Any change is better than no change. In throwing himself into a political battle with characteristic courage, he has done all SL a great service...!!!

Muddled thinking about Tamil politics

by Rajan Philips

It is not that there is no thinking in Tamil politics; there might be too much thinking going on. There is no institutional apparatus to screen out bad thinking and try out better options. And the free license of the internet has provided the medium for unsupervised circulation of idiotic thought. Transnational government is a prime example – the kind of political idiocy only expatriate electronic expertise can create and sustain. There is also too much idiocy in the political thinking about the forthcoming presidential election, and it is particularly evident in the unsolicited advice that is being dished out to the Tamil voters. To wit, the idiotic advice that the Tamils should be smart and vote for Mahinda Rajapakse and leave it to His Excellency and his handful of Tamil hangers-on to decide how much of the 13th Amendment is good for them.

A perennial commentator offering this advice has charitably conceded that even after the extermination of the LTTE the Tamils need not roll over and play dead. Rather, they should steer clear of the old ways that have brought them to the current crossroads and look for new modes and models. A brave new model is apparently that of the late S. Thondaman, the "proud and upright leader" of the upcountry Tamils who took "his people out of the depths of disenfranchisement without losing a single life". What is more, "he knew how to get the better of and the best out of the Sinhalese, not bring out the worst!"

It is not only the thinking behind this patronizing advice that is muddled, but its premise also falsifies a good part of Tamil and Sri Lankan political histories. For starters, Thondaman got his political leverage after 1977 from one and only one source - the rise of Tamil separatism in the North and East and the political violence associated with it. He was a party to the now defunct Vaddukoddai Resolution and he was the first person to publicly reveal in Parliament, in the wake of the 1983 riots, the secret understanding that the TULF and JR had reached between Vaddukoddai (1976) and the 1977 elections. He did not turn his back on the TLUF after 1977, unlike the more native Tamil turncoats, and he did not flinch from raising his voice on behalf of the TULF whenever and wherever there was need for him to do so. He always maintained that up till 1983 the TULF kept to its bargain but not JR or the government. After 1983 and the Sixth Amendment, there was no TULF.

JR, Premadasa and Kumaratunga did not grant Thondaman anything out of charity or altruism. They needed peace in the ‘thottam’ (a simple Tamil word that the circumspect and consistent Mervyn de Silva turned into a potent political term) and needed to avoid it being infected by the Tiger virus from the North and East. They were also constrained to be on their best behaviour by the global spotlight that had been turned on Sri Lanka after JR opened the economy to the world’s robber barons. In addition to tea, the plantations became the nursery for the first wave of local and foreign NGOs who were appalled by the plight of the plantation communities. After 1983, the spotlight became glaring and New Delhi found the excuse to flash its own torch light on Sri Lanka.

The original sin

Thondaman played his cards superbly. He harnessed the global attention, India’s oversight, and the threat of militancy within the thottam inspired by the exploits of Tamil Tiger nationalism outside the thottam, to extract from JR and others the maximum he could for his people. He did get the better of and may have got the best out of the Sinhalese, but he had no illusion that he succeeded in not bringing out the political worst in them. The Sirima-Shastri Pact may have been a worse deal for him and his people than disenfranchisement, and as he publicly lambasted he was not spared the political rudeness and disrespect of some of the Sinhalese ministers at cabinet meetings.

More important, the maximum that Thondaman achieved was by no means the full reparation for the injustice of disenfranchisement that was inflicted on the upcountry Tamils on the morrow of our independence. By the time the long simmering citizenship question of the upcountry Tamils was settled 40 years later, their population was halved, the inter-ethnic electoral balance designed by the Soulbury Commission was destroyed, and the most cohesive social base for class politics in Sri Lanka was ethnicized.

Anyone who lays claim to being a leftist in thinking or in action has to agree with my paraphrasing of Hector Abhayavardhana’s characterization of disenfranchisement as the origin sin that triggered Sri Lanka’s postcolonial disintegration. The crushing defeat of the LTTE has not arrested or reversed that process of disintegration. It has merely changed its direction. Rather than installing stability and normalcy, the victorious Sri Lankan government has imploded in internal fights over the political spoils of victory. The squaring off of the Commander in Chief and his erstwhile Chief of Defence Staff as the principal presidential candidates for the January election captures in one fell swoop the farce and tragedy of our country. Let me leave the farce of it for another time, and focus on the tragedy for now, especially Tamil tragedy.

The Tamils cannot overcome their tragedy, goes the second part of the advice, unless they turn away from the old ways of Tamil intransigence. An unbroken string of so called intransigencies – from fifty-fifty, federalism, the 13th Amendment and the northeast merger, to LTTE’s maniacal obduracy – is flaunted as what the Tamils should avoid today, after their dream of Eelam has been blown out of the lagoon waters of Mullaitivu. What is conveniently forgotten in this simplistic summary of history is that compromise and intransigence have alternated in Tamil politics, and until the horrific hijacking of Tamil politics by the LTTE, Tamil compromise always preceded its intransigence, with the latter almost always begotten by Sinhalese intransigence in spite of Tamil compromise.

G.G. Ponnambalam’s Fifty-Fifty demand was the sequel to D.S. Senanayake’s manipulation of the Committee system of the State Council to create the infamous pan-Sinhala Board of Ministers under the Donoughmore Constitution. But the practical lawyer he was, Ponnambalam backed down from Fifty-Fifty and took the case to the Tamil people to support "responsive co-operation" with the Sinhalese government under the Soulbury Constitutional compromise (the "communal compact" according to A.J. Wilson). But the compact was broken by the Citizenship Act, the disenfranchisement of the upcountry Tamils and the state directed colonization of the Eastern Province and parts of the Northern Province. Ponnambalam stood his ground despite these reversals and was thoroughly vindicated by the Tamil voters in the 1952 election. At the same election the Tamils totally rejected the Federal Party that called for Tamil intransigence accusing Ponnambalam of sellout and demonizing him as a traitor.

Someone has to be really creative to suggest that the Tamils precipitated the Sinhala Only movement in order for them to vote for the Federal Party in 1956. To its credit, the Federal Party too strove for compromise in reaching agreement with S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. But to the utter discredit of his widow-successor, the SLFP turned its back on its founder’s principled policy on the Tamil question. And these reversals were constitutionally entrenched in 1972 and 1978, both milestones on the path of Sinhalese political intransigence that became millstones weighing down Sri Lanka’s political development.

Not the end of Tamil history

The 13th Amendment of 1988, whether too little or too late, addresses many of the old issues but most of it has so far remained only on paper. The warning now is that the Tamils have no realistic option but to rally behind Mahinda Rajapaksa and hope that he will implement a portion of the the 13th Amendment in return for their votes. What is implied is ‘the end of history’ for Tamil politics in Sri Lanka and that there is nothing for it beyond Rajapaksa’s generosity and the framework of the 13th Amendment. The warning is also premised on mendicant triumphalism that western compassion for Tamil human rights has gone dry, that the US (based on Senator John Kerry’s ill informed Foreign Relations Committee Report) has finally acknowledged the Sri Lankan government’s military victory over terrorism (although these greetings were passed on immediately after the war), and that the US perforce has to recognize the importance of the Rajapaksa government for US interests in South Asia. This is not very different from the Tiger thinking and mendicant triumphalism that sent the LTTE to its grave.

The assumptions of ‘end of history’, final solution to the Tamil question, and Western accommodation of the Rajapaksa government fly in the face of historical experiences and current realities. The disenfranchisement of the upcountry Tamils, the passage of Sinhala Only, and the enactment of the two constitutions were all thought to be acts of finality. No one – not even the Tamils – thought they would become sites of permanent contestation. They have and they will continue to be. The LTTE arrogated to itself the task of imposing a final solution on the matter and had defeat imposed on it by the government. But the defeat of the LTTE has not eliminated the issues that gave rise to it.

The meaning of politics in our time is not the resolution of contradictions and inequalities from one time period to another, but their resolution throughout societies at the same time. The demands on politics are more spatial and cross-sectional than temporal and longitudinal. The rights and lives of individuals and groups and nationalities matter and no government can ignore them. Nor can they be ignored by the so called liberation movements as justification for some future good. The Tigers got it wrong when they forced the Tamils to shut up and put up with them purportedly for the sake of future generations. The government is getting it wrong in subjecting the rights of the Tamil people and their life requirements to some form of rationing on the pretext that they may or not have supported the Tigers in the past. The spotlight on Sri Lanka is not going anywhere and it will be difficult, even impossible in the long run, for any government or its leaders to violate people’s rights and shortchange them on their material needs without paying a global price for it - either through trade penalties and sanctions or individual accountability. The Tamil Diaspora may not be equipped to force a political solution in Sri Lanka, but it has the wherewithal to create hell overseas for an intransigent government in Colombo.

For the Tamils in the north and east of Sri Lanka, it is the worst of times. They are war ravaged and traumatized and their world has been turned upside down ten times over. Nonetheless, these conditions will create a new mode of politics to continue the contest and the struggle for their rights and equality within Sri Lanka. Tamil politics cannot function or perform in isolation from others in Sri Lanka and outside of the Sri Lankan political framework. That was the misplaced beginning and the tragic end of the LTTE.

The LTTE did poke its hand into Sri Lankan politics but always in the most abominable way. What was also its remarkably stupid intervention was to order the Tamils to boycott the 2005 presidential election. In January 2010, the Tamil voters have 22 different ways of avoiding a boycott. Of the 22 candidates vying for the highest office, Vickramabahu Karunaratne and Siritunga Jyasuriya present the most rational and progressive positions in regard to the Tamil question. They may not win the election, but their positions are neither unwinnable nor are they unsupportable by the Sinhalese. It was practically with a similar position on the Tamil question that Chandrika Kumaratunga won the presidency twice in 1994 and 1999. If it could happen then, it can happen again.

The Tamil voters may want to think ahead of future elections even as they vote in the present election – and to vote in a manner that will recreate the political possibilities of 1994 and 1999, sooner than later. That means they have to vote for change, if not in this election, but soon after. That will rule out voting for the incumbent, Mahinda Rajapaksa. His chief contender, Sarath Fonseka, is no knight in shining armour. But he represents change although he is not the best change, and any change is better than no change. In throwing himself into a political battle with characteristic courage, he has done all Sri Lankans a great service. For even if he were to lose the election, he has effectively lame ducked the Mahinda Rajapaksa presidency and has ensured that there will be no Rajapaksa family dynasty after the second term is done. Sri Lankans who think clearly will acknowledge this.

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