Reading Against The Grain: Notes On Wigneswaran's Speech On The National Question

By  Mahendran Thiruvarangan  - April 4, 2014 

Mahendran Thiruvarangan

Chief Minister CV Wigneswaran's speech delivered at the Centenary Commemoration Bernard Soysa Special Meeting Last Monday carries significance for a number of Reasons [I] . It is a speech that we need to read closely, carefully and critically. As a speech that has the national question at its heart and as a speech delivered by none other than the Chief Minister of the Northern Provincial council, many of us may want to read the ways in which the speech frames the (Tamil) nation or the (Tamil) national. Chief Minister Wigneswaran tries to address the national question by highlighting the failure of the post-independence Sri Lankan state to include the Tamil nation within its imagination. He underlines the astute, progressive positions the Left parties took in the past with regard to the national question, while highlighting rightly where and when the Left went wrong and how they contributed to deepen the majoritarian structures of the state. Wigneswaran recalls his decision to stop learning Sinhala, as an act of resistance, after the introduction of the discriminatory Sinhala-only act and bemoans that it has rendered him unable to explain to the Sinhala speaking people in the South the predicament of the Tamils ​​under the hegemonic state. All in all, I read this speech as one that believes that engaging the South on the national question is imperative for the two communities on the island to co-exist with trust in one another. What prompted me to write this piece is the need to move beyond the nationalist paradigms of state formation that Wigneswaran presents in his speech and to address the national question without furthering the polarization of our communities.  

As the Tamil Nation Chief Minister Wigneswaran Frames a pre-given, ontological entity, On which an argument rests his entire speech:                                                     Read More