Act I: An article in The Hindu about the recent sale of radar systems from India to Sri Lanka shoddily throws in the following line without any context or dates:
Ironically, both radars were sent from the Hindon military base on the outskirts of Delhi. This was the place from where helicopters were despatched via Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu to rescue the LTTE leader V. Prabakaran at Vadamarachchi on the northern tip of Jaffna after the Sri Lankan Army had cornered him in the late 80s.
Act II: An opportunistic writer for the Asian Tribune pens an article titled, Indians rescued Prabhakaran when he was cornered by the Sri Lankan forces in the 80s. In this masterpiece of unsubstantiated bullshit, he takes that one line from the Hindu as the gospel truth and elaborates:
The Vadamarachci operation was closing in on Prabhakaran when the arrogant Indians launched the rescue operation. This is a gross violation not only of Sri Lankan sovereignty but also a deliberate attempt to rescue the terrorists, who were destabilizing Sri Lanka.
The problem here is that the Vadamarachchi Operation, also known as Operation Liberation (in which the Sri Lankan government sought to take Jaffna from the LTTE through a military blitz) began on May 26, 1987 and made steady progress towards Jaffna. On June 4, the Indian Government launched Operation Poomalai, during which military planes dropped humanitarian aid parcels over Jaffna. The Sri Lankan Government protested at the Indian violation of its sovereignty (although one wonders how much sovereignty the Government of Sri Lanka could claim over that area at that point), but the next day, the Sri Lankan president, J. R. Jayewardene, called Rajiv Gandhi asking to talk about it. This was the beginning of the end of the Vadamarachchi Operation, and led to the talks which ended with the Indo-Sri-Lankan Accord, establishing the disastrous Indian Peace Keeping Force.
According to Bharat-Rakshak.com, which has a detailed history of the missions flown by the Indian Air Force, Prabakaran was indeed flown out by helicopter to India where he was to participate in talks:
At 0700 hrs on 24 July 1987 at Thanjavur the Commanding Officer was given his instructions personally by the AOC-in-C Southern Air Command.
The mission was to fly out the LTTE leader Prabhakaran along with his wife, children and close advisors to Trichy from a point North of Jaffna. The two helicopters that undertook this somewhat surreptitious task were the first aircraft to land in Sri Lanka and in a manner of speaking could be called the first of the IPKF although the Accord had still not been signed. Surreptitious- because the pilots were to avoid contact with any Sri Lankan authority. Further, they were required to fly low and then land at a temple which was an LTTE strong hold. The helicopters were flown at very low level across the Palk Straits and inland Sri Lanka so as to avoid being identified from a distance. The sortie was a success (Bharat-Rakshak.com).
Prabakaran was flown out on July 24, 1987, nearly two months after Operation Poomalai. Just a few days earlier (July 19-20), the Indian envoy to Sri Lanka, Hardeep Puri, had met with Prabakaran in Jaffna to discuss the terms of the accord (rediff.com). If, as both the Hindu article and the Asian Tribune article allege, Prabakaran was in imminent danger of being captured (or worse) by the Sri Lankan military, would the Indian Government have sent its envoy to Jaffna to meet with him?
Act III: Someone finds the Asian Tribune story and posts it on the Sepia Mutiny News Tab, where it's picked up by one of the bloggers, who writes:
So I HAD found the "obscure" part of The Hindu article which Sam's tip mentioned, which is what fascinated me in the first place! I know nothing about this conflict (that's what you are here for, dear readers…to edumacate me in your inimitable way)-- but even I could sense that this seemed like a rather big deal.
...compelling one who knows little more about the conflict to sense something fishy, do the tiniest amount of digging, and find internet sources indicating pretty clearly that it's all a bunch of hokey - something a post and 85 comments couldn't get around to doing.
Thanks to kettikili for corroborating the above with non-internet sources. Books are wonderful things.
DI:
?
The point is that Prabhakaran was not captured because the bankrupt Indians compelled the cowardly Jayewardene to stop the operation. Would have liked to see Indians meeting their own vietnam or Afghanistan. Waiting for it even now.
A N N A (#7):
Sorry, you've entirely missed the point. Even without the offline source I provided, vivek was able to find the same details of this story online. He links to a number of sites and pieces that can be easily found by spending ten minutes with Google. He asked whether I could confirm what he had found with a more thoroughly researched source only to ensure he wasn’t fueling the fire.
(The book, for anyone who is interested, is M.R. Narayan Swamy’s Tigers of Lanka: From Boys to Guerillas, 3rd ed. Delhi: Konark Publishers, 2002. The author, a journalist who has worked for Agence France Press and the Indo-Asian News Service, conducted research and more than 100 interviews over a period of three years, and this shows in the details, but his analysis – particularly in regard to the Indian government’s role in producing and managing the conflict – leaves something to be desired. If anyone is interested, say so, and I will compile a reading list—I’ve been meaning to, and have been asked by some folks before.)
The concluding sentence of vivek’s post, to my mind, sums up the absurdity and opportunism engendered by The Hindu article: It's plain to even a reader with a modicum of interest in the history and politics of Sri Lanka that something was wrong with the story.
Santosh (#8):
The problem, however, with this approach is that the news is never simply just 'news.' A critical blogger/reader doesn't take what is reported as given -- especially when the issue at hand is a highly politicized conflict that often turns on revisions of history, and has seen a resumption of military operations, disappearances and extrajudicial killings (including many Sri Lankan journalists who can’t afford to be so cavalier with their writing.) The original link to the purported "fact" is to the Asian Tribune, a site that, even at first glance, is blatantly belligerent, chauvinist and nationalist in its reporting, despite its claims to "striving for Asian solidarity." The fact that this rag picked up such sensationalistic 'news' so eagerly should have been the tip-off to doubt The Hindu reporter's sidenote.
The post isn't about you, per se, Anna. The problem is endemic to the media more generally, and blogging as a form is especially susceptible, since most writers simply re-iterate what they perceive to be simply "the facts" in a bid to generate more content. It's quite clear that, rather than take the time to become acquainted with the story you were about to post, you took a leap in order to get the scoop, to be 'first' to put it out into the blogosphere. You circulated misinformation. I don’t see a problem with calling that out. The point isn't to censure you, or to stop you from asking questions, which is the authoritarian response you imply with your rhetorical question-- there is nothing wrong with asking a question.
But mind this: The questions that each of us asks already betray a certain kind of knowledge-- what we assume and presume in order to want to ask them in the first place.
Your question, in light of the present-day political situation in Sri Lanka, simply wasn't the question to ask. The question to ask was in the very first sentence of the piece you quoted, and you glossed-over as simply par-for-the-course in your bid to post a juicier tidbit:
“Yes, fine, fine”? That didn't jolt you awake? It should have. Because any kind of military aid (and not just the kind classified as “lethal”) to the Government of Sri Lanka in a return to war, is the real story, not the Hindu reporter Dikshit’s sensationalistic line about a purported helicopter “rescue.” This story comes after debates regarding the role of India today – whether pro- military aid or negotiations towards a political solution – and an announcement on May 31 in which Indian National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan made the following statement:
That is the political and economic context in which this kind of misinformation circulates. Putting it out there “for discussion, for lots of people” only fuels the thrust of justifications for Indian (lethal and non-lethal) military aid to Sri Lanka to combat “terrorism.”
Dikshit’s article also comes one week after the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 on July 29 (five days after this helicopter ride, which means that the Indian and Sri Lankan governments were on the verge of signing an accord that was in the making over two years of quiet diplomacy and strategic equivocation in the state's best interests—a fascinating historical “tidbit” that seems to have escaped the reporter.) Maybe this explains the inclusion of a sentence that otherwise has no place in an article on the sale of radars. Or perhaps there is a more insidious reason. In making his “ironic” point, Dikshit misses the real irony of the story:
Having literally flown under the radar to pick up Prabhakaran for last-minute negotiations, India is now selling these same radars back to the Sri Lankan government.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
(Sorry so long.)
Scoop!
still turned out to be one of the more sober, thoughtful and less shrill discussions of the conflict on sm ive ever seen
What, no one mentioned back hair? :)
Good newspapers, shoddy news...
Even newspapers like The Hindu sometimes screw up. Blogger Vivek shows us why it is important to not blindly accept everything you read in the papers in a recent post.
......
[...] August 8th, 2007 · No Comments Even newspapers like The Hindu sometimes screw up. Blogger Vivek shows us why it is important to not blindly accept everything you read in the papers in a recent post. [...]
Yes.
Or alternatively, if you are no longer a student and therefore have no access to documents and articles from university libraries which are supposed to help disseminate information rather than confining it to the priveleged, then you can have a university student point person who will pull them up for you, cut and paste them, and then send them to you. True, you might be hassling the "connection" you have, but such is life and the things we do for in the pursuit of knowledge.
I'm sad that my "investigative reporting" standards are so poor, that you felt the need to damn me faintly with snark. I'm not a reporter, so I never claimed to be an expert "digger"; SM is not a newspaper. It's just a place for discussion, for lots of people, which is why something like "back hair" might get mentioned humorously and randomly, as if such a thing makes us worthy of derision.
I don't have a lot of time, but I do what I can. I was frustrated that I couldn't find more information online, about something posted on our newstab and at that point, I needed to go to bed, vs. heading down to Kramerbooks on my broken leg to try and find "wonderful things".
What really bothers me is this-- when did it become wrong for someone to admit that they don't know enough about something, but would like to learn more? It's not very progressive to put down someone for doing that.
Yes. They are. And I would have welcomed suggestions which weren't online, as well. You are fortunate that you have peers who can corroborate, since the Indian and SL Tamil people I asked for help weren't able to provide that.
Sounds like she made a honest mistake, one of taking a news report at face value. Most bloggers, if they're honest, will admit to falling into that trap now and then.
I don't get why just because he was safe a few days earlier, that means he couldn't have been in danger of capture a few days later. There seem to be some unarticulated assumptions in place here.
We also have a blog here (called PTR) and we can make what we want of it: not silent about SL, and disseminate info that will help readers become more informed and aware about what is going on.
Yes, dude. When's that reading list coming? I personally have been waiting for over a year now... :)
That's not how I read Anna's post at all. She's saying, here's something I read that I didn't understand, maybe some of our readers can help me with it. She wasn't assuming it was right or wrong, and the post really didn't read like it was a scoop, it was somebody trying to understand what was going on.
But how do we get to better questions without going through the questions that are first on our mind?
And Anna looked and didn't find anything that could help her, which is why she asked the readers. Vivek may have been able to find useful resources precisely because he understood that period of history better, and so knew where to look and for what.
You're assuming that Anna was writing from an authoritative perspective. Instead, I understood her as writing as somebody fairly uninitiated with respect to a complicated topic, and who was asking for help figuring it out. If you want other examples, take a look at Anna's posts on Cricket. There she also writes as a newbie trying to understand a subject with the help of the readers, not as somebody who understands what is going on.
Doesn't telling somebody that they can ask questions, but only the right questions, also have a chilling effect?
Look, I rarely write open discussion posts or ask for help posts, precisely because they are problematic. However, I think you are completely mis-reading the spirit in which my colleague wrote originally. This is the blogosphere. Some posts we write out of expertise. Others we write out of ignorance, to remedy our lack of knowledge. As long as we are honest and transparent about what we know and don't know, what's the harm in asking questions? Isn't free and open discourse more important than correctness in the end?
I agree that Anna's post was in the frame of wanting to know more, even if it takes places within a preconceived narrative of events (like my writing does and kettikillis and everyone else's) and the political dialogue on SM leaves a lot to be desired.
But how can the person who raised the questions, Anna, fairly complain about getting answers to the questions that she wanted, even if she doesn't like the form or tone that they take? I mean, isn't this post exactly what she was looking for?
I think some of the problems here are:
1. Sufficient time wasn't allotted to find various sources to make sense of a topic (I really believe that bloggers should take time to figure out what is going on the best they can rather than hastily posting something just to shriek, "OMG, I got a SCOOP!" That is what MSM is there for.)
2. Some people who are much more familiar with the situation are irked at the inaccuracies of a blogger who didn't know much, and hence argue in some way that the blogger shouldn't have said anything in the first place (which I completely disagree with) or didn't approach it critically enough (a valid criticism).
3. A blogger who is attacked for publishing an inaccurate fact is offended. Which you can't be, because if you publish something in the public sphere, you will be critiqued and called out regarding your inaccuracies. And there is nothing wrong with that. <strong>anna</strong> and <strong>ennis</strong>, you can't complain if someone calls out a post. I certainly don't agree with the high handedness of some of the critiques here, but seriously, you can't get mad and defensive that someone took issue with an inaccuracy that, if you had approached it from a critical perspective and done a little bit of Google digging, you would have been able to detect.
Anyway, each blogger unto his/her own.
Ennis (#12):
Let me clarify a few points in response to this question. What I said above was not meant to suggest that there are "right" and "wrong" questions, or that any one of us should be policing another person's thoughts. (And that is regardless of how much we can or can't claim to be "authoritative" about something, as you mentioned above-- that isn't relevant to my point.) The point was that your colleague didn't take some time to read up a little and think through her questions before posting. Instead, as vivek (#15) noted above, the post and its comments did not raise any doubts about the "rescue." We were presented with a quoted line as though it was fact, and then this:
As an admission of not knowing, not only does that hardly make for a question-- I saw it as an excuse from doing the work to ask questions that would generate a vigorous discussion. If the problem is not having enough time to do anything more than a cursory search because it's late and it's time to go to bed, what would be so terrible about waiting for the next morning? As Anna said, SM is not a newspaper, there is no race to the printers.
Maybe taking the time to read a little and think through those initial questions, before moving onto public dissemination?
If the point is to learn more about Sri Lankan history, politics and culture more generally, asking for that via an obviously sensationalistic news item was a roundabout and unproductive way to do so.
Desi Italiana (#14):
Again, I'm not "irked at the inaccuracies," nor do I think that "the blogger shouldn't have said anything in the first place." I don't expect anyone to be an "expert," and in fact welcome more discussion about the current situation in Sri Lanka; the overwhelming silence is one of my biggest pet peeves about so-called "South Asian" publications and groups, online and off. The second point, however, is correct -- I don't think the article was approached critically at all-- and that is what is upsetting, given the matter at hand. That someone could approach this without making an effort to learn more about the (politically volatile) context in which this "news item" is inserted is upsetting, even more so when the blog in question is so widely read.
vivek (#15):
Exactly. Public dissemination of this kind of (mis)information is part and parcel of the politics of the conflict, in which Anna has been, despite her best intentions, a participant. My comment was not intended to undermine her right to ask a question, but to engage with and challenge the politics of her post. And to that end, I will reiterate what Dr. Anonymous (#13) asked:
Because sometimes the only response to a question is another question.
Mine is, once again: After we leave this thread and move on, is anyone actually interested in reading and discussing the history and politics of the war in Sri Lanka?
ANNA (#7):
I wrote this post to call out what I perceived to be bad journalism and lazy blogging. SM is obviously not a newspaper, so you're not the one I'm accusing of bad journalism. The Hindu article is what started this whole thing off.
I'm no expert digger either, and this post certainly didn't involve any sort of expert digging. It involved a few minutes of searching through Google and Wikipedia, and then putting a few basic things together. The putting together part took me a while, as I find these processes excruciating, and what started off as a comment on that thread consumed enough of my time that I no longer wished to see it buried as the 86th comment in response to a question which no one had yet answered: namely, that the Indian military had not, in fact, "rescued" Prabhakaran from the jaws of death at the hands of the Sri Lankan army.
Also, having done the minimal research and taken the time to write it up against my better judgment (I, too, have a job) I couldn't help thinking that this was something you could have done just as easily, if not more so, since you're a more experienced writer than I am, and that I was doing your homework for you. This is why I decided that instead of contributing comment #86, I would put this in a post and call out what I thought was lazy blogging on your part - lazy blogging which inadvertently contributes to a body of literature focused entirely on finger-pointing without taking a second to think about what might eventually cause peace to break out in Sri Lanka as war has so easily for so many years.
Ennis (#12):
I feel like we're one or two moves away from a competition to see who knows less about Sri Lanka: Anna or Vivek - where knowing less advances one's case - and I think this is a fairly damning reflection on two people and two blogs which like to consider themselves South Asian.
You may be right, but I don't really think that the spirit in which one embarks into lazy blogging is at all significant.
And to be clear, I hold myself to this standard as well. If anyone reads my posts and feels I missed an obvious source, or made invalid points, or was lazy or wrong, I would fully expect to be called out on it.
proletaricat (#3):
I agree with you, and I hope that my post isn't seen as a condemnation of [ALL of] those comments. I found some of them quite informative and sensible. I mentioned the thread because none of the comments had actually questioned Prabhakaran's "rescue," which on an immensely popular blog like Sepia Mutiny, might be mistaken for validation of the original article.
SCOOP!!!!!!!!!!!!
A 129 page report by Human Rights Watch just came out and states:
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/08/03/slanka16573.htm
Vivek:
Oh, I was being snarky when I said "scoop" :)
But I encourage everyone to read the report I linked to (or read the executive summary at the least). There are some serious violations going on there.
Okay, to start off that reading list, here are some texts that I mentioned during a different discussion on SM: http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/004627.html#comment156488
I am a South Asian American who grew up with loads of other South Asian Americans. I don't know squat about South Asian politics, so I'm usually lost here : (. I hope the booklist is posted up soon.
"...the political dialogue on SM leaves a lot to be desired."
Seriously.
clearly not. see post above ;)
but yes, it's good to open discussions.
Anna is being attacked and I don't think it's fair, if not petty and tedious. She opened a discussion and as a blogger, that's the best she can do. It is very difficult finding unbiased sources on the Sri-Lankan conflict and it is a well known fact that Sri-Lanka, like many African countries at war, hardly ever make it to the news.
I feel the same way as Malathi.
So are there any trusted links where I can find info? Because it's difficult for me to even make time to cook something for dinner, let alone go chase down books that I probably won't even find. And my work spills into my weekends, so it's doubly hard.
Any suggestions?
Please count me in. I am interested. This is my first day/first reading here and hence I don't feel 'initiated' into or familair with the roti community yet, but I will bookmark this site and try to visit frequently.
Hey B, thanks for commenting here and welcome! Is there anything we can do to make the conversation more accessible?
on another note, I have a suggestion for modern Indian history in general, which is Sumit Sarkar's History of Modern India (starts in 1857, i think). Among the history of India books I've read, it's probably the best. And I think Chapati Mystery a few months back had a long conversation about history books for an intro south asia class.
I did a Goodreads search on Sri Lanka and this is what turned up. Any feedback from anyone on any of these books is welcome.
Okay, for all ye roti-passers who don't have the time to read big volumes of Sri Lankan history, here's a start.
On my blog, if you scroll down, you'll see a black box called "Files". From there, you can download a pdf file of A. Sivanandan's article on Sri Lanka, which I think is a good basic primer on the history of the conflict. It is an old article--published in the British journal Race and Class, which Sivanandan edited (and still does?), in 1984. So it only goes up to that point. Nevertheless, it is a useful starting point.
As and when I do find the time to dig up more online stuff, or to make pdf of articles that I have, I will put them up as well.
I have also created a category of links titled "Sri Lanka Readings" just above this black box. I will try as far as possible to only put up links there to articles that I can vouch for. However, I will often only be skimming these articles, so please let me know if you feel they aren't worth reading.
Given how controversial the issue is, there can be no "neutral" position on it. So, in order to be very clear about my own position, and where I'm coming from, I would encourage you to read this very brief report that I wrote for Socialist Worker when the peace process collapsed in 2003. Please remember that it was a short report written for a weekly newspaper, not an historical analysis--hence its summary nature. But it should give you a sense of where I'm coming from. ("Ganesh Lal" was a pseudonym I used to write under back in the day. Not my real name.)
If you do come across material that you would like me to place under my "Sri Lanka Reading List" for others to access, please pass it along to me at leftyprof[at]gmail[dot]com.
That said, I really do think that Sumantra Bose's book, States, Nations, Sovereignty: Sri Lanka, India and the Tamil Eelam Movement is well worth the read. It is brief, and well argued. Curiously enough, though, it doesn't appear under the list of his publications at his faculty page at the LSE. I'm not sure why this is.
I find his more recent stuff, both on Kashmir and on Sri Lanka to be less than satisfactory, as he essentially ends up proposing a Northern Ireland/Bosnia style peace process. Can't go into in detail here, but suffice it to say that, from my socialist perspective, these essentially are means of institutionalizing the status quo--forms of "peace" without any justice.
One last thing: is there a comments rss for ptr?
Sorry it took so long - there should now be a link to the Comments RSS for each post at the beginning of the comments section.
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