Let's unpack the query in 'Tamil National Question'

President Ranil Wickremesinghe has called all parties to get together and solve what he calls the ‘ethnic-problem’ that has remained ‘unresolved’ for decades. Meanwhile, parties that claim to represent ‘Tamil interests’ have put forward a set of demands: a) stop ‘land grabs in the Northern and Eastern Provinces by armed forces the state institutions while releasing all lands so acquired earlier by them in those two provinces, b) hold provincial council elections forthwith after implementing all provisions in the Constitutions and other laws in respect of power devolution, and c)  implement power devolution under a federal framework through a new Constitution are the three demands.

Any private lands acquired by the state for military purposes should be returned to original owners provided that doing so does not compromise strategic interests. It is hard to imagine that there are ‘strategic interests’ that are vital that such an exercise should be ruled out. Using state lands for state-purposes is of course another matter.

State operations may one day be carried out entirely in virtual space. Maybe state institutions would one day be moved to floating facilities in the sea or in the sky. Until then, they need land and there’s no logic in demanding that they should be located in or out of a particular province. Calling it ‘land grab’ is downright silly. The use of the term ‘land grab’ is interesting. A Freudian slip, in fact, considering the entire discourse of Tamil nationalism, sorry, chauvinism.

Holding provincial council elections, on the face of it, is a legitimate demand. However, it is strange that these very parties have been conspicuously silent about elections not being held for years! It’s almost as if they’ve never been serious about devolution of power. More importantly is the fact that provincial council were set up illegally via a constitutional amendment forced on Sri Lanka by India in a do-it-or-else manner following the infamous dhal-drop by that country’s Air Force.

The third demand is fine: power devolution under a federal framework through a new constitution.  Anyone (including Tamil chauvinists who were vociferous approvers of terrorism and terrorists) has the right to demand anything. Whether such demands can be met is another matter. They can and should be considered. That’s what one expects from a functioning democracy. There should be mechanisms for this and if such don’t exist then they need to be put in place.  

There’s a problem though. Why federalism? Why devolution? On what basis? Grievances, did someone say? What grievances? And, if such do exist, what logic dictates ‘devolution’ as the one and only way of resolving them? Well, Tamil chauvinists are pretty thin on all this.  History is not on their side. Archaeology is not on their side. Demography is not on their side. Geography is not on their side. And even economics is not on their side.

There are serious problems with Tamil nationalism and nationalists.  Substantiation is not their thing. Ask them to do so and they twiddle their thumbs. Talk history and they dodge. Talk about demography and they pretend people and land don’t go together. Talk solutions and they start shifting goalposts. Talk economics and the logic or otherwise of devolution (the Western Province has close to 75% of the country’s GDP and if we played devolution-logic to the letter we would see the continued relative impoverishment of certain districts and provinces) and they will talk about human rights violations. Talk about human rights violations and they act as though it all happened in 2009 and that the LTTE was a band of angels.  Insist and they mutter 'Darusman Report.' Ask a few pointed questions about veracity of claim and they rant and rave about something else in the manner of artful dodgers.  

Thus, when they demand devolution under a federal framework they are talking absolute rubbish.  Not too long ago, i.e. in November 2019, the people of this country voted at a presidential election. The winner and the candidate who came second together polled 94% of the vote.  Both pledged to uphold the unitary character of the state. The Tamil National Alliance supported one of these candidates, Sajith Premadasa. So what talk of federalism? If they were so principled, shouldn’t those in the TNA and other ‘Tamil’ parties have disassociated themselves from any individual or party that did not espouse their cause or at least claim that they will consider a ‘federal’ constitution?

The Tamil National Question. That’s what they like to call it. Question. That’s the key word here. Tamil chauvinists do have a problem, a question. They really don’t care about ground realities. They don’t care about history. They don’t care about demography. Yes, we need to say these things again and again, simply because the biggest question about Tamil Nationalism is this: ‘why is the word ‘substantiation’ not in their vocabulary?’ Why cannot they come out with the true dimensions of grievances and explain how ‘devolution’ and/or ‘federalism’ resolves these? Why do they talk of ‘unity’ when that word is not ‘constitutionable’ and why do they fail to acknowledge that close to 100% of the voting population was not interested in federalism?  All these are questions. All questions that Tamil nationalists must answer but will respond with the kind of navel-gazing that they’ve indulged in for decades which of course did nothing in improving the well being of anyone, including Tamil people in this country.

That’s the ‘Tamil Question’ then — simply a misnomer, a proposition of a racist and a land-grabber.  So when Wickremesinghe wants all parties to come together to resolve the ethnic-conflict, he should first get them to agree on the truth about this ‘ethnic conflict,’ which includes the lie that has been the political foundation of racist, chauvinistic, land-grabbing Tamil politicians and parties for decades.  As for the demands of ‘Tamil’ parties, the time has come to politely tell them, ‘how about an audit of history or histories claimed, how about talking demography and geography, how about discussing voter behaviour and how about dumping the 13th Amendment because it was forced on Sri Lanka by the neighbourhood thug?  

Yes, more than one question. Easily answered. All of them. And, in answering, something could happen to the so-called Tamil Question — a problem of chauvinistic Tamils which can be easily resolved if the chauvinistic Tamils closed shop.  Shouldn't have taken decades. Need not take the five weeks left until the 75th Independence Day celebrations. Five seconds should do.

malindadocs@gmail.com

Read more

Grievances and resolution: the question of true dimensions

Grievances.  ‘Grievances?’ rather.  A word and a question.  The former implies a list or at least two issues that somehow cause distress.  The latter, the question that is, is something that has been customarily ignored or caused much shy-making, toe-watching and navel-gazing.  At best it prompts a highly emotion and even highly stylized narrative which is marked by marking out preserves (of grievances) where there are none and exaggerations where there is some degree of legitimacy to claim.  We are talking of ‘Tamil grievances,’ by the way.

Dr Nirmala Chandrahasan (LLB, LLM, PhD, Attorney-at-Law) in an article titled 'National Question and grievances faced by a minority’ (which she claims is a response to a piece I wrote, ‘Let’s make Sampanthan’s New Year wish come true’) does not indulge in such histrionics.  She offers some sober reflections on the issue, lists grievances and makes recommendations for their resolution.  They demand response.  

Nirmala begins by quoting the LLRC (Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission) report: ‘The Commission takes the view that the root cause of the ethnic conflict lies in the failure of successive governments to address the genuine grievances of the Tamil people (Chapter 9 para 184).'  

One doesn’t have to take the LLRC report as the last word on anything of course.  Those who could be called fellow-travelers in Nirmala’s pro-devolution caravan were shrill in their objections when the LLRC was set up.  The LLRC did not stick to mandate.  A minor misdemeanor, that.  I remember offering some observations on this a few years ago.   When the same shrill voices demanded that LLRC recommendations be implemented forthwith, I pointed out the following important ‘misses’ or ‘forgets’ in their pronouncements: “the LLRC was a far cry from a body enacted to draft a constitution. Secondly, some of the recommendations require constitutional amendment and even referenda. A third ‘forget’ can be added: the Government is not bound (as per the mandate-limitation) to implement all of the recommendations. There’s can-do and cannot-do in all this. There is, moreover, ‘done’, ‘doing’ and ‘forget it’ too. There is wanted-speed and doable-speed.” [For elaboration, please read, 'LLRC and Devolution: the politics of skipping caveats'].

The LLRC note on ‘root cause’ is incomplete.  It is correct that successive governments have been in part responsible on account of their inability to address the genuine grievances of the Tamil people, but that is not the only root cause.  Tamil chauvinism predates the much maligned ‘Sinhala Only’ legislation.  But let’s ignore all that.  The key terms here are ‘root causes’ and ‘genuine grievances’.  We’ll take up ‘root causes’ later; for now, the key descriptive of the word ‘grievances’ is the word ‘genuine’.  This has been ignored by those who have hurrahed the LLRC report.  

‘Genuine’ is about true dimensions — fact, not falsehood; history and not myth-models.  

Nirmala, having started with that LLRC quote appears to have forgotten that the issue is root causes in the main. She’s flagged eight points of contention: 1. Implementation of the Language Act, 2.Equal access to services and opportunities, 3. The principle of equality in the dispensation of justice, 4. Fair and just treatment of those detained, 5. Transitional justice, 6. Return to rightful owners of private properties secured by the state during the conflict (Points 4, 5 and 6 being essentially elaborations of Point 3), 7. Lack of state-sponsored economic development in the northern and eastern provinces, and 8. Non-implementation in full of the 13th Amendment.

Of these, Points 3-6 and 8 are not 'root causes'.  They are issues that have arisen long after tensions snowballed into a full blown armed conflict. Even Point 2, touches on language-related issues, i.e. Point 1.  They are certainly valid concerns and anything less than comprehensive addressing of the same cannot help the cause of reconciliation.  However, to flag these as valid or strong justification for ‘devolution’ is simplistic and demonstrates the pretty thin case for federalism championed by Tamil nationalists long before the LTTE came into the equation.  Indeed, it shows that the unadulterated chauvinism of the Tamil political leadership was as potent a poison as that of their Sinhala counterparts.  They’ve offered therefore a ‘Tamil counterpoint’ to ‘the non-addressing of grievances by successive governments’ by articulating ridiculous aspirations, confusing cause, effect and objective, and thereby feeding militancy among Tamil youth.  They’re as culpable as lax governments in the production of the LTTE and the terrible thirty years of conflict.  

Of course it is the state that has pick up after the fact.  Those who funded, armed and in other ways backed the LTTE can adopt and have adopted a hands-off policy in the matter of infrastructure development and other necessary action to rebuild conflict-ridden territories including rebuilding livelihoods.  It’s never enough, of course.  Charles Haviland, one time BBC correspondent in Colombo, once wrote about a ‘rehabilitated’ LTTE militant in Jaffna who was lamenting about being unemployed.  [For an elaboration of the kind of ailment that the likes of Haviland suffer, read 'Towards a post-complicit moment for those in pre-sleep slumber' and 'HRW and Brad Adams need to get some sleep']

Haviland's wail was rich.  Terrorists were offered skills that would help them earn an income, they were allowed to study and sit for examinations, they were released (if anyone wants to know what the countries that champion human rights and have berated Sri Lanka for being 'non-complient', all that is required is to whisper the name 'Guantanamo Bay' several times before and after meals) and the state is required to find them jobs as well?  It’s great if any state anywhere in the world can do a fraction of all this, but this was being demanded of Sri Lanka, a not yet middle-income country, that was in no position to eliminate unemployment and certainly not required to babysit ex-terrorists!   

The issue of justice (Points 3, 4 and 5) are valid. Of course one need not elaborate that injustice is not a badge that only Tamils have to wear.  In fact the entire justice system in its operation heavily favors the privileged.  Privilege is not the preserve of any particular community.   Nirmala’s point is valid when it comes to disappearances.  Proper investigation and follow-up action is necessary and sadly has been most manifest in absence.  

Just to get the ‘ethnic’ dimensions of the perspective right, the kind of justice that is sought was something that was not offered to victims of the 1988/89 insurrection either. And, in the larger narrative of ‘reconciliation’, it has to be remembered that it was not just the security forces that were engaged in strewing misery.  Who conscripted children?  Who killed members of rival Tamil political and military groups?  Were all members of the clergy, intellectuals, professional and ordinary people in the Tamil community killed by the security forces?  The LTTE’s track record is known in all this.  And it was not only ‘innocent Tamil civilians’ who were killed.  There were civilians of all communities who died, some were massacred, some villages were burnt and not all of them warrant the ‘Tamil’ marker.  Widowhood.  Becoming orphans.  Sinhalese know all this.  Muslims too.  The baby belongs to the state by default of course, but when we talk about it, we can’t talk of certain widows and not others, certain orphans and not others.  That’s a crime of selectivity that demands the descriptive 'pernicious'.

Does this absolve the state from finding out what happened to those who were taken into custody and then disappeared?  Can the state shove it all under a carpet called ‘forgive and forget’?  No.  Allegations have to be investigated.  It may take time, but it has to be done.  The LLRC is absolutely right on this.  Nirmala has picked the correct quote which bears re-telling: ‘The government is duty bound to direct the law enforcement officers to take immediate steps to ensure that these allegations are properly investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice. It will be recalled that this report came out quite a few years ago, but evidently these recommendations have fallen on deaf ears.’ 

It is a problem.  Not a root cause.  Perhaps a ‘cause’ for delay in reconciliation or even a cause for another round of violence, but certainly not a ‘root cause’ that warranted armed insurrection or even a demand for devolution.  It's none of that simply because of the error of chronology.

The same holds for Point 4, the indictment or release of those held in detention.  The release of over 90% of those taken into custody at the end of the conflict, many of them as mentioned above after being provided the opportunity to obtain marketable skills and useful qualifications (something unheard of in countries whose leaders regularly lambast Sri Lanka for ‘doing nothing’ by way of reconciliation), is not a valid excuse for denying justice to those who remain in custody.  Again, as pointed above, ‘not a root cause’ but a consequent whose genesis is not neat, not tidy and marked by multiple traces of 'ethnicity' if that's the preferred frame.  The state has to hold the baby, of course since no one is saying ‘I am an LTTE member’ these days, not even the LTTE’s conflict-time proxy, the TNA, which by saying ‘the LTTE is the sole representative of the Tamils’ covered itself with the Tiger flag.  The state has to hold the baby, yes, but this doesn’t mean that we say nothing of the baby’s parentage. But again, let us not forget, it’s not a ‘root cause’.

Point 6 is also an issue of justice.  However, demilitarization is a process and no one can say that this Government or the one before did nothing on this count.  Security is and always will be an issue, but 'return to normalcy' requires that properties secured for whatever reason be returned to rightful owners, subject of course to the often difficult process of establishing legality of claim.  Thorny, but addressable.  A must, in fact.  The fact remains, it is not a ‘root cause’.  Not a grievance that caused conflict of a military nature.  

The implementation of the Language Act has been slow.  Nirmala is correct.  Reasons include lack of resources and lack of political will.  There’s movement on both, however.  It is a grievance that needs to be rectified, the LLRC is correct.  Perhaps it is a root cause in generating a sense of being subject to discrimination, but whether the dimensions are significant enough to warrant insurrection is not clear.

Let us now take on Points 1 and 2

Point 2.  Equal access to services and opportunities.  Of course.  The Tamils were favored by the British in the public service and that edge did erode.  If that’s a grievance and therefore should be addressed by restoring the percentages we had in 1948 then the Sinhalese would be edged out for all time.  We can play the proportions game in many ways.  We call it multi-ethnic and multi-religious as though the population is equally divided among ethnicities and religious communities.  Not true, but it’s not said is it?  

Nirmala, however, is absolutely correct about the low representation of Tamils and Muslims in the armed forces and the Police.  This has to be rectified.  It will be slow, in the case of Tamils at least, for understandable reasons, but progress should be made.  The recruitment of a full complement of Tamil speaking officials as per the requirement of providing meaningful services to all citizens is a non-negotiable.  Here too, Nirmala is absolutely correct.  Point 2 is a demand and it outlines a genuine grievances.  A root cause?  Well, as much or as little as Point 1, as argued above.

As for job opportunities and the lack of effort by governments to set up factories in the conflict-ridden areas (the ‘development-deficit’ discussed in Point 7), one must understand that it was not possible for thirty years and little thanks to those who went around burning all state institutions, factories included.  People all over the country are struggling to make ends meets.  Farmers all over the country are suffering.  It’s not just Tamil farmers.  As for fisherfolk, there was a time when they couldn’t go out to sea and they can thank the LTTE for that!  

Governments can only do so much.  Much has been done, in particular by clearing the ground for development.  It is unfair to expect a country like Sri Lanka to turn a war-torn territory into a flourishing industrial zone overnight.  Nirmala talks about benefits of development not accruing to ordinary people, but then again when was that ever an objective of any government?  Development was never for Tamil ‘ordinary people’ and not for Sinhalese 'ordinary people’.  Nirmala should be commended for noting this.  

The one telling ‘deficit’ is a comprehensive irrigation program for the northern province that matches development in this sphere elsewhere.  The issue of a ‘River to Jaffna’ has been debated for a long time.  There are disputes over technical feasibility.  One must take into account that not all areas have the same complement of resources.  However, if devolution is about each devolved entity making do with what's contained in the relevant geographical boundaries, then the ‘Jaffna River’ is out.  In any event, the lack of development argument only alludes to something that few Tamil nationalists acknowledge or want anyone to mention: 

‘Development-lag is an issue that can gather greater currency if it is dressed in an ethnic garb’.  

Let’s consider devolution.  There’s nothing in Nirmala’s ‘Seven Point List of Grievances’ that makes a case for ‘devolution’.  Point seven, in fact, is dependent on the ‘center’ and not periphery.  It’s not a root cause or a grievance.  An aspiration, yes, but not a grievance.   The grievances, the genuine ones that is, call for action and resolution but nothing that can be pinned on devolution of power.  If there’s a wound in a foot, one doesn’t apply medicine on the neck.  Apples and oranges.  Call it whatever you will. The 13th Amendment is an aberration.  It presumes historicity and scientific validity of arbitrarily drawn lines and markers that neither the Tamils nor the Sinhalese had anything to do with.  The President himself has correctly pointed this out and the most ardent devolutionists have maintained a deafening silence on the matter.  

Nirmala asks if devolution is good for everyone, not just Tamils, never mind that devolution to the current ‘lines’ will concretize the myth-models of Tamil chauvinism.  She quotes Mahinda Rajapaksa on this, ‘people in their own localities should be able to guide their own destinies’.  This of course presupposed a neat and equal distribution of resources, but even if that were true, then the devolution logic demands that we move to village councils and not stop at provinces.  Nirmala says decentralization can do it but strangely does not apply that logic to the only two valid ‘issues’ she has flagged (Points 1 and 2).  

Many have misquoted or selectively quoted the LLRC report on the issue of devolution.  Nirmala is not an exception.   I strongly recommend a re-reading of the LLRC report with close examination of Section 9.231 which interjects 4 caveats to the principle of ‘devolution.

Section 9.231 of the LLRC report, which interjects 4 caveats to the principle of ‘devolution’:  (A) Devolution should essentially promote greater harmony and unity and not disharmony and disunity among the people of the country, (B) The focus should be to ensure that the people belonging to all communities are empowered at every level especially in all tiers of Government, (C) The democratic empowerment of the people should take place within the broader framework of the promotion and protection of human rights, and (D) In addressing the question of devolution two matters require the attention of the government: empowering the Local Government institutions to ensure greater peoples’ participation at the grass roots level, and lessons learnt from the shortcomings in the functioning of the Provincial Councils system be taken into account in devising an appropriate system of devolution that addresses the needs of the people, (and finally) it should at the same time provide for safeguarding the territorial integrity and unity of Sri Lanka whilst fostering its rich diversity.

Caveat A imposes the condition of ‘harmony’. Now if devolution uses the current provincial boundaries (randomly drawn, let us not forget), which constitute the basis for the (diminished) Eelamist demarcation, if the majority of Tamils people live outside the North and East (for example), devolution along these chauvinist lines powered by myth-models and exaggeration cannot inspire anything but suspicion and anxiety among the Sinhalese.

Caveat B speaks of empowerment and calls for much better governance and greater affirmation of citizenship-meaning.  Caveat C is about human rights. The upholding or subverting of human rights has nothing to do with the structure of the state (for example, whether it is a federal, unitary or other arrangement). So Caveat C, like Caveat B, is an add-on that is not devolution-specific.

Finally, Caveat D. It is about ‘building on what we have’, i.e. the local government institutions. It is about greater and meaningful participation. Such ‘democracy,’ again does not require devolution as per the 13th Amendment, 13 Plus posturing etc., but about scripting in checks and balances into the relevant articles of the constitution. Caveat D also unequivocally salutes the need to ‘provide for safeguarding the territorial integrity and unity of Sri Lanka whilst fostering its rich diversity’. The devolution debate has gone too far with taking as ‘fact’ and ‘legitimate’ the extrapolations of Tamil chauvinism for any power-devolution to established provincial lines not be seen as a threat to territorial integrity and unity.

A common and not very innocent ‘error’ is to confuse ‘devolution’ with ‘power sharing’.  Power sharing is about checks and balances that forbid the abuse of power, celebrate equality of opportunity in letter, spirit and practice, and about leveling playing fields to the extent possible in a capitalist economy.  Devolution is certainly not a necessary pre-condition; more robust legislation that insulates citizens from power-abuse is.  

Back to basics.  Root causes.  Trotting out issues produced by an armed conflict where the blame for the dismemberment, death, displacement and destruction cannot be placed at a single door is not an enumeration of ‘root causes’ but a description of what any conflict inevitably produces.  The only legitimate grievance Nirmala has expressed is about the language issue and here again it is more about sloth than anything else that one can complain about.  

‘Genuine,’ let me repeat, is about true dimensions — fact, not falsehood; history and not myth-models.  Genuine grievances are about true dimensions.  And resolution is about a solution that engages with grievance.  Devolution doesn’t arise from any of the genuine grievances Nirmala has outlined and certainly not the devolution to the Eelamist lines that are taken erroneously as a ‘goes without saying’ which, we all know, comes from a ‘comes without saying’ that has nothing to do with grievance.

Related Articles and videos:
My representations to the LLRC (along with responses to questions)
LLRC Proposals: let there be no foot-dragging 
Reconciliation and hallucination

*A shorter version of this article was published in the Daily Mirror on February 2, 2017.

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer. Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com.  Twitter: malindasene.  

Read more

Preconditions for fighting ‘grievance-liars’

There are grievances and there are aspirations.  Grievances refer to wrongs done, by omission or commission.  Aspirations may or may not be extrapolations of redressed grievances, i.e. they can always exist and be articulated but need not necessarily grow out of grievances.  Aspirations, in general, tend to be formulated in grand terms enabling ‘resolution’ through purported compromise in terms favourable to the ‘aggrieved’.  In short you ask for something close to the impossible so that you can secure large chunks of the improbable which far exceed the goodies warranted by resolution of grievances. 

That’s politics, whether it’s about salary hikes, securing territorial control or operating space to fiddle around with the share market.  The success of Tamil nationalism/chauvinism, at least in the ideological sphere, is that it has cleverly used grievance and aspiration interchangeably, virtually rendering the two coterminous.  This is perhaps why ‘addressing minority grievances’ almost always has references to power devolution and is framed in territorial terms. 

The power of the lie is such that when the LLRC Report talks of devolution, devolutionists (both of the Eelamist kind and those who believe it’s a democratizing move and not necessarily pandering to Eelamists) cheer and demand ‘full implementation’.  They ignore deliberately (and that’s telling!) the caveats in the report which recommend that devolution be framed by the need to ensure justice for all communities and have modalities that prevent and not foster suspicion, antagonism and division.  That kind of selectivity, especially from those who pooh-poohed the LLRC when it was set up, shows that they are not in this for peace and harmony among communities but for setting things up for another Eelamist putsch in the reduced circumstance of Tamil Fascism being vanquished military.  In short, the legitimizing as ‘ethnic demarcation’ the boundaries that were not drawn on ethnic terms but according to the whims of some errant foreigner who came to this island to plunder, maim and kill.  

The truth is that there is nothing tangible in either grievance or aspiration in terms of ‘territory’ as far as Tamil nationalists are concerned.  Most Tamils live outside the areas to which power-devolution is envisaged.  There is no archaeological evidence that supports the thesis of exclusive traditional Tamil homelands.  The demography, especially of the Eastern Province (the North was ethnically cleansed of Muslims and Sinhalese by the LTTE fascists), thumbs a collective nose at territorial claims.  Even if one counted out ‘colonization’ (which is by no means illegitimate, either by law or by virtue of historical claims of anyone to any place), one cannot get away from the fact that vast swathes of that province has nothing of ‘Tamil homeland’ written on them, either by habitation or historical account. 

Does this mean that there are no minority grievances? No. There are.  Only, there are not territory-bound and therefore territorialized proposals are nothing but red herrings that can only lead to further aberrations engendering further antagonisms and dislocations.  Non-territorial issues must have solutions where the non-territorial is core and ‘territorial’ elements incidental or peripheral. 

 

Some of the grievances can be called minority grievances because they refer to conditions suffered by minorities.  Poverty is a grievance.  Poverty among Tamils is a minority grievance.  But poverty is not a grievance that is peculiar to Tamil people.  Development-lag is a similar grievance.  Representational anomalies too.  Not peculiar to Tamils.  The point however is that Tamil nationalism will not point this out.  They will label such grievances as ‘Tamil Grievances’  implying somehow that all is hunky-dory for Sinhalese.  Conflict, however, did produce Tamil-specific grievances. For example, IDPs.  Now there have been Muslims and Sinhalese that have been displaced for decades, but they are outnumbered by the Tamils who were displaced by the conflict, a displacement caused primarily by the rise of fascism in the name of Tamil ‘liberation’. 

Those who represent these people have a right to be part of decision-making processes pertaining to resettlement and reconstruction.  This is why elections are important. This is why those elected should be incorporated into such bodies as they are mandated to address these issues.  Roping in ‘friendly’ Tamil politicians who cannot claim to represent the majority of Tamils is tokenism.  Whether R. Sampanthan, for example, is a bankrupt Eelamist and terrorist-apologist or not is not relevant.  He is elected and has the right to represent. 

Development, as has been pointed out by many, is necessary but not sufficient in alleviating anxieties.  Language issues remain resolved not due to lack of constitutional guarantees (and I am NOT talking about trivialities such as the National Anthem) but problems in resources, resource-allocation and political will.  In addition, to the extent that grievances that cut across communities are articulated with ‘minority’ or ‘Tamil’ tag, it is incumbent on the Government to resolve them across the board.   This includes concrete measures to address citizenship anomalies that favour the powerful and rich.  It includes constitutional amendments and procedural arrangements to ensure good governance.  If these things remain unaddressed, the Government (erroneously and perniciously dubbed as ‘Sinhala-Buddhist-Nationalist’) will be accused of neglecting minorities and not as being deaf to the pleas of the constitutionally and variously disenfranchised and marginalized. 

’13 Plus’ is a joke because problem and proposal are of the koheda yanne malle pol kind, or like giving cough syrup to correct a sprained ankle.  The Government is erring by not pointing this out and instead preferring to play the game within the frames created by Eelamists. 

There’s a simple point that needs to be tossed at devolutionists: ‘Demonstrate the territorial nature of your grievances and show how devolution sorts it out for all minorities within and without the Northern and Eastern Provinces’.    However, the Government obtains the right to make this point, only if it has shown genuine purpose in correcting the citizenship anomalies and institutional flaws that already exists.  There’s no way around it.  If you are not serious about democracy then you will be forced to fight on the terms of the separatists, whether they masquerade as democrats or devolutionists. 

 [Published in 'The Nation', April 29, 2012]

Read more

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] 

Read more

Grievance first, devolution later (if at all)

Kalana Senaratne, in an article titled ‘Will there be peace before death?’ published in www.groundviews.org, begins an interesting essay on the 13^th Amendment with the obvious preamble that the end of a war is followed by the resurfacing of problems that could not be resolved through the use of force.

Kalana offers that the answer to political problems rests in our own attitudes and perceptions, and in our ability to compromise.  He singles out two issues; that of ‘devolution of power’ and ‘promotion and protection of human rights and equality’; as challenges that confront us and ones on which people hold strong and uncompromising views.  He is correct.  These have been talked-to-death issues over at least two decades and the two have often been conflated for reasons of political convenience.  They can be but are not necessarily related.  Kalana makes this distinction. 

He dwells at length on the issue of devolution, picking the debate over the 13^th Amendment as an illustrative case of the condition he laments over; i.e. perceptions and (in)ability to compromise.  I am yet to come across as clear and accurate a delineation of the contending positions, pointing to the fault lines that have time and again caused fissures in discussion and crumbled compromise when it comes to devolution.  Being an opponent of the 13^th Amendment and devolution along the lines proposed by both Eelamists and their academic and other apologists, I will focus on the issues that Kalana raises regarding objections to the 13^th.

He observes that some of the arguments against the 13^th Amendment are presented mischievously. For example, the on-the-ground failure of the 13^th is not a sufficient argument against devolution, Kalana points out, because ‘failure’ can be attributed to ‘the inability and/or unwillingness to implement,’ and ‘waste of resources less a problem of the document that a problem regarding those who were supposed to implement it’.  He is absolutely correct here.  Just because some Christian or Buddhist fundamentalist does something horrendously uncivilized in the name of Jesus of Lord Buddha, respectively, it does not mean that the respective faiths or their founders are uncivilized and/or erroneous.  The 13^th can be rubbished on other grounds that have nothing to do with identity-issues and which indeed are foregrounded by issues of democracy, human rights etc. 

I find Kalana’s observation regarding myth and reality to be spot on. This is what he says:

‘One would not believe in the concept of a ‘traditional homeland’ or in a merged North-East, and would dismiss these ideas as political myths. But the fact that the majority of the North and the East consist of Tamil speaking people is not a myth, along with the fact that this demand for power-sharing had always been the predominant demand of the Tamil minority, or its representatives, elite or otherwise.’

Yes, ‘Tamil-speaking’ and this, let us not forget, was political sleight of hand on the part of Prabhakaran and a little game that Ashroff, the founder of the SLMC was happy to play.  The two communities, Tamil and Muslim, in terms of linguistic commonality do make the majority.  It doesn’t mean that the total land area of the North and East is mostly ‘Tamil-speaking’ though.  The linguistic issue can have a language-related ‘solution’ and the legislation for this already exists. Political will has been slow off the blocks, but it is not standing still either.  Citing ‘language’ when convenient and leaving it out when it is not is bad, insincere and ‘rubbishable’ politics. That kind of conflation is good for Eelamists, not for any sensible person who genuinely wants resolution or is agreeable to deferring to superior logic. 

Yes, the demand for power-sharing has always been a biggie as far as the Tamil minority is concerned.  So?  All kudukaarayas (drug addicts) consistently want heroin.  When they run out of money they rob.  It is quite ok to demand, but for demand to be reasonable, it must flow from grievance.  Having said this, I do agree that ‘devolution’ cannot be rubbished off the political stage easily, but for different reasons from what Kalana offers.  Devolution has been politically accorded a kind of currency that is not congruent with the grievances that it seeks to redress. Furthermore, the grievances have been so frilled that their true dimensions need to be re-obtained.  This is why I say that we are putting the card before the horse when we talk about devolution and grievances. 

My contention, as the title indicates, is that ‘Devolution’ is not a necessary town that the nation-train has to pass on the way to a conflict-free, peaceful and harmonious future.  I am not saying that we must not take a route that takes us through Devolution, but that the issue of devolution has been poorly framed. 

The question of whether or not the 13^th Amendment makes Sri Lanka a federal entity or not is academic at a certain level.  Kalana believes that the 13^th is harmless.  One doesn’t write into law and implement all harmless things.  That makes constitutional enactment a joke.

The bottom line here is that we have to work up from minority grievances.  ‘Devolution’ cannot only be about efficiencies (the 13^th is inefficient for reasons other than those that Kalana states), it has to allude to the grievances.  We are not talking about aspirations here because that’s an as-high-as-the-sky kind of thing.  We are talking instead of real grievances of a community that is clearly aggrieved.  We are talking of redressing these grievances and doing without disregarding demographic realities, political doability and in ways that make economic sense. 

It is important to understand, as Kalana argues, that resolution of grievances (through devolution or in some other manner, as made ‘appropriate’ by grievance-dimension) must go hand-in-hand with ‘constitutionalism, the rule of law, the establishment of independent institutions and a firm resolve to promote and protect human rights and equality’, not just to placate minority anxiety but in creating the conditions conducive to a wholesome citizenry.

It all begins from the beginning that time was made to forget by a politics that I suspect did not necessarily like it: GRIEVANCE.  Forget it and all ‘solutioning’ is easily reducible to crass politicking. 

Kalana is absolutely right: an opportunity, a tremendous opportunity, has arrived, now that there is an absence of violent conflict; but success depends on how well that opportunity is used, or utilized.’  I would add, it depends on how honest we want to be about what we gripe about. 

[This article was first published in the 'Sunday Island' in May 2010]

Read more