The Maduru Oya Fiasco

By Rajan Hoole -November 22, 2013 |

Rajan Hoole

The Rise and Fall of the Tamil Militancy and the International Legal Implications of the Government’s Counter-Insurgency – Part 2

In the last chapter, we touched on the drive initiated by leading officials in the Mahaveli Authority pre-emptively to settle Sinhalese in the Maduru Oya Basin in the Batticaloa District. This area was to be developed under the Mahaveli Project. The story of this takes much of Herman Gunaratne’s book For a Sovereign State (FSS). The author should be complimented for an unusually frank narrative where he has been true to his perceptions. But after five years – roughly the period covered by the book – it was clear that his perceptions were in crisis. This was true of a large number in his class. What is particularly interesting about his book is that without being aware of it he tells us much about how leading Sinhalese politicians thought and operated.

The scholar-detectives of the Mahaveli Ministry, T.H. Karunatilleke and Hemapriya, found an eager disciple in Herman Gunaratne who on Dissanayake’s invitation took up the job of Additional General Manager, CECB. Karunatilleke was Director of Planning. The scholar-detectives saw no end of Tamil conspiracies during July 1983 and its aftermath. A particular discovery of Karunatilleke’s was that cunning Tamil surveyors in the Survey Department had been altering Sinhalese place names in the North-East to Tamil ones. One example was the supposed alteration of Kokkila to Kokkilai by adding an ‘i’. Had any one of them cared to look up the 1824 Census or books on Ceylon by Prideham or Tennant written in the first half of the 19th century before there were Tamil surveyors, they would have found the same names and even more Tamil names. They were capable of locating a Tamil menace under every bush and every stone, and went on to become the leading lights of Sri Lanka’s administrative bureaucracy.

Gamini Dissanayake was a sophisticated player who had use for such zealots in his power game. The prestigious and lucrative Mahaveli Authority placed him almost at the top of succession stakes. Reviving the ancient glories of the Sinhalese with foreign loans and putting the Tamils in their place was the stuff of the game.

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The Rise and Fall of the Tamil Militancy and the International Legal Implications of the Government’s Counter-Insurgency – Part 1