The Pioneer
Author: Priyadarshi Dutta
What will a UNHRC resolution matter after 500 years — or even 500 days? The Tamils of Sri Lanka will continue to be underdogs and without a political resolution, the sores will continue to fester
Colombo betrayed its complicity to genocide years before the first gunshot was fired in the Lankan civil war. In 1971, to stall the great slaughter in East Pakistan by the Pakistani Army, India had closed its airspace to airplanes from Pakistan. Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s government, however, had permitted Pakistani aircraft to fly through Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) with refueling facilities at Colombo. Unwilling as she was to withdraw that favour, even in the face of mounting casualties in the East Pakistan, it took foreign minister Sardar Swaran Singh threat of a military intervention to make her acquiesce.
The men behind the butchery in East Pakistan, which claimed an estimated three million lives between March and November 1971, were never brought to justice. General Tikka Khan, the architect of that genocide, continued to live safely in native Rawalpindi until his death in 2002. The Hindus, who in 1971 constituted 14 per cent of East Pakistan, bore the brunt of that carnage. Their condition deteriorated as the initial euphoria over free Bangladesh subsided and the nation became first a de-facto and later, de-jure Islamic republic.
