U.S. President Harry Truman signs the bill ratifying the North Atlantic Treaty, part of creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/north_atlantic_treaty/

Question me: Third Front

Among the big casualties of the recent general elections was the “Third Front” which had been the centre- piece of the left’s political strategy to push the Congressinto a corner and cut the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) down to size. Unfortunately for its promoters, who pitched it as the electoral and policy alternative to the Congress and BJP at the national level, it was largely rejected by the voters and has now been accepted, by its very advocates, as a non-starter.
The reasons for this crushing defeat are not difficult to spot and have already been identified by the principal players them­selves. It was an ad hoc arrangement cobbled together under the initiative of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] after its bitter parting with the United Progressive Alliance gov­ernment over the nuclear deal in July last year. The primary binding factor of the constituents was opposition to the Congress. Yet this opposition to the Congress was of a contingent nature for most of them. Even though, ostensibly, they all were opposed to the BJP, they had, other than the left parties, often shared power with this “communal” party. Crucially, there was no coherence in the policy and ideological positions of its constituents. If the All- India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam had construction of the Ram temple and protection of Ram’s bridge (Sethusamudram) in its manifesto, the Telugu Desam Party had for long been the World Bank’s global poster boy for “economic reforms”. While the Telangana Rashtra Samiti’s (TRS) demand for a separate Telangana sat uneasy with its ally, CPI(M)’s insistence on a unified Andhra Pradesh, the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s pitch for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s Prabhakaran was equally at odds with the positions of other parties. Further, it was clear that each of its non-left constituents had kept their options of joining a BJP-led government open. Lastly, all the main third front con­stituents, including the CPI(M), faced significant erosion of popu­lar support due to their policies in government and were basing their chances of victory on the unpopularity or division of their opposition, rather than on any positive agenda of change.
Given this context, one is sorely tempted to repeat Marx’s oft-abused line that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. The present, happily deceased, attempt at a third front government at the centre has a genealogy which stretches back to the post-Janata Party period when parties which represented regional economic and social interests came together against the domi­nance of the Congress. Their strength came from two social strata: one was the peasantry led by the dominant castes of each region and the other was the non-metropolitan urban popula­tions of professional middle classes, businessmen and industrial­ists. These social classes were in a struggle with the big industri­alists and metropolitan middle classes for political power and economic resources. This struggle expressed itself in a political agenda of federalism, democratic reforms and redistributive eco­nomic policies. It provided coherence and strength to their unity, gave them a radical edge and they, in turn, helped democratise Indian politics by breaking the dominance of the Congress. Their decade-long struggle for political power culminated in the defeat of the Congress in 1989 and the formation of a true third front govern­ment which was anti-Congress yet distant from the BJP.
This third front was repeated in the form of the United Front govern­ment of the mid-1990s, which, in hindsight, can be labelled a “tragedy”. Not only did it give a big push to neoliberal economic reforms, it paved the way, politically, for the emergence and con­solidation of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. The third front provided the personnel, training in running national coalitions of regional powers and political space for the expansion of the NDA. If that was a tragedy, the present attempt has surely been a “farce”.
It is not enough to merely dismiss the third front in such terms but is necessary to understand why it has come to such a pass. Today all the parties which potentially make up the third front, whether it be the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, Deve Gowda in Karnataka, Telugu Desam and TRS in Andhra Pradesh, Nationalist Congress in Maharashtra, Biju Janata Dal in Orissa, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha in Jharkhand, Janata Dal (United) in Bihar and Bahujan Samaj Party or Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, have a distin­guished track record of opening their states to the most rapacious exploitation of humans and nature by capital while peddling var­ious forms of cultural and regional chauvinism to mobilise the masses. In this they are led by the rich peasants who are clamour­ing to commercialise agriculture and thus transform themselves into rural capitalists, and by industrialists in the states who have seen their capital grow exponentially under the policies of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation and are now among the biggest champions of such economic “reforms”. In pursing this agenda, these social classes and their parties are natural al­lies of the Congress and BJP and, therefore, do not show any in­terest in bonding together like they did two decades ago. Where is the space, in this transformed agenda of the regional parties, for any form of radical or democratic politics?
The CPI(M), which has been the main proponent of the third front, should have very little in common with these policies of the third front parties. Unfortunately, in the recent past, its Bengal unit has shown a similar inclination, allowing special economic zones, dispossessing poor peasants for big industrialists and encourag­ing Bengali chauvinism to counter the Gorkhaland demand. It is crucial for the health of Indian democracy that the CPI(M) in particular and the left in general, dump this poisoned chalice and reaffirm their commitment to their own legacy of building mass movements on a radical transformative agenda.

The Civil War ends, but....

The death of Velupillai Prabhakaran signals the end of the civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). For nearly three decades since its formation, the LTTE had relentlessly pur­sued its aim of achieving a separate state (Eelam) to be carved out of the northern and eastern areas of Sri Lanka. In the course of its single-minded drive to achieve “Eelam”, the organisation ruthlessly decimated other militant organisations and voices among the Tamils – many of whom were willing to accept autonomy or federal rights for the Tamils. But by accepting no com­promises and by continuing to use tactics such as assassination of perceived “enemies of the cause” and violent retribution, the LTTE brought about its own doom.
Despite a systematic shelling and bombing campaign that killed or incapacitated thousands of civilians, the Sri Lankan army did not receive anything more than token disapproval or humanitarian appeals from the international community. The Sri Lankan government’s ruthless drive to vanquish the “terrorist” LTTE was never halted in the final phase of war by an international community tired of “terror” – a stigma that the LTTE car­ried for its past actions. The LTTE’s own cynical moves to use Tamil civilians as a shield, a fact that was brushed aside by the organisation’s propagandists, only alienated them even further in the eyes of the international arbiters such as the United Nations or India. The events leading up to the end of the battle – with the Sri Lankan army’s capture of the last remaining areas of the Vanni region under LTTE control, and the killing of the outfit’s senior representatives and leaders – are murky. Questions remain about the way the LTTE leader and founder, Prabhakaran, his family members and the organisation’s political representatives were killed and war crimes by the Sri Lankan army cannot be ruled out. But the general lack of sympathy for the vanquished among the international community is itself a consequence of the LTTE’s intransigence in its ways and means.
Thousands of Tamil civilians now live in “appalling conditions”– as the visiting UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon called them – in internment camps after displacement because of the war. Despite claims by the Lankan government about commitment to “early resettlement”, its actions in restricting access to these camps by humanitarian agencies and its callous treatment of the displaced people in the camps in the name of security do not inspire confidence. These actions in tandem with the triumphalism dis­played by the Sri Lankan polity would only make one more scepti­cal about the Lankan government’s claims of bringing about a democratic solution to the problems of the Tamil minority after the defeat of the “terrorist” LTTE. A lasting peace after the defeat of the outfit would remain a chimera if the Sri Lankan polity refuses to acknowledge the plight of the displaced Vanni residents or indeed of the genuine grievances of the Tamil community.
The LTTE’s inflexibility and rejection of any compromise, say a federal solution to the conflict, its dwindling legitimacy internationally and the internal split, with the defection of erstwhile eastern commander, Vinayagamurthy Muralidharan, were ulti­mately responsible for its defeat. Several moments capture the cynical single-mindedness of the group. It rejected an offer from the ex-president Chandrika Kumaratunga, which provided powers of devolution even greater than what the Thirteenth Amendment in 1987 (that provided for provincial councils) envis­aged. After a ceasefire agreement in 2002, the LTTE signalled a willingness to discuss a federal solution, but backed out of peace talks for no valid reason. It also engaged in violent acts in viola­tion of the agreement (something which the Lankan government was also guilty of). It even called for a boycott of elections by the Tamils, an action that helped hardliner Mahinda Rajapaksa become the president of the country with the support of other Sinhala chauvinist parties and thus resulted later in the recently concluded violent phase of the civil war.
The intractable positions taken by the LTTE were partly due to the enthusiastic material and arms support that the organisation received through funding and donations from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora over the years. After the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York, the LTTE, which had been proscribed in 32 nations, found its material support drying up because of tough actions against its sympathisers in many countries where toler­ance for support to “terror” outfits became negligible.
Among the Tamil community in Sri Lanka and in the vast diaspora of Sri Lankan Tamils, there is a deep sense of despond­ency following the defeat of the LTTE. Many of the latter’s sympa­thisers are still in denial about the death of the outfit’s leader. These sympathizers should introspect about the reasons for the bloody end to the war between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. Far from realising the aspirations of the minority Tamils, who aimed for self-rule, the LTTE’s actions have only resulted in a traumatised Tamil population disaffected both by the “Eelam cause” and with the government ruling from Colombo.
There remains no excuse for the Sri Lankan government to avoid addressing the grievances of the Tamils now that the LTTE is vanquished. Anything short of a federal set-up that grants political rights for the oppressed Tamil population would only lead to a further festering of the deep wounds from years of mar­ginalisation and alienation of the Tamils. In the provision of relief to the displaced Tamils and in their resettlement, the international community, through its various humanitarian agencies, must play an important role. Also, the international community must be vigilant and should pressurise the Sri Lankan govern­ment to arrive at a political solution to the conflict that takes account of its root causes. In the absence of this, the seeds would be sown for another militant organisation – one that would have learnt from the past mistakes of the LTTE – espous­ing complete separation.

EPW