The claims and counter-claims of intransigence

Leader of the Opposition and the senior citizen of Tamil Nationalism R Sampanthan in an adjournment motion has made some interesting points.

“All people who lived in Sri Lanka, irrespective of their ethnicity, religion, or any other difference, whether Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim or Burgher made their fullest contribution to the achievement of independence. It is almost 70 years since Sri Lanka attained Independence from Colonial Rule. Ethnic strife had plagued the country from shortly after it attained Independence. Pacts entered into between Prime Ministers and the Tamil Political Leadership to help resolve such ethnic strife and enable all citizens to live together in peace and amity, with equality and justice were not fulfilled by the ruling elite. As a result of such ethnic strife and ethnic violence against the Tamil people in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and thereafter, up to 50 per cent of the Sri Lankan Tamil population were compelled to leave their own country largely on grounds of insecurity and take up residence in different countries the world over.”

Some of the above is true, some can be contested.  Yes, people from all communities contributed to the achievement of independence, but it was the Sinhalese or rather the Sinhala Buddhists who sacrificed lives, over and above ‘the call’ of demographic slice.  The ‘other contributions’ came much later.  They were important, though.  

Yes, ethnic strife has plagued the country.  Pacts between Tamil political leaders and various governments have collapsed, yes.  On the other hand it is not the case that what was contained in the pacts died natural deaths.  Some of it survived and was even enshrined in constitutions later on.  Still, the objective of peace and amity, equality and justice, were not achieved, and not just as far as the Tamils are concerned.  

Sampanthan implies that successive governments are to blame, first for not resolving the ‘problem’ and secondly for being unsuccessful in stopping attacks on Tamils.  He is correct.  

On the other hand, it is not that the Tamils have been blameless in all this.  When you paint aspiration as grievance, when aspiration includes a desire to take control of one third the land mass and half the coast, when myth is called history and fiction called fact, you are essentially robbing your cause of legitimacy.  When you deliberately feed anxiety to the point that it evolves to self-righteous objection to perceived hurt, when you are silent as the demons unleashed by you turn into blood thirsty terrorists who will not stop at abducting your own children and holding your own community hostage, you are not helping your cause.  

Things then are not pretty.  Maybe this is why Sampanthan says, ‘Ethnic violence against Tamils is an imminent danger unless and until there is a political resolution of the conflict.’  In other words, he believes that if there’s no ‘political resolution’ to ‘the conflict’, then Tamils would get attacked.  This brings up two issues.   First ‘the conflict’ and secondly, the inability of successive governments to resolve it.  

Why have government’s failed?  The common explanation is that successive governments have ‘capitulated to pressure from extremist Sinhalese’ (sometimes called ‘Sinhala Buddhist extremists’ or chauvinists or racists).  Sometimes the ‘extremist’ qualifier is dropped and it’s blamed on the entire community or else the entire community is described as ‘extremist’.  Even the ‘state’ as well as particular governments have been described as ‘Sinhala’ or ‘Sinhala Buddhists’, never mind the fact that neither the state nor governments have exactly been kind to these communities, butchering them on occasion by the thousands.  

One possible reason, however, for ‘Sinhala intransigence’ is the absurdity of Tamil demands.  Just because you want something, it doesn’t mean that others are supposed to desist from assessing the fairness of the demand.  You can say they are ‘racists’ for saying ‘no’, but then again that’s crass politics, nothing more. 

We can interpret all this as a simple matter of politicians who depend on votes desisting from doing something that might get them thrown out of office.  We can also bring in the pertinent reality of political parties playing political cards ‘right’ to retain or regain political edge.  For instance, oppositions have typically opposed the bad as well as the good, clearly for reasons of political expedience.  And this kind of choice is not the preserve of Sinhala politicians.  Tamil politicians, as Sampanthan knows only too well, have upped the nationalist ante just to secure votes.  Exaggeration is a useful tool in anxious times, we should not forget.

It is prudent to take fixations of communal identity as givens.  It is silly to paint one community as villains and others as innocents. Given these realities, we need to understand that anxieties as well as the fact that extremists are best served by falsehood and not the truth with respect to grievances.  This is where Tamil politics has failed.  Sinhalese cannot be expected to swallow a tall story.  

This is also where successive governments have floundered.  The homeland myth has not been unpacked.  The issue of lines arbitrarily drawn by the British being taken as the boundaries of this mythical homeland has not been challenged.  The contradiction between claiming discrimination and the reality of half the Tamil population choosing to live outside the so-called historical homelands has to be taken up. 

It is time for a historical audit.  Otherwise, we will continue to have people like R Sampanthan disappointed and claiming that Tamils are running out of patience.  The truth is that the Sinhalese have been patiently listening to fabrications tossed out by Tamil extremists for decades.  It is time to stop keeping everyone in suspense.  It is time that the Government did the hard thing: get the homeland story, shake it, strip it of frills and obtain its true dimensions.   Until then we will have Tamil nationalists talking about the intransigence of Sinhalese and Sinhala nationalists returning the favor, charging that their Tamil counterparts are charlatans trying to shove fictions down the throats of Sinhalese to serve a land-grab objective.  It will be a ‘they are the bad guys’ back and forth that takes no one anywhere any time soon.  

Read also:

Sinhala and Tamil traces in an island history

Grievances and resolution: the question of true dimensions

Let's make Sampanthan's New Year wish come true

Cheating Sinhalese through proposal and Tamils through outcome

Death by obfuscation: the prerogatives of the federalist lobby

The management of insecurities

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Three problematic ‘traditional homelands’ can intersect to create a wholesome fourth

Eelamist sections of the Tamil Diaspora, including of course its Sri Lankan component, naturally subscribe to the unsubstantiated claims of the North and East being the exclusive traditional homelands of Tamil people.  Land-grabbing, resource-base-enhancing politics often plays with myths and legends, turning the imagined into fact and spreading the bad news around. This is par for the course of communal politics.  To date, not a single Eelamist would dare put on the table anything of substance to buttress land-claim and indeed their anti-Sinhala, anti-Buddhist cheering squad, overt and covert, are given to deleting the history factor from the political equation for reasons that do not require elaboration. 

It will take time for those who purchased the traditional homeland myth to acknowledge that they were taken for suckers because of the emotional investment involved, the bucks that were sent with little to show by way of investment-return, the debts owed to the notion on account of finding real estate in greener pastures and the flowering of career paths.  There will be a natural period of transition from fantasy to reality. This is why the end of the LTTE sparked so much of protest in Western capitals.  It had the dressing of outrage but the body that self-righteous anger covered was made up of disappointment, denial and the nagging suspicion of being gullible. 

Sooner or later, Eelamists, i.e. those who actually believed the myths tossed around as fact and those who regardless of claim-legitimacy aspired to an ethnic enclave that could be transformed into a nation state, will have to come to terms with certain realities: a) history does not support the claim, b) the archaeological evidence rebels against exclusivity, c) demographic patterns including communal-composition, pull and push of economic and social realities render untenable the vision of a ‘gated’ Tamil community, and d) it is simply not feasible politically and Prabhakaran’s failure even under conditions most favourable for secession should be sobering. 

Quo Vadis ‘traditional homeland’ then?  I can think of three places where the ‘traditional homeland’ thesis did have substance and tangibility.  The first was the relevant Diaspora.  In that rarified and un-moored place, the notion had natural currency on account of the natural angst for lost familiarity and abandoned home.  ‘Diaspora’ was common ground and one that was fertile for myth-planting. Magnificent edifices of ‘past’ and ‘future’ were duly constructed and happily and hopefully inhabited and indulged.  Hence the horror and disbelief at the nothingness that the deflated LTTE balloon yielded on terra firma.  In Sri Lanka, this particular traditional homeland is looked at with increasing suspicion by the principal recipients of tragedy, the Tamil civilians in the North and East as well as those who gullibly believed Prabhakaran was invincible and would deliver a nation, by hook or by crook.   In time, Diasporic Disbeblief will give way to acknowledgment of reality and the retirement of fantasy.

The there is Cyber Space. This is so seamless and without forbidding that fantasy had a free reign.  Networks were established. They grew.  The growers and the growing did not realize that cyber-networks don’t necessarily transform or nurture on-the-ground communities.  It confers a sense of participation and community, allows for dreaming but, like cybersex, is not the same thing as the real article.  The truth is that Eelam had a better footing in virtual reality than on reality.  The end of the war pulled the rug on the virtual and the ‘traditional homeland’ in cyberspace fell hard on its real behind.  The dreamers and fanatics will continue to play.  The realists and intelligent will move on to other games or to real life or both. 

The third ‘traditional homeland’ is of course Tamil Nadu.  India deftly resolved the problem of possible irritants flowing from incipient nationalism from the South by fostering secessionist moves in Sri Lanka, happily arming, training and funding terrorists.  It gave the nation-wanting Tamil Nationalist in Tamil Nadu something to dream about, without being taxed for fantasy.  Sooner or later, Tamil Nationalism will revert to its true and logical traditional homeland, Tamil Nadu, i.e. in terms of solid claim, favourable demographic pattern and greater political feasibility. 

Where does all this leave the Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalist and Tamil Nationalism vis-à-vis the idea of ‘traditional homeland’? I believe that the three ‘traditional homelands’ can be considered spaces and that their intersection, metaphorically and pragmatically makes for a fourth ‘traditional homeland’ for the Tamil community and one which has logical residence right here in Sri Lanka. 

Tamil Nationalism could see the territoriality of ‘homeland’ as a metaphor and not land-fact.  There are histories that play into ‘other’ homelands and these include spin-offs from pandering to the homeland idea that proved and will prove to be untenable.  The divide-and-rule policy of the British which saw accessibility to education extremely skewed in favour of the Tamil community (in terms of percentages, not absolute numbers, the latter fact being the source of the 50-50 claim) helped produce large numbers of educated and professional persons.  Resource-lack fed the communal need to seek betterment through education.  Conflict, regardless of ontology, saw people to relocating overseas and this, even if spurred by not-so-genuine claims of political harassment, and the thus relocated once again saw education as the pathway to better futures, especially in technical fields. 

Eelamism and reasonable hope of actually turning fiction into something tangible spurred, as mentioned above, the proliferation of cyber-Eelamists.  The propaganda machine of the LTTE was comprehensive and effective.  What they lacked on the ground by way of collective, community and faith, they compensated for in cyber-networks. 

Tamils in Tamil Nadu haven’t shown the same enthusiasm for secession that their counterparts in Sri Lanka did.  That shows how successful the Indian Central Government has been in dealing with a potentially explosive problem.  Instead, Tamil Nadu decided to up their collective regional competencies. 

The intersection of these ‘homelands’ points to a peculiar and fortuitous coming together of interests that can create the 4^th ‘traditional homeland’ alluded to above.  It is non-territorial but could have a land-base somewhere in the so-called traditional homelands, if preferred.  The Tamil Community is ideally placed, given resources, communal solidarities, anxieties regarding security and future legitimate or otherwise, and acquired competencies, to create a ‘traditional homeland’ in the form of an IT hub of immense potential.  That would be employing ‘comparative advantage’ in meaningful, life-affirming, community-developing ways that are also politically feasible and moreover capable of stamping communal presence in the larger polity of Sri Lanka. 

It is time to give fantasy a rest and to employ the acquisitions that fantasizing demanded to better and more fruitful use.  There’s a traditional homeland waiting to be created.  It won’t have a flag or an anthem. It won’t need either.  It will, however, give far more self-determination to Tamils, as individuals and as a collective, than anything that Prabhakaran promised. 

Note: This article was first published in February 2011

Malinda Seneviratne is the Editor-in-Chief of 'The Nation' and can be reached at msenevira@gmail.com

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