It is pre-poll time, and ‘competitive Tamil nationalism’ too is back in business

BY N Sathiya Moorthy-September 17, 2018, 9:13 am 

No one should be overly surprised, even less shocked that the TNA-controlled Northern Provincial Council (NPC) has a passed a unanimous resolution, "calling upon the UNHRC to Refer Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and calling for UN-monitored referendum for the political preference of the Tamil-speaking people" in the country. What should however be surprising is the readiness with which the NPC Leader of the Opposition, S Thavarajah and Muslim member, Ayoop Asmin, backed the controversial resolution, moved by TNA’s even more controversial M K Sivajilingam.

It is not surprising that the TNA, or to be precise the faction led by Chief Minister C V Wigneswaran, and identified with pro-separatist Sri Lankan Tamil groups overseas, sought out such a resolution. With the possibility of near-immediate dissolution of the House at the end of its maiden five-year term on cards, followed possibly by fresh elections, possibly as early as January 2019, they ought to behave the way they have done, since.

The Wigneswaran administration has nothing much to show off on the administrative or development fronts. If there is one political administration in these parts of the world, and not just in the country, that has failed miserably on the administrative front, it is this! When other provincial administrations in the country and those similarly-placed in neighbourhood nations would be demanding a greater share from the ‘national kitty’, here is one Chief Minister who has excelled in returning back funds, as ‘unutilised’ or ‘under-utilised’.

In the normal course, no amount of Team Wigneswaran passing on the buck to the Centre, and arguing the case for more powers and further power-devolution would wash even with his own ‘Tamil nationalist’ constituency. Hence, this repeated Tamil extremist strategy of mounting the hard-line hobby-horse, with the hope that the idea is still sustainable and still has a larger audience than hoped for/anticipated.

Constitutional silence

It is first for the TNA’s ‘national leadership’ to clarify its position in the matter. It is even more for the Government of SLFP President Maithripala Sirisena and UNP Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to address the issue of a constituent unit of the larger constitutional scheme passing such resolutions – of which there have already been many. The Constitution just now may not provide for such exigencies, and the Tamil leaders are not unaware of it.

This in turn has led to a quaint situation in which the hard-liner opposition to the TNA leadership charging the latter with yielding ground to the ‘majoritarian Sinhala views’ on the proposed Constitution, which is nowhere in sight. For all the tall talks, claims and declarations of the ruling duo and the official TNA leadership, especially at the parliamentary level, nothing has moved on that score.

Despite the existing ‘constitutional silence’ or the ‘silence of the Constitution’ in the matter, the TNA leadership is on record that they are not averse to including ‘safety valves’ that empower the Centre to act under such circumstances more decisively than at present. They too want more powers for the Tamils, especially the Provincial Councils, but then they are ready to empower the Centre to initiate constitutional action under the proposed statute that such a right/freedom did not become a ‘licence’ for misuse and abuse of a separatist/ secessionist nature.

Free run of NPC

The irony is striking even more if one were to consider the recent recommendation of the Attorney-General’s Office to proceed against sacked Central Minister, Vijayakala Maheshwaran, for making pro-LTTE statements at an official function in native Jaffna only weeks earlier. The UNP leadership of Prime Minister, acting with circumspection that was as much political as it was ‘nationalist’, asked her to quit the Government and face criminal action, if the AG deemed fit. In comparison, the Government at the Centre is helpless and hapless – or, so it pretends – in taming the Tamil hard-liners, who have had a free fun of the NPC for full five years.

‘Nationalist’, the UNP action was because at the end of the day, what Vijayakala said at the public rally was unacceptable for an average Sri Lanka, including many Tamils. By equating women’s safety in the North to the forced LTTE ‘regime’ of the war-time past, she specifically claimed that people would welcome the LTTE back. Obviously, she was not speaking for women’s safety, but was mainly addressing the Tamil hard-liner sentiments, ahead of the anticipated PC polls, to be followed by the presidential and parliamentary polls, though a year later. Candidate Vijayakala was speaking on the occasion, not a responsible Minister of the Union.

The referendum-cum-ICC resolution and dozens of others of the kind passed through the past four-plus years apart, the NPC is reported to have decided on examining ‘Sinhala settlements’ in four districts of the Province. The NPC has resolved by end-August, to appoint an experts’ committee for the purpose, though with only the idea of maintaining an ‘official list of settled persons’.

Well-intentioned as it may sound, in times of ethnic crisis, as had happened over the war and pre-war decades, it is a wrong sword in wrong hands, if one were to go by the experience of the Tamils in Sinhala areas, including capital Colombo. Be it post-Pogrom-83 or more recently on New Year Eve-2006, ‘Sinhala hard-liner goons’ and/or the police had used the voters’ list to identify Tamils even in cosmopolitan Colombo localities, to target them physically and otherwise.

Tamil militants

The Tamil militants in general, and the long-ruling LTTE in particular had used similar tactics to get rid of Sinhala students and bakers and other citizens from the North is again a recorded incident from the past. The LTTE used it all to greater and more crude and cruel effect when they got the Muslims of Jaffna and elsewhere in the North, to vacate their residences and occupations of generations and centuries, just at 24-hour notice, with only a few hundred rupees to take with them.

On both occasions, and for both hard-liner ethnic groups, the scheme worked. There is nothing to suggest that it would not work again, be it against ‘minority’ Tamils in Sinhala-majority areas of the country, or against the Sinhala locals, who are in a minority in ‘Tamil majority areas’ of the North and the East. As experience has shown, in both cases, when even the armed forces were tasked with additional responsibilities alongside the police, they all either arrived too late or participated in the mayhem.

Drumming up support

It is one thing for political parties, both within respective ethnicities and cross-ethnicity, play competitive politics of whatever kind, with electoral gains in mind. Today, however, in the case of the NPC resolutions of the referendum-ICC kind, there is a need also for the Sinhala majors of the UNP, SLFP kind in Government and the SLPP-JO in the Opposition, do not drum up anti-Tamil sentiments in their favourite Sinhala constituencies.

There is however the added/additional danger of the Sinhala majors in Government, more than the Rajapaksas-centric SLPP-JO, to play down resolutions and initiatives of the kind, hoping for the ‘Tamil votes’ of the 2015 kind, which alone made incumbent President Mahinda R’s defeat and their own consequent victory, possible. Mahinda too did woo the Tamils, but they did not fall for his ‘development card’. There is nothing for him to hope now that they have changed, and in his favour.

This time, again, the SLFP and the UNP in particular, anticipating to be pitted against each other and also against the SLPP-JO in the presidential polls, whenever held, are playing into the ‘Tamil hands’, without drawing out the inherent distinctions that are due to the minority ethnicity in the country. In such a game of silent concurrence, whoever wins or loses, Sri Lanka as a nation would have lost out, all over again. Instead, there is a need for saner and transparent leaderships that are frank to the point of being brutal and also do enough to carry the minorities with them as a community, not just as an electoral constituency.

Instead, if the Tamils have changed, or are being sought to be changed, it is to motivate them against the Sri Lankan nation and the Sri Lankan State, all over again. The moderate TNA leadership, like their predecessor TULF counterpart of the pre-war era, cannot sit by the side, watch it all unfold, and then blame the rest of them all, starting with the Sri Lankan State, the Sinhala polity and maybe the Tamil hard-liners, too, the latter rather weakly and meekly, and then expect the rest of the world to stand by their side, all over again.

Unlike in the past, the international community is very much engaged with Sri Lankan affairs now. If it suits them in the global context, the international community may end up taking up the UNHRC resolution, war-crimes probe and the like. If it suits them otherwise, they may pounce upon the Tamils this time round, for being unreasonable and ‘anti-nationalist’. The choice is for the Tamils and all Sri Lankans to make. The international community, or sections thereof, may have something esoteric to win, but nothing substantial to lose, either way!

(The writer is Director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, the multi-disciplinary Indian public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi. email: sathiyam54@gmail.com)