Except for Sena taking control of Mumbai, I agree shit existed when the BJP was in power.
The majority of us opposed.

Now, if you treat a brilliant military strategist and war-hero like a street dog, just imagine the plight of ordinary innocent tamils.
I can still say I am proud of my country.
You call SL your country. Are you sure you are proud of it?

Not my own comment but one I read somewhere in a forum :
“Srilanka Means lost paradise. Its constitution is illegal, its rulers and its agents and liers Its Pseudo Interlectulas are either singing the same lies for their supper , keeping mum. Its finances in the ruins, its armed forces, judiciary are politicised, media and INGOs have been silenced or ousted out of the country. Ruling elite have been squandering the countries wealth. Can a country sink any more than this and call itself a soveign state. ??? “

The BJP, at the peak of its popularity, got not more than a measly third of the *hindu* vote. That they came to power at all speaks volumes for the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system and unprincipled coalition politics. They’ve never got anything like the share of the national vote that Mahinda managed.

Jcnars: Most Sri Lankans are proud of Sri Lanka in much the same way we’re proud of India. They may disagree with the policies of specific governments, but it doesn’t affect the way they feel about the country. Did the Gujarat riots stop us being proud of India?

In my adult life (which now spans over two decades) there have been four elected leaders of the country (Premadasa, Chandrika, Ranil, Mahinda). Three of them came into power on an explicitly anti-communal, negotiated settlement platform.

As for Mahinda, some people hold that he rode a wave of Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism into office in 2005. I think this is, at the very least, debatable. While his stands on the CFA and the unitary state certainly appealed to the tribalists, there were plenty of reasonable people who felt that the government needed to take a harder line with the LTTE, what with their rampant ceasefire violations and assasinations. There was also a deep anxiety about the ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies of the UNF administration. On top of that, Ranil was a terrible campaigner. Still for all, Mahinda just scraped by.

He won by a landslide in 2010. But then he did end a 30 year war.

JCNARS, Please save me the BS about “the majority of us opposed”… the SL equivalent to the BJP is the JHU and it has NEVER been able to gain the amount of support the Hindu extremist BJP did/does. But in India the BJP is the main opposition and it ran India for several years. You wax eloquent about SL but from Ayodhya to Godhra to attacks on Christians in Orissa and Karnataka clearly show the religious hate that drives Indian politics. So much for you much vaunted ‘secularism’

Yeah I’m proud of my country. And you’re a typical ugly Indian who thinks others can’t be proud of their country :) Can’t even believe you asked such a dumb question dude. Let me guess, you think all Sri Lankans are desperate to become Indians? lol. Little wonder India has any friends in the neighbourhood, while SL has excellent relationships with all of them.

As for Fonseka, can’t say I feel sorry for him. If he was planning a coup he deserves to be behind bars.

Here is a quote about India from a forum:

“According to 1991 nationwide census., Muslims constitute 12.60 percent of the total Indian population. However, the representation of Muslims in the parliament, state legislatures, administrative services, armed forces, police and para military forces, educational institutions and the private and public sectors is far below their proportion. The percentage of the Muslims in the civil and foreign services is less than a quarter of their population. ”

Another one:

“In what promises to result in a long overdue move, the world is finally waking up to the shocking barbaric abuses that take place in the Third World shithole India. The United Nations is about to declare the barbaric, centuries old Hindu caste system a gross human rights violation.

Shithole India has always been the place where the most barbaric, subhuman, gross, savage human rights violations take place in the name of “caste”. The Indian government, controlled by the “upper castes” has understood that such barbaric practices don’t take place in any other country in the world and that no civilized person will ever tolerate such filth. Therefore, it tries hard to deny the issue, conceal it and even justify the sub-human savagery, rape, murder, torture that is perpetrated by the “upper castes” on the “untouchable castes” or dalits.”

and another:

“Yeah. India is a shithole all right. I’m a real Indian waiting to get the hell out of this country at the first available opportunity.”

You see where this is going right?

Two can play at this game.

Hey jcnars,

Did you hear about the recent bomb blast in Pune? Did you watch the images of crying relatives, a devasted bomb site and breaking news blaring left and right? Well that’s what your government visited upon Sri Lankans by arming, training and funded the LTTE. How does it feel to taste the medicine you have been dishing out to neighbouring countries? I’m not trying to be an asshole here, just wondering honestly. And you have the nerve to threaten to revive the LTTE? Ha! Let’s see what the Maoists and the Indian Mujahideen do next.

V: Terrorism’s nothing new for us. When I was in school in the 1980s, we had classes on spotting bombs in parks and on buses, and on how to check if a toy in a playground was booby trapped with a bomb. Things have never been that bad in Sri Lanka. That’s why the Pune attack makes no difference in relation to how Indians see terrorism. We’ve been ‘tasting our medicine’, as you so charmingly put it, well before we started dishing it out.

From the tenor of your comments, I’m not sure you’re really interested in understanding how Indians felt about things in Sri Lanka, but in case you are, or some other watcher is, the reason support for the LTTE declined precipitously starting in the late 1980s was precisely that ordinary people in TN couldn’t stomach their terrorism. Note how, despite the strong wave of sympathy for the people of the Vanni, the parties who were openly pro-LTTE got their bottoms royally kicked in the election. Most of us did not see the LTTE as being part of the solution.

Rajivmw: That’s a sobering point. I’ve always belonged to the ‘if only’ school which likes to think that Vijaya would have ended the conflict and healed the rift if he’d lived. But I don’t know. It’s hard to accept that the problem was so intractible that only relatively unconstrained violence could have ended it. On the BJP analogy, I’m sort of aware that Mahinda wasn’t elected on a chauvinist plank. But neither was the BJP. The one time they were elected (and it’s worth pointing out that they came to power only once), it was becase they managed to attract economic nationalists (i.e. neo-mercantilists) and populists (jobs for the poor! protect the public sector!), political nationalists (i.e. Self Interested Great Power-style nationalists – we have the bomb! hurrah!) and the Hindu right. That seemed to me to be the same sort of coalition that propelled Mahinda to power in the first election.

“Things have never been that bad in Sri Lanka. ”

Clearly you have very little knowledge of Sri Lanka or what Sri Lankans have faced over the last 30 years or so. This is typical of the Indian mentality. It is to be expected however, I can’t say I am surprised. Most people from large countries are clueless about their smaller neighbours, bcause they see themselves as the centre of the world.

Support for the LTTE only “declined precipitously” not because the ordinary Tamil people ‘couldn’t stomach their terrorism’, but because Rajiv Gandhi was blown into a million pieces, and a bomb ripped through the then Madras Airport. That is, they only gave a shit when terrorism hit them hard. Otherwise as long Sri Lankans were getting blown to bits in bombs they were supporting the LTTE to the hilt. Some still do.

The way I see it now is that as long as bombs rip through Indian cities like in Pune, the Indian government and many of the Indian people will realise that supporting terrorism in neighbouring countries is a realy shitty thing to do. Sniggers about bomb blasts in Pakistan and support for the LTTE in Sri Lanka are kept in check.

Actually, I do know what’s been happening in Sri Lanka. I’ve had family there, and I’ve had friends killed in the war (mostly by the Tigers). I’m not sure how much you know about terrorism in India in the 1980s but, in any event, terrorism existed in India before India started supporting the LTTE. The people responsible for India’s Sri Lanka policy knew exactly what they were doing. Bombs blowing up in random places in Delhi didn’t change anything in the 1980s, and bombs blowing up in Pune or Bombay aren’t going to change anything now.

Support for the LTTE in TN began declining in the late 1980s, well before Rajiv Gandhi was killed. There were a number of reasons for this – internecine killings were part of it, but so were things like the expulsion of Muslims from Jaffna, the massacres of monks and other such things which gave the lie to the whole ‘noble freedom fighters’ image. Official tolerance of their activities didn’t end until Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, I’ll grant you that, but they’d lost the bulk of their popular support before then, and there was absolutely no protest against the government crackdown on the LTTE.

But believe what you want to believe.