At the best of times it is a bad idea to allow bureaucrats to run a country. And, here we are in very bad times with the Election Commission ruling India for yet another month. In Sri Lanka the civil war is reaching a horrific climax. As we are in limbo between governments, the Indian response has been confused and unbecoming of a country that likes to think of itself as the regional power.

We needed to make it clear that we were not on the side of the LTTE. We did not. How can we forget that more than a thousand Indian soldiers died at the hands of Velupillai Pirabakaran’s guerrillas?

If the ghastly Pirabakaran meets a violent end the one country that should be pleased is India. He is wanted here for the murder of Rajiv Gandhi and personally I believed that Sonia Gandhi would have stepped in to restrain our Foreign Secretary from rushing off to Colombo to interfere in the endgame. Remember that she brought a government down in 1996 because she felt it had not done enough to investigate the murder of her husband. Either time has healed old wounds or she has been too busy electioneering to notice even that the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, her friend and ally, announced on national television that Pirabakaran was his ‘good friend.’ He tried to make amends the next day but TV cameras make the ‘misquoted’ defence untenable. It’s one thing to feel sympathy for Tamil civilians trapped in the war but to express friendship for Pirabakaran is treason.

... contd.