The most beautiful child lives in Roxywatte

About ten years ago, my friend Ayca Cubukcu, then an undergraduate at Cornell University and now a Professor in Anthropology, alerted me to a poem by the most celebrated poet from her native Turkey, Nazim Hikmet. It was about the most beautiful things. This was written 64 years ago.

The most beautiful sea

hasn’t been crossed yet.

The most beautiful child

hasn’t grown up yet.

Our most beautiful days

we haven’t seen yet.

And the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you

I haven’t said yet...

For years what captured me was the last line, an eminently for-all-time quotable quote for those in love, especially those who find themselves in what could be termed ‘impossible love’. Until last Monday.

Last Monday I actually saw the most beautiful child.

I used to think that there can be no children more beautiful than mine. I therefore glossed over Hikmet’s ‘child-line’ in this poem or thought of it as metaphor for innocence and the childlike quality that’s so endearing in the first flush of love. I am aware also of that telling observation about the Loris; that to the mother, her child is a gem. There are so many things about beauty to talk about. It’s in the eyes of the beholder, we are told. Beauty is truth, John Keats opined. Words can craft beauty out of things that are not pretty. There is a lot of illusion and self-delusion in the consideration of beauty.

It’s a lot of vague and transient things and notions that float around for us to pick and choose at our pleasure. Last Monday it all came together and I got a length, breadth and depth version of beauty. Tangible.

Beauty came with a name. Uma Shiny Fernando. She is six years old. She came in the arms of her father, Pradeep Fernando. Pradeep Fernando is a single father, I later learnt. No, he is not a widower. Pradeep Fernando is a sculptor, he told me: mama moorthi shilpiyek. I haven’t seen his work but I can’t think of any sculptor having crafted anything more beautiful than the precious little thing he was carrying. Uma Shiny Fernando is a special child. She suffers from a rare disease I had never heard about until her father told me. Goldenhar Syndrome. The little child had breathing difficulties and had to depend on a tube-like contraption. She didn’t say a word and didn’t have to.

Her father spoke softly. She takes only liquids. She’s already been through 13 operations and I have to find Rs. 30,000 a month for her medicines.

My children are so blessed (I had to say this).

Shiny is a beautiful child. I didn’t know how to help and even though some money passed hands I felt it was not enough and sadly that nothing would be ‘enough’ and that even the ‘something’ that could mean more than ‘something is better than nothing’ was beyond me.

I went to the Internet. Here’s what I found. Goldenhar Syndrome is also known as Oculo-Auriculo Vertebral (OAV) Syndrome and is a rare congenital defect characterized by incomplete development of the ear, nose, soft palate, lip and mandible, usually on one side of the body. Additionally, patients can have growing issues with internal organs, especially heart, kidneys and lungs with the particular organ either not being present on one side of being underdeveloped. There can be severe twisting of the vertebrae, deafness/blindness in or both ears/eyes.

Here are the positives. The intellect is usually normal. Most abnormalities are amenable to surgical correction and do not require specific treatment. Most affected individuals have a good quality of life.

Last Monday, let me repeat, I saw the most beautiful child. I was also privileged to see the most beautiful father. Not just beautiful. He was proud. Unbowed. Determined. And in his eyes I saw a kind of equanimity that is probably rarer than the condition little Uma Shiny Fernando was suffering from.

I don’t like to take anything away from the beautiful little girl, but some perspective can’t do harm, I think.

Last Monday I stepped on to Galle Road and came face to face with the ugliest faces in this country. They were splashed all over the walls. The city walls were carrying a lot of money, as is usually the case during elections. They were carrying trees in fact, considering that a big spender on posters would, according to Environment and Natural Resources Minister Patali Champika Ranawaka, cause around 300 big trees to be felled. What a waste, I thought.

I am not sure how much corrective surgery would cost or the total annual cost of treatment thereafter. My sense is that it would be a fraction of what one single candidate would spend over the next few weeks.

There’s a beautiful little girl living with her sculptor father at the following address: 12/20 Roxywatte, Galle Road, Colombo 6. I know beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but I don’t think it will harm anyone to get some sense of beauty, perspective and sense of proportion about beauty, life, what’s important and what’s not and a better understanding of the gems lying around us that we don’t get to see.

Last Monday I saw the most beautiful child. She hasn’t grown up yet. Perhaps she never will. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. Perhaps we never will know.

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Let’s go to another country*

(or the timeless specter of St. Monica)

I am hooked on Eduardo Galeano.  The man walks through my sensibilities, planting flowers.  Some are made of dry-wit brown, some flutter like flags of rebellion, some exude the fragrance of hope and some are textured with irony and pain.  And in this field of color, texture and fragrance, from daybreak to dusk and in the many hours of night, are produced aggregates that shatter television screens and simple stories that fuel the relentless interrogation of truth.  I am a poor student of this extraordinary man, but I record, by way of appreciation, the stories, subplots and elaborations that jump off the canvass on which he paints the world in all its colors, dismal and brilliant. 

“In the barrio of Cerro Norte, a poor suburb of the city of Montevideo, a magician gave a street performace.  With a touch of his wand, he made a dollar bill sprout from his fist, then from his hat.  When the show was over, the magic wand disappeared.  The next day, neighbors saw a barefoot child walking the streets, magic wand in hand.  He tapped on everything he came across and stood waiting.  Like many other children in the neighborhood, that nine-year-old boy liked to sink his nose into a plastic bag filled with glue.  Once he explained why: ‘It takes me to another country.’”

In the aftermath of the US Presidential “election”, a new map has emerged in North America.  The unknown cartographer has gathered “blue” states that “went to Kerry” in an expanded “United States of Canada”, and has named “red” states as Jesus Land.  Jesus I am sure would have pouted and said “Elie, lama lama sabathkini”, for being a Buddhist, I have heard that the archenemy of liberation marches into the final battle wearing the clothes of liberation.  But that’s another story. 

The story is that of many blue-citizens wanting “out”.  “I want to migrate to Canada”.  “We might as well secede from the union”.  These are the gut-reactions of some who have only now noticed their beloved country is disintegrating before they eyes or that it never really existed in the first place.  These are the sentiments which persuade me to say by way of offering comfort and light humor to ease the pain, “Come to my country; I will do my best to give you citizenship, for you are political refugees”.  Yes, the wheel has come a full circle.  A land peopled by freedom lovers fleeing tyranny, have to flee the tyrannies they themselves spawned.  Except that this very same tyranny has erased for all intents and purposes the notion of territory-based nation. 

This country inhales a plastic bag filled with glue that takes the people to countries called nostalgia and forgetting.  And this diplomatic passport that facilitates travel from one dream to another, one myth to another is called television. 

“Development: an image on TV of a TV showing another TV on which there is yet another TV.”

Life is an entity that lives off make-believe, not realizing, as Peter Guerevich has pointed out that power is the ability to make one inhabit the powerful’s version of one’s reality and conversely, that inhabiting someone’s else’s version of one’s reality is the ultimate condition of ideological slavery.  A simple exercise would explain it all.  Replace “development” in the above proposition with “life in the United States” and we get the following:

“Life in the United States: an image on TV of a TV showing another TV on which there is yet another TV.”

“During the year 1998 the globalized media dedicated the most space and their best energies to the romance between the president of the planet and a plump, voracious, talkative woman named Monica Lewinsky.  In every country we were all Lewinskyized.  We had her for breakfast, reading the papers; we had her for lunch, listening to the radio; and we had her for dinner, watching TV.  I think something else happened in 1998, but I can’t remember what.”

Lewinskyization is not something that happened in the middle of Clinton’s second term.  It is as much an “American” tradition as is Apple Pie and Ice Cream.  This is why Weapons of Mass Destruction is Monica Lewinsky.  This is why The War on Terrorism is Monica Lewinsky.  This is indeed why The Existence of Democracy is a Monica Lewinsky.  Moral Value?  Yes, another Monica Lewinsky.  Islamic Fundamentalism too.  As was the Evil Empire prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

This is why people find it hard to believe that another country exists within this Monica Lewinskyized USA, a country that resides as a throbbing pain in their hearts and minds, so painful that it requires the constant anesthetization of Monica Lewinsky morphine.  

The United States cannot remember Enron, does not want to know the links between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family, does not want to learn the political economy of oil, forgets that it houses a significant segment of the “Third World”, does not breathe a word of how its industries are rapidly making it difficult for the entire world to breathe, and will not admit that the “Axis of Terror” is headquartered in Washington DC.  The above do not coalesce into that fascinating an image on TV of a TV showing another TV on which there is yet another TV the people of the United States consumes from their living rooms. 

This Monica Lewinskyized country will not admit that the franchise of their people is systematically robbed or, more correctly, was aborted at birth.  This country which audits the health or otherwise of political systems all over the world, does not tolerate or make possible an audit of its own “democracy”. 

When will the United States switch off the TV that is the “plump, voracious, talkative creature named Monica Lewinsky”?  Sorry, I should write that in a different way.  Will the United States ever wake up to the need to switch off the TV that is the “plump, voracious, talkative creature named Monica Lewinsky”?  That is a question that the United States must answer.  I come from another world, but I do not think I will be judged harshly or be called presumptuous for offering the following observations. 

I do not think that the “other country” so desired by a citizenry that has been turned into glue-sniffers exists outside the United States.  For this “other country” is the United States, which, despite manifest fraud, systemic disenfranchisement (not to mention vast sections that refused to exercise its franchise, probably due to a manifest lack of faith) and endemic Lewinskyization, still “officially” voted against Bush to the tune of almost 50%.

Today is the name of this other country.  This Hour is the name of the state each citizen must live.  This Moment is the name of the community that builds the trenches, builds the schools, develops an embrace made of love and hope, and lays the foundation of that other, more enduring and infinitely more honorable universe called Tomorrow.  

*The ninth in a series of articles collected under the title 'Love Notes to Democracy', written while in the USA as a member of a team of international monitors during the US Presidential Election 2004]

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After the election debacle, which way for the Left?

[This is the 8th in a series of articles titled 'Love notes to democracy' written around the time of the US Presidential Election 2004, when I was a member of a team of international election monitors, working in the state of Florida]

In Sri Lanka, in the aftermath of the general election in 1989, a columnist wrote an article titled “After the election debacle, which way for the Left?”  The “Left” referred to what is now known as the “Old Left”, those political parties which spearheaded the struggle for independence in the 1930s.  They were roughly two factions, the Trotskyites and the Communists, and had come together, along with some centre-left groups, to form the United Socialist Alliance, and were routed at the hustings.  Another columnist, supportive of the more radical (and to this mind the most progressive and “truly left”) People’s Liberation Front (better known by its Sinhala acronym, JVP), responded with an article titled, “Which way for the Left? Right!”

I remembered this as I was roaming around Miami Dade, Florida, on November 2.  I remembered this line, because there were three possible outcomes, two of which would be cause for concern, given a refreshing desire by ordinary people in the USA to ensure their voice is heard through the vote. 

Outcome 1:  the difference in the number of votes polled by George W Bush and John Kerry is so small that every vote would be fought over, every allegation of fraud looked into and all the niggling issues that are part and parcel of a patently flawed system would be discussed and debated.

Outcome 2:  John Kerry wins easily. 

Outcome 3: George W Bush wins easily.

I believe, in the interest of the future of democracy in the USA, Outcome 1 would have been the most desirable because it forbids the issues from being pooh-poohed, swept under the carpet and generally forgotten until 2008.  Outcome 2 might have persuaded the more alert and democracy-desiring sections of the population to celebrate the fact that Bush was voted out of office, while forgetting that the fundamental issues pertaining to exercising the franchise, being able to vote and having one’s vote counted, has not been resolved. 

We got Outcome 3.  I was troubled by the possibility of two by-products emerging.  One, the Democratic Party believing that in order to win in 2008, it has to re-clothe itself in the political colors of the Republican Party.  Secondly, the marginalized sections that had been mobilized in unprecedented numbers, would retreat into a state of unbelief, resolving not to vote because in the end their vote did not count. 

It is too early to say if either of these will happen, but I believe it is worthwhile pointing out the problems of these possibilities.  The signs are there, however, and in fact they were out there even before November 2.  The Jewish Vote.

The Kerry Campaign and indeed the Democratic Party have essentially abandoned the struggle for a more representative and fraud-free democratic system.  That task has been left to the likes of Ralph Nader, Cobb and organizations such as Moveon and www.blackboxboting.org and others who voted Democratic not so much because they were pro-Kerry, but because they were more anti-Bush.   

Noam Chomsky, referring to US foreign policy on Latin America, and especially El Salvador in the late eighties, once said, “the entire political spectrum in this country agrees on this…..” (I can’t remember what exactly they were agreeing about), and went on to say (complementing his comment by bringing his hands together, within about an inch apart from each other) “although of course the spectrum is this thin”.  There are many people, especially in other parts of the world who would laugh when Republicans refer to Democrats as “left”.  Sure, they are “left” in a relative sense, but the Republicans are so far “right”, that “left of the Republicans” is still way too far to the right! 

My friend Ayca Cubukcu, a graduate student at Columbia University put it best: “The Republican candidate is always going to be to the right of the Democrats, and therefore will always be able to pin the left label on the Democratic candidate.  So what’s the point in trying to be “right”? 

But this is the obsession of the Democratic Party!  Someone said that ideology had become a non-issue in presidential elections.  True. And what of the Left outside of the Democratic Party?  Why is it so reluctant to admit that even if allowing for fraud, millions of Americans in the United States have embraced Bushism, that we-are-number-one-and-we-don’t-care-for-world-opinion kind of arrogance is a significant trait in the cultural ethos of this country? 

No, the Left, like the Democratic Party prefer to live in the rarified territories of nostalgia.  Their politics is colored by and indeed motivated by a longing for a land that does not exist and probably never did.  If there is a Religious Right, it follows that there is a non-Religious Right as well.  The Left, however, has failed to obtain the other “Other” of the Religious Right, for if there is a Religious Right, logically there should also be a Religious Left, but no, the Left does not want to touch religion with a ten-foot pole!  They could for example, at least in line with the fundamental political sense of subverting the enemy, reference Jesus Christ himself to counter the bigotry that is mouthed in his name. 

Someone said, “It is important for the Left that Bush is defeated, because Bush makes the Left look ridiculous; once he is defeated they can take on Kerry.”  Makes sense, but I believe the people of the United States can do better.  And I believe that the Left can reason better.  Sure, Bush makes them look ridiculous, but not as silly as they make themselves look! 

They could find out why millions don’t vote and maybe they will realize that these people simply cannot identify with the likes of John Kerry.  Or Hillary Clinton for that matter.  Even if the Democratic Party reduces politics to capturing the White House, it makes no sense to act as though these people do not exist. 

After the election debacle, which way for the Left?  Right?  Not right, I believe is the answer!

How long will the vast numbers who have by not voting expressed a massive vote of no-confidence in the system remain silent?  What if, they decide to take matters into their hands and into their communities?  What if they design a politics outside of the mainstream and it grows big enough to so narrow the defined “mainstream” and make it obsolete?  What if Howard Dean, who is probably the only candidate deserving the left label, and who was unceremoniously dumped by the party hierarchy, decides not to take up the post of President of the Democratic Party?  What if the Left dares to ponder the fact that the most left candidate in the senate races, Barack Obama won some 70% of the votes in Illinois?  What if Barrak Obama himself contests as an independent?  What if the so-called Blue States initiate procedures to secede from the Union?  What if someone launches a let’s-not-vote campaign and agitates for a none-of-the-above option to be included in the next ballot, so that the United States and the world can measure the true political pulse of the country?  

Let the Left, self-defined and Republican-defined, sleep on these questions.  Let the Left awake.  Or decide never to wake up again.  In either event, the people of the United States of America would have gained, I believe.

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Whither democracy now?

[The 7th of a series of articles on the US Presidential Election 2004, titled 'Love Notes to Democracy', written while in that country as a member of an international team of election monitors]

Sometime during the early afternoon of November 2, while moving from precinct to precinct in Southern Florida with a team of international election observers, I mulled over the following question: “After the election, what next for ‘democracy’ in the USA?” 

I did not have any illusions about “American democracy” when I came to the USA, all the way from Sri Lanka.  I did not have illusions about being able to witness malpractice for fairly obvious reasons: I knew that the electoral process did not begin at 7.00 am and end twelve hours later; I did not have any access to the “before” nor the “after”, which are as critical as the in-between in the matter of obtaining the much-celebrated “free-and-fair”; and even in the “in-between”, we were accorded, in South Florida, very limited (and grudging) access.

More importantly, there were systemic flaws that had not changed despite the fiasco that was Florida in 2000, flaws that were neither limited to Florida nor that particular election: that the election was not being conducted by an independent authority, that there was an appalling absence of uniformity across and even within states; and that there were too many ill-trained polls workers who were, sadly, supervised by partisan election officials.  Add to this the introduction of “computer voting” and collation amenable more to human interference than to human error, especially given the surprising reluctance to complement the process with a paper trail that could act as back up in case of dispute, and we get an election that was structurally too problematic for anyone to write a fairytale report about. 

So no, I did not have any illusions about the process.  This does not mean I did not have hope.  Indeed, I asked myself the above question because I had seen, albeit in a limited way, an incredible outpouring of democratic intent among the people of this country.  In Southern Florida, for example, I saw the energy, hope and resolve that community organizations brought to educate voters and to ensure that no one interferes with their right to vote.  It was encouraging to see that people had understood that the present and future of democracy lay in their hands and not in those of presidential candidates. 

To my mind, John Kerry and the Democratic Party conceded not just the election the very objective of making-every-vote-count which was the rallying cry of hope in this country, the “world’s oldest democracy”.  The “before” and “after” issues alluded to above seemed to have gone underground and the media by and large seems to have glossed over the persisting questions pertaining to democratic process.  Predictably, everything was brushed aside by one word, one name, one horrendous exercise: “Fallujah!” 

I talked to people from Miami Dade, Florida to Waterville, Maine, and from Manhattan to San Francisco, not forgetting the so-called “Red States” or “Jesus Land” as some have dubbed this region.  Many seemed to have taken up permanent residence in that strange and sterile land called Comfortably Numb.  Yes, I was disappointed.  

“Whither democracy in the USA?” is the question I wanted answered.  I did not expect an answer, however, when my sister, a citizen of this country, took me to a meeting of the Waterville Area Bridges for Peace and Justice a couple of nights ago.  Listening to people articulate their concerns, their fears, and their outrage, renewed my faith in the democratic spirit of this country. 

Encouragingly, they were less upset not by the possibility that Kerry had been robbed but by their democratic voice having been mugged in the process.  The question was not one of whether a computer “glitch” not having an impact on the outcome, but that such errors need to be addressed and corrected if the franchise of every single voter is to be protected.  “Conceding” without resolving these questions, translates into the following: “we really do not care about democracy, we only wanted the White House and the people in the streets were but a means to that end”. 

“Waterville Bridges” is a small group, but they seem to have realized that the democratic process is not something limited to a day in early November in years divisible by four.  If John Kerry or the Democratic Part is not interested, “fine”, they seem to be saying.  “We are interested and we will be heard,” is what I heard them say in various ways.  They seem to be done with the mandatory period of mourning and happily, are not focusing on 2008 and the next Democratic Hopeful, but on today, the American Voter and the future of their children and communities.  They want full investigations into all allegations of malpractice in every precinct.  They are “local” enough to want that, responsible enough to be appalled by the subversion of the democracy question by “Fallujah” and international enough to see the connections.  Simply, they felt that the right to wage war is also predicated on earning the right of representation. 

Waterville Bridges is admittedly a small group, but then again so were the Founding Fathers.  Waterville Bridges is a small group, but they comprise an “America” that holds hope for this country and the world, and they are but a Maine articulation of a phenomenon that is fast becoming the “mainstream political” of this country, and a political that no one aspiring to political office can afford to ignore and probably too numerous to be crushed using brute force.  As a citizen of the Global South, I am thankful that this “America” is so resilient despite the many reversals it has had to suffer.  I leave this country in a couple of weeks, and when I go home I will tell my friends back home, “we have friends, even in the USA”.      

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LLRC Proposals: let there be no foot-dragging!

When President Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed a commission to obtain through representations and discussion the lessons learnt from the decades-long conflict, the act was pooh-poohed by his detractors as an exercise in foot-dragging.  Some said he was buckling down to pressure from powerful players in the international community.  Some claimed that the very act was tacit acknowledgment of a certain lacuna in the institutional arrangement of the state and a lack in society in the matter of learning lessons and post-conflict reconciliation.

The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) has released its report and the President has tabled it in Parliament.  The members of the commission need to be commended for the time and energy expended and a job well done.  Now it is out of their hands.  It is now a public document that details the lessons learnt and recommendations for reconciliation.  It will no doubt provoke cheers and jeers, some warranted and some not, some on account of political and ideological preferences and some out of a sober and reflective consideration of content.  All this, we will see in the coming weeks.

While it is not useful to speculate on what academics, politicians, political commentators and movers and shakers of the international community will have to say, it might be useful to focus on particular observation by the Commission that could be used as a frame of reference to the politics of report-appraisal. Paragraph 9.120, titled ‘Follow up action on the reports of past Commissions of Inquiry’ strongly recommends ‘the implementation of the recommendations of the Report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry Appointed to Investigate and Inquire into Alleged Serious Violations of Human Rights Arising since August 2005’.

The Commission refers specifically to the deaths of 5 students in Trincomalee in January 2006 and 17 aid workers of the ACF in August 2006, and notes that action on these matters would send a strong signal in ensuring respect for the Rule of Law, which it believes ‘would in turn contribute to the healing process’.

It is easy to say in hindsight that had the Government implemented the recommendations at the time it would have preempted a lot of unnecessary invective and warded off resultant pressure.  That’s a lesson, though and one which the Government could learn and more importantly apply to the recommendations articulated by the LLRC. 

It is good that the President has chosen to place the report in the public domain and not let it gather dust like that controversial but immensely important report of the ‘NGO Commission’ appointed by President Ranasinghe Premadasa.  One hopes that he will take note of the contents and the discussion it provokes, but more crucially that he acts and acts soon and positively in implementing recommendations.  This country, after all, has had its fill of commissions and reports, most of which have served to keep objectors quiet and waiting so that the particular government can safely negotiate the relevant evil hour. 

There’s been objection. There’s been waiting.  There has been patience, grudging and otherwise.  The LLRC was made of eminent persons.  Sri Lankans.  Its report therefore is home-grown, so to speak.  There’s  absolutely no excuse to dilly-dally in implementation.  The President can and must act on it.  It can only increase his stature.  There will be whiners, but the applauders will outnumber them. 

[Editorial, 'The Nation,' December 18, 2011] 

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Sri Lanka's Civil War (Complete) | Asia Society

http://asiasociety.org/video/policy/sri-lankas-civil-war-complete

NEW YORK, December 6, 2011

Documentary filmmaker Callum Macrae, Malinda Seneviratne, Editor-in-Chief of Sri Lanka's The Nation, and Bob Templer of the International Crisis Group present and assess both the Sri Lankan government and international community's perspectives on that country's decades-long sectarian conflict.

Tunku Varadarajan, editor of Newsweek International, moderates the discussion.

(1 hr 24 min)

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If it’s about territory, then it’s about history

M.A. Sumanthiran, speaking at a seminar organized by the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies recently, is reported to have waxed lyrical about children conscripted for battle.  He had lamented that not only were their childhood taken away from them, they died and that their parents don’t have the privilege of visiting their graves. 

The TNA National List MP could have confessed the fact that neither he nor his party had ever found fault with the abductors, the LTTE, not for child-snatching and not for any of the countless acts of terrorism.  With that kind of disingenuous utterings neither he nor his party can reasonably expect anyone to believe that they are serious about reconciliation. 

Eran Wickramaratne, the UNP National List MP, has lauded various programmes of the Government, but is reported to have attributed everything to foreign pressure.  Perhaps this is a colonial mindset he has acquired after formally joining the UNP and deciding to back the present leadership, but it is strange that this man, known for sobriety, has not attributed the victory over terrorism also to someone like, say, Navi Pillai.  It’s that absurd! 

This is not to say that the Government and the President are all about doing everything possible to alleviate the suffering of all citizens, especially the Tamils.  Quite apart from the fact that no one expects anyone to be Superman, there are issues that are urgently in need of attention which are being neglected.  Not all of these are North and East specific nor Tamil-specific of course, but the fact remains that we are still a long way from reconciliation, even though it was no easy task to get over the biggest hurdle, that of terrorism and the realities of violent conflict. 

Wickramaratne might say the LLRC was also a product of outside pressure and in this he may be correct.  He doesn’t have what it takes to ever fault Western/UN double-speak, but it is certainly true that the LLRC was birthed as a prompted after-thought, never mind the pros and cons pertaining to the relevance of such an exercise. It is a fact and as such one we have to deal with.  It is a fact that produced a report.  The tabling of the report is also a fact. It an ‘out there now’ thing.  Locally made. 

The LLRC is faulted for mandate limitation.  It will be faulted for not offering goodies as per the wish lists of various stakeholders.  To be expected in various degrees of ferocity, one might add. 

The most important news story of the week, however, was not the tabling of the LLRC in Parliament.  It was not about the chauvinistic and myopic posturing of Sumanthiran or the Wickramaratne’s snooty down-the-nose dismissal of things Sri Lankan, by Sri Lankans and for Sri Lankans.  It was about a claim made by the TNA MP, S. Sritharan who claimed ‘there is archaeological evidence to prove that Tamil Buddhists lived in certain areas of the northern province’.  The evidence referred to is that Buddhist archaeological sites had been discovered in the North subsequent to excavation. 

Now there’s nothing to link ‘Tamil’ to ‘Buddhist’ in the evidence except the fact that these artifacts have been unearthed from areas where Tamils now form the majority.  Concluding in this manner is akin to saying that there were white people who held Mayan beliefs because some Mayan artifacts have been unearthed in some spot in the Andes where whites now reside.  It is like saying that the discovery of a Nestorian cross is evidence of Christians having played a key role and one equal to the role of Buddhists in building a civilization. 

Buddhism does not belong to the Sinhalese, this is true.  One of the greatest commentators on the scriptures, Buddhagosa, was a Tamil bikkhu, after all.  Buddhism did have its historical moment in South India, even though it never had the sway enjoyed in what is now called Bihar.  What is most striking about the extrapolation pertaining Buddhist archaeological remains is the conspicuous absence of the ‘Tamil’ signature.  Buddhism, from the time of Siddhartha and through the intense debates between and among the major schools, the Theravadins and Mahayanists, was a doctrine made for archiving. 

It is indeed strange that neither this politician nor those who share the ideology of separatism a la ‘traditional homelands’ can come up with a corpus of material IN TAMIL, either on stone or on some kind of printed form dating back to those heady days when ‘Tamil Buddhism’ owned the spiritual space pertaining to the claimed ‘traditional homelands’.  History shows that Tamils were not illiterate.  They had a script. They had a literature.  It is hard to believe that a community of Tamil Buddhist dominating to the point of leaving behind an exclusive archaeology did not think of penning a few words that could validate such claims millennia later. 

What is interesting about the statement is the fact that the TNA has finally understood that it has to back rhetoric and claim with fact and substantiation.   The long years of Eelam posturing was bereft of any reference to ‘Tamil Buddhists’ except from the staunch Tiger-supporting Peter Schalk, whose efforts were largely ignored by the Christian-dominated articulators of Eelam mythology.  The current ‘latching-on’, then, indicates a) the recognition that history will preside over claim-verification and b) there’s very little fuel in the Tamil Nationalism bus to take the country towards any significant landmark along the road to Eelam. 

It brings the debate down to terra firma, that of citizen’s rights and flaws and anomalies therein.   If exclusivity cannot be established when it comes to ‘traditional homeland’, if the illogical demarcations of provincial boundaries cannot be supported in ethnic or any other terms, if the demographic reality of more than half the Tamils residing outside the North and East has to be taken into account, then we are forced to get back to the constitution and all the flaws in it.  It is not about devolution, then, but about democracy. It is not about cultural domination, but about coexistence. It is not about gerrymandering to suit chauvinistic designs or tweaking of land laws to skew demography in favour of this or that community, but about being sensitive to concerns and indeed fears. 

Sritharan may have unconsciously stuck a poisonous thorn on TNA politics and Tamil chauvinism.  Now   Sumanthiran can no longer say one thing in private and another in public. He needs to grow out of Tamil chauvinism, acknowledge the racism of Chelvanayakam, be loud and clear about his position regarding merging the North and East, accept demographic and geographical realities, clear about history, eschew myth and apologize to the entire population for the crimes of omission and commission committed by the TNA in its Tiger-loving past and its chauvinistic present.  He can do it.  I doubt though that Wickramaratne, given his ecclesiastical prerogatives would budge from the colonial horse he’s borrowed, but then again anything is possible. 

The issue of history has been dodged for too long.  It is the very dodging that feeds chauvinists on both sides of the divide.  It is this dodging that helps keep a flawed and anti-citizen constitution largely unscathed by political upheavals and even regime change.  It is a dodging that all parties, all governments, and all presidents have indulged in.  For too long. 

The LLRC might, sadly, provide a diversion that is useful to politicians, but sooner or later the thorny issue of territory must be taken on.  History will preside, as it should, version, artifact, text and all.   It should not matter whose claims get punched holes in.  We need to get past this if we are to live as friends and citizens, equal under the law.

[Published in 'The Nation' of December 18, 2011] 

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