri Lanka, a direct fallout of the Indira Gandhi years. Sri Lanka, though only a short distance from the southeastern tip of India, was once a separate island colony, ruled first by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally Britain, from which it regained its independence in 1948. It had a rich history of its own, with a largely Buddhist, ethnic Sinhalese population in the south, mixed with Christians and Muslims (known as Ceylon Moors, many the descendants of Arab traders). In the north, ethnic Tamils, many of them Hindus, had been living for centuries in a region centered on the Jaffna peninsula and adjacent areas. A second group of Tamils, descendants of laborers from South India transported to work in the British tea plantations in the hilly center of Sri Lanka, arrived later and share little but their ethnicity with the Tamils of the north, an intellectual, often high-caste community.

Northern Tamils, many of whom were English-speaking graduates of American missionary schools in Jaffna, were favored by British overlords filling colonial administrative jobs. This bred resentment among the Sinhala-speaking majority, and erupted into a chauvinistic campaign against Tamils after independence. When Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike, playing to Sinhalese

Buddhist prejudices against the northern Tamils in the 1950s, began to discriminate against Tamils and announced a national language policy of "Sinhala only," the resentment grew.

By the 1970s, organizations were forming among the Tamil elite to fight for Tamil rights. The movement was at first dominated by politicians who wanted to remain within a national parliamentary system. But in the shadows, more militant leaders were also organizing. Among them was a young man of a lower caste, Velupillai Prabhakaran, whose organization, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), would become the most powerful and ruthless of rebel groups.

In 1975, rebel violence broke into the open with the assassination of the popular Tamil mayor of Jaffna town, Alfred Duraiyappa, an ally of then Prime Minister Srimavo Bandaranaike, the widow of Solomon Bandaranaike, who had been assassinated in 1959 by an outraged Buddhist for not being chauvinist enough. The assassination of political rivals became a hallmark of the LTTE, known most commonly in Sri Lanka as the Tamil Tigers. Over the years that followed, Prabhakaran decimated the leadership of other Tamil rebel groups and ordered the murders of numerous mainstream Tamil politicians trying to work within the national political system. Later, he also was behind the killing in Colombo of the country's leading human rights lawyer, Neelan Tiruchelvam, a Tamil who devoted his life to trying to bridge the Tamil-Sinhalese rift.

Open civil war began in Sri Lanka in 1983 with a series of atrocities--the murder of 13 Sri Lankan soldiers and a fierce retaliatory pogrom against civilian Tamils in Colombo, the capital--and has never really ended. In the process, South Asia's most socially developed and law-abiding country has been coarsened politically. The LTTE has murdered a generation of statesmen, and tougher or less capable politicians have emerged to fill the vacuum. Two vicious Sinhala-led rebellions fueled by a vaguely defined leftism and anti-Tamil hatred brought horrific atrocities to the country's previously peaceful south. Amazingly, Sri Lanka has somehow weathered this appalling period with social, educational, and health indicators still at the top of South Asian tables. Without the war, Sri Lankans argue, this country could have been Singapore.

What do India and Indira Gandhi have to do with all this? To hear the accounts of officials on both the Indian and Sri Lankan sides, there was intense personal animosity between Gandhi and J. R. Jayawardene, who was president of the country in 1983. Indian and Sri Lankan diplomats tell stories of the bitterness between them and the deprecatory remarks made by one when out of the earshot of the other. Strategic differences also fueled the fire: Sri Lanka had been moving to open its economy and improve ties with the United States. Also complicating matters were the Tamil nationalist politicians in India's Tamil Nadu state, across a narrow strait from northern Sri Lanka, who were more than willing to assist the beleaguered Jaffna Tamils.

Whatever the paramount reason, however, Indira Gandhi appears to have made a decision by 1983 or 1984 (the year of her death) to aid the Tamil rebellion in Sri Lanka in numerous ways: by providing training in India, organized and supported by RAW, and by allowing Sri Lankan rebel leaders to establish safe houses, political bases, and other facilities in India. When reporters wanted to find Tamil rebel spokesmen or leaders such as Prabhakaran and his chief political advisor and negotiator, the late Anton Balasingham, the place to look during the mid- to late-1980s was Madras (now Chennai) or other South Indian towns. Whether or not this was all due to the generosity of sympathetic Tamil politicians in Tamil Nadu, the Indian government was certainly part of the campaign to keep Sri Lanka on a war footing and off balance. Indira Gandhi was determined not to see Sri Lanka fall into a Western camp.

When Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister after the assassination of his mother on October 31, 1984, he inherited a policy of deep involvement in Sri Lanka, where thousands of lives were being lost and where acts of terror by rebels and abuses by army troops were devastating any semblance of normal life. Tourism, once a major foreign-exchange source for Sri Lanka, was ruined.

Tragically, as it would turn out, Rajiv Gandhi decided in 1987 to put a stop to the Tamil terror and sent an Indian army peacekeeping force to northern Sri Lanka. The Indians forced Prabhakaran to surrender arms but let him go free, and the crisis only grew more intense. The still-potent LTTE turned their attentions to attacking Indians in Jaffna and, in the Sri Lankan south, a frenzy of anti-Indian hatred took hold, boosting Sinhala chauvinism to perhaps its most dangerous level. This almost rabid Sinhala nationalism has bedeviled any and all attempts for a genuine peace agreement ever since.

In 1990, an opposition government in India brought the troops home, after a considerable loss of life. The following year, in May 1991, the LTTE took its revenge on India. Rajiv Gandhi, while campaigning in Tamil Nadu for reelection, was blown apart by a suicide bomber sent, according to exhaustive Indian investigations, by Prabhakaran.

Along with the United States, Britain, and numerous other countries, India has now declared the LTTE a terrorist organization. But there is a strong assumption in Sri Lanka that Indian intelligence knows where Prabhakaran is, but will offer no help to the Sri Lankans in pinpointing his scrub jungle headquarters or joining efforts to find and capture him. Despite successive governments in Delhi committed to better relations with its neighbors, somewhere in the Indian establishment (probably within the intelligence community), there are those who will not give up the Tamil card. For its part, the Sri Lankan government decided in 2007 to break a ceasefire agreement and re turn to war against the Jaffna Tamils. Many more deaths on both sides are likely to follow. By early 2008, the Tigers had resumed killing civilians in the Sinhala south with bus bombs and other attacks in crowded places.

Across South Asia, the next few years will be crucial in determining whether India can finally shake off the legacy of Indira Gandhi and continue to take the kind of conciliatory steps begun by Prime Ministers Vajpayee and Singh to reduce tensions in the region and the pressures on India's neighbors. Provocations abound. Indian politics appears set for a period of some uncertainty as national elections loom in the next year. For Islamabad, entering a new political era, there are concerns that Indian politicians courting the Hindu nationalist vote cannot appear to be "going soft" on Pakistan. Prime Minister Vajpayee, the leader of a Hindu nationalist party, was nearly forced to resign in 2001 after he was deemed to have been bested by President Pervez Musharraf in a rare summit meeting.

Nepal may be on the eve of political domination by Maoists. It is widely assumed in the region that India, with radical leftist movements of its own, would view with unease the ascent to power of radicals in Kathmandu. Sri Lanka is back at war, and there will be pressures in India's Tamil south to prevent the Jaffna Tamils from being overrun by a Sinhala army. Bangladesh is without an elected government, and fresh elections bring the threat of more political turmoil--and more illegal immigrants pouring into India. In the Maldives, where India intervened in 1988 to put down an attempted coup, resistance to long-time President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom continues to fester. Only Bhutan seems to be out of the line of fire, at least for now. It is a restless region, and while the specter of Indian intervention may be fading in some places, it has not yet disappeared.

Barbara Crossette was The New York Times United Nations bureau chief from 1994 to 2001, and a correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia. She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas and The Great Hill Stations of Asia as well as a Foreign Policy Association study, India: Old Civilization in a New World. She won a George Polk award for her coverage in India of the assassination in 1991 of Rajiv Gandhi. She is now editor of the United Nations Association of the USA's quarterly magazine.

Crossette, Barbara

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Crossette, Barbara. "Indira Gandhi's legacy: vying for mastery in South Asia." World Policy Journal, vol. 25, no. 1, 2008, p. 36+.

Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A180969705/AONE?u=oran95108&sid=AONE&xid=9219754d. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.

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