For Sinhalese Like Us: ‘Unknown Knowns’ Of The Tamil Man’s Problem

By Vangeesa Sumanasekara -October 1, 2013 

Vangeesa Sumanasekara

Let us lay the cards on the table. The Northern Provincial Council election result has decisively shaken the post-war political balance in the country and redefined the lines of demarcation. The immediate future of the country will depend, to a large extent, on the way the newly elected Northern Provincial Council strategically implement its political agenda and the way the government responds to that. The fundamental challenge at hand for us, in the South, is to prevent a Sinhala-Buddhist fundamentalist counter-mobilization that would ultimately pressurize the government to adopt the former’s position.

Heart of the problem is the following: why does the overwhelming majority of the Sinhalese do not recognize what only appears to be the blatantly obvious and justifiable reality of the aspirations of the Tamils to obtain a certain self-determination in the parts of the country where they are the dominant majority ? The Tamil man’s problem, as I will henceforth call it – and by ‘man’ I, of course, include both men and women – is, in a certain sense, a remarkable phenomenon. It is at once the most elusive and the most obvious problem, depending on one’s standpoint: one that argues that the Tamil man’s problem is a pseudo-problem and the one that believes that it is the most serious and pressing problem in the country right now.

The former position can be summarized thus: ‘Tamils do not have a problem at all. The colonial rulers had intentionally given privileges to Tamils, in order to create an ethnic divide in the country and, by extension to safeguard the smooth functioning of the former’s rule. At the end of the colonial rule, Tamil leaders perceived that they would no longer be getting the privileges they enjoyed during the colonial rule insofar as the numerical majority of the country would become its new rulers, as indeed it should be according to the natural destiny of the country, in tune with its pre-colonial history. With this realization the Tamil leaders started to demand an unjustifiable share in legislative power and started to mobilize the average Tamil people around a mythical homeland, when in fact, the latter did not have a problem being a Tamil. It was the leaders who corrupted the minds of the people in order to maintain the privileges the former enjoyed. Tamil ‘problem’ itself is an illusion’

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