The Return Of India: New Realities For The Govt & The TNA

By Dayan Jayatilleka -May 28, 2014

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

Something happened. Things just changed. Unnoticed by the Sri Lanka’s cosmopolitan civil society intelligentsia which was engaged in “much wailing and gnashing of teeth” (as the Bible has it), and “how many angels can dance on a pinhead” type disputations (convoluted and obfuscatory, with much lost in translation), the tectonic plates just shifted.

The five post-war years were largely wasted because the South and North, the Sinhalese and Tamil political elites represented by the Government and the TNA adopted political postures that were exceedingly unrealistic but did not appear to be so. The mutual and shared unrealism was possible because of one factor and that factor has just changed; it no longer exists. Thus in an overarching,  parabolic, strategic sense the worst may be over, though in a tactical sense things are bound to get worse, even much worse, before they get better.

Mr Modi’s investiture ceremony and the attendance of eight top level delegations from the region restored South Asia’s status as a sub-system of the world system. Every system or subsystem has a centre and a periphery. In the second term of Dr Manmohan Singh, India as the centre of the South Asian subsystem was deactivated; almost dormant. To put it slightly differently, as a subsystem, South Asia had a de-activated centre and therefore seemed de-centered. It is in this context that actors on the periphery, including non-state actors, operated with an anomalous degree of autochthony, going off the charts, verging on soft anarchy. With Mr Modi, South Asia’s centre has been reasserted.

During the interregnum that was the second term of Dr Manmohan Singh, Sri Lankan ethno-politics were characterised by the following factors: the Sri Lankan Government froze political dialogue with the Tamils. The State proceeded on the basis of unilateralism. The Sinhalese tended to make believe that they had beaten the Tamils, not just the Tigers. The Southern hawks indulged in the fantasy of non-implementation of the 13^thamendment. During the same interregnum, the Tamils for their part proceeded to make believe that the State hadn’t decisively won the war and that the political project of Tamil nationalism could remain unaffected by that outcome despite the fact that the Tamil political community had for the most part backed the Tigers.