Aluthgama: Thinking About Co-Existence And Resistance In A Time Of Crisis

By Mahendran Thiruvarangan -June 25, 2014 

Mahendran Thiruvarangan

I come from a community that was both a victim and a villain in the thirty-year civil war that unsettled all of us. We were victims because the Sri Lankan state killed thousands of us, grabbed our lands and made us homeless; we were villains as we could not question the LTTE strongly when the movement massacred members of the Sinhala and Muslim communities and members of our own community who refused to conform to the movement’s ideology. We witnessed how the narrow nationalist politics that we romanticized, alienated us from the other communities on the island. We witnessed how our failure to criticize the decisions made by our leaders contributed in part to the death of thousands of Tamils in Mullivaikal in May 2009. We witnessed how our obsession with the particular—our language,our culture, our religion and our homeland—incarcerated us within the walls of purism and political decadence. It is true that there was no space for dissent when the LTTE ruled us. But we need to accept as a community that because the LTTE fought against a state that dominated us and persecuted us, many of us often, in our everyday conversations, justified its violence against other communities. Any community that clings to a narrow-minded nationalism has many a lesson to learn from the painful experiences that the Tamils in Sri Lanka went through during the war. When I read about the recent attacks on Muslims in Aluthgama, I remembered the Eviction of Muslims from the Northern Province by the LTTE and the violence that the LTTE directed at the Muslim community in the East in the name of Tamils. Thus, I do not want to understand, in its literal sense, the much-highlighted remark (in sections of the Tamil media) made by a Muslim woman who was affected by the violence in Dharga Town: “If Prabhakaran had been alive, they (the perpetrators of violence) would not have touched us.” It is possible that the Muslim woman made this remark without knowing the LTTE’s atrocities against the Muslims. However, rather than signifying anything else, this remark belongs to the kind of rhetorical statements that people make out of frustration and anger, when leaders let down their communities during times of crisis. It is somewhat similar to the anxious remark supposedly made by an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) in Menik Farm in 2009 that it would have been better had all the IDPs died in the No Fire Zone giving no room for the government to treat them like animals in a zoo. Is it correct to interpret these sentences in their literal sense? Can we read these remarks without paying attention to the contexts in which they were made? What we need now is neither retaliatory violence nor reactionary political activism, but rather a critical consciousness that liberates us from the iron grips of religious and cultural nationalism and helps us imagine ourselves in new ways as a political community that loves and respects all irrespective of one’s ethnicity, class, caste, religion, gender, sexuality, etc.Read More

Thomas More’s Socialist Utopia And Ceylon ( Sri Lanka)

By S. I. Keethaponcalan -June 25, 2014 

Dr S.I. Keethaponcalan

“Thomas More’s Socialist Utopia and Ceylon (Sri Lanka)” by Laksiri Fernando

Laksiri Fernando’s recent book titled “Thomas More’s Socialist Utopia and Ceylon (Sri Lanka)” (Createspace, 2014) certainly is one of the most interesting books published due to the fact that it differs greatly from the general line of investigation undertaken by leading contemporary Sri Lankan political scientists. Fernando takes Thomas More’s book, published in 1516 in Latin (English and other language translations were published later) and argues that the island imagined by More in this book was in fact Sri Lanka. The rational is that More took inspiration to his ideal society from a real world example, the 16^th century Ceylon. 

Fernando enthusiastically introduces Thomas More, who was one of the early socialist thinkers and coined the now very popular term ‘Utopia,’ which means an ideal society or condition. The book entails two major sections: the first section examines More’s ideas from Laksiri Fernando’s perceptions and the section two, is the reproduction of More’s work with some modifications to make the comprehension easier for an unfamiliar reader. This review therefore is concerned with the first section of the book. In this section Fernando: (1) introduces and examines More’s notion of socialism, (2) argues that the utopian island that More talks about in this book was Sri Lanka, and (3) contends that socialism can be the medicine for some of the problems the Sri Lankan society faces today.                                                                      Read More