India: Policing A Tough Neighborhood

For a determined regional cop, India finds itself working on a chaotic schedule. New Delhi had just managed to push forward a plan to resolve the long-running conflict in its tiny northern neighbor Nepal when trouble broke out on the southern front.
After months of uncertainty, the peace process in Sri Lanka seems to be unraveling. The government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) both insist they are committed to peace talks. Intensification in the recent spiral of violence could provide either side – perhaps even both – the excuse to return to fighting, which has already claimed 64,000 lives over a quarter-century.
In Nepal, sustained Indian pressure forced King Gyanendra to restore parliament and hand over power to an opposition alliance that brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets for almost three weeks.
The patch-up between the palace and parties has not relieved India of much. New Delhi still has to contend with the Nepalese Maoist rebels fighting to overthrow the monarchy. The rebels, whose decade-long “people’s war” with the state has claimed 13,000 lives, control much of Nepal. Indian officials brokered an alliance between mainstream opposition parties and the rebels to force King Gyanendra to shed the absolute powers he seized 15 months ago. Having tamed the palace, Indian officials believe they can encourage the Maoists to lay down arms and join the political process.
New Delhi may have made a promising beginning. The Maoists have announced a three-month ceasefire in the hope that the new government would hold elections to an assembly that the rebels hope would draft a new constitution abolishing the monarchy. Nepalese opposition parties still doubt the Maoists’ new-found commitment to multiparty politics, but seem willing to test it.
For India, a more pressing imperative is at play: the growing menace posed by Indian Maoists. Some 20,000 Naxalites, as the Indian Maoists are known, have arms and are an important factor in states comprising 20 percent of India's population. They pose a serious menace in vast swathes stretching from the Nepal border through the most backward states of north-central India - from Bihar to Jharkand, Chhattisgarh and parts of Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently described the Naxalites as the greatest internal security threat Indian has ever faced. The Maoists’ success in Nepal has directly strengthened and emboldened the Naxalites, something New Delhi has resolved to stop.
Ethnicity, rather than ideology, is what concerns India in Sri Lanka. On April 25, a suicide bomber struck the army’s heavily-fortified headquarters in the capital, Colombo, wounding the country’s hard-line army chief and killing several of his bodyguards.
The bomber was a member of the LTTE, which seeks an independent state for the mainly Hindu Tamils of northern and eastern Sri Lanka.
Originally sympathetic to the LTTE, India has suffered much at the hands of the fierce organization. When New Delhi sent a peacekeeping force to the island nation to protect the Tamils from the Sinhala-dominated government forces at the height of the civil war in the late 1980s, it faced a rude awakening.
The LTTE and Sri Lankan forces joined hands to drive out Indian troops, inflicting heavy losses. (India’s reluctance to intervene militarily in Nepal is partly rooted in the Sri Lankan fiasco.)
Fearing a harsh response from Rajiv Gandhi, the man who dispatched the troops and was set to return to power in 1991, the LTTE did what it long excelled in. It assassinated Gandhi midway through India’s staggered general election.
Although the peace process in Sri Lanka has been steered by the Norwegians, India has been playing critical behind-the-scenes role.
After the Colombo attack, the Sri Lankan government retaliated by mounting air strikes against LTTE positions in the north and east, killing several people and prompting the rebels to warn of more attacks. The fear of renewed war could trigger an exodus of Sri Lankan Tamils to the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. With state elections approaching, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh certainly cannot be perceived as anti-Tamil – either through his action or inaction.