Remembering The Martyrs And Traitors

By Mahendran Thiruvarangan -November 30, 2012

Mahendran Thiruvarangan

Remembering the past, its struggles and the actors and agents who advanced those struggles as a community is a key political act inextricably linked to our political journeys in the present. The past and the memories associated with it speak about our historical progress into the present, and therefore we tend to preserve the past in the form in which the past and its agents presented the past to us in the past. On other occasions, the voids of disillusionment and defeat into which the past leaves us often invoke romantic and illusory pictures of the past. As a result, we often desire to see the present to mirror the past without change or contamination. Our unceasing idealization of the past is not going to be a productive political practice in the long run. By keeping us within a circumscribed narrative of glorification, the past that we want to preserve and eulogize slowly weakens our critical eye. The present, as a consequence, finds itself crippled by obsolete forces. And the future appears as a blurred space in our visionless eyes. Whether we like it or not, there is a point where we need to break this self-destructive continuity that binds the past and the present in our thoughts, and rescue the present with a view to initiating political processes that would lead to transformation instead of stagnation.

My thoughts on the LTTE Martyrs’ Day event observed by the students at the University of Jaffna, despite the threats and gruesome violence they faced from the Sri Lankan Army and the Police, stem from this understanding of the interplay between the past and the present. The purpose of this opinion-piece is not to pass judgment on the rightness of commemorating the LTTE Martyr’s Day event at the University of Jaffna. I share in the students’ admiration of the idealism that characterized the lives of the LTTE cardres. I remember the LTTE cardres’ moral courage to sacrifice their education and the prime of their youth and to keep aside their responsibilities towards their families for a greater cause that had the larger community at its heart. I also condemn the brutal violence used by the Sri Lankan state against these unarmed students and the state’s unrelenting opposition to commemorating the slain LTTE cardres. But, I want to distance myself from patriotic narratives that use these martyrs to demonize those who democratically questioned the LTTE’s ideology and politics, and therefore want to think about what else a critical reflection of the past requires us to do when we remember the LTTE Martyrs in the post-militancy period. Read More