Response To Mahendran Thiruvarangan On The CM's ChinthanaResponse To Mahendran Thiruvarangan On The CM's Chinthana

By  Dayan Jayatilleka  -   April 5, 2014

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

If an ethnic group which accounts for 4% -10% of the populace is defined as a nation, just how small does an ethnic group have to be, to be recognised as a national minority or minority nationality? As Minorities Are there no such entities, in the Chief Minister 's scheme of Things? 

The basic points I am making here do not change even if one were to prefer the higher figure of roughly 10% for the Sri Lankan Tamils ​​which is found in certain source material. The UN Chairperson of the Working Group on Minorities, Prof Asbjorn Eide of Norway, clearly stated on a working visit to Sri Lanka during the CFA years, that going by international, and chiefly UN criteria, Sri Lankan Tamils ​​are not a nation enjoying the right of self determination but a national minority deserving of equal rights and enjoying, arguably, the right to autonomy.

Chief Minister Wigneswaran's "Two nations" theory that underlay Concept is the same partition of the British-inspired
and Lahore.  

It is not merely the Sinhalese who do not accept the Tamils ​​of Sri Lanka as a nation without a state. No country does. Most importantly, the Two Nations and goes against the thesis is rejected by
Most enlightened definition of Sri Lanka, namely that contained in the Preamble of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord . 

The dangerous upshot of the Two Nations theory that it lends credence to the cautioning of the defence hawks that there is a latent secessionism or a secessionist project by incrementalism, aimed at establishing a state for "a nation without a state". Therefore, say the hawks, devolution should be denied or delayed.

Can any democratic political party in the island's South, ranging from the UNP to the JVP, be convinced into recognizing the Sri Lankan Tamils ​​of the North and East as a nation? If not, isn't the Chief Minister's very definition of the problem such that it precludes a solution? In the alternative, doesn't the Chief Minister's definition of the problem, which precludes domestic support from the South, leave an externally propelled partition as the only 'solution'? Was that the problem from the very start?

Perhaps still more negative is the other consequence of Chief Minister Wigneswaran's thesis. By classifying the Tamils ​​of Sri Lanka as "a nation without a state" rather than a minority without autonomy or equal rights, he deflects the struggle for the achievable goals of minority rights and more equitable inter-ethnic relations, devolution of power and anti- discrimination, pre-empts a civil rights movement and locks the Sinhala and Tamil communities into the protracted zero-sum game of a struggle over nationhood - an eternal tribal conflict-on this small island.

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