This isn’t a question of tit-for tat - C.V.Wigneswaran 

2016-07-28

Northern Province Chief Minister and former Judge of the Supreme Court, C.V. Wigneswaran spoke to Dailymirror the at his official residence in Jaffna. During the interview, he spoke of the recent clash at the Jaffna University, the personal and the political and much more:

Q The recent clash which occurred at the Jaffna university has given rise to renewed discourse among the Sinhala and Tamil polity. What, as Chief Minister, are your views on it?

Firstly, its very unfortunate that we have given too much political importance to a matter between two groups of students. You must realize that just a few months ago, there was a clash between two groups of Sinhalese students. There are one set of students who are trying to bring about a more nationalist attitude among the student hood- a sort of parochial get together. Since there were some students against it, there was some sort of a clash between these two groups of Sinhalese students. This occurred some months ago. So there is definitely a group who want to propagate a sort of anti-Tamil attitude among the Sinhalese students.

They would want the students to clash with the Tamil students so that they could tell the world everything negative about the Tamils. That they are tigers and so on. With regard to this incident, it had been agreed upon the previous day that there was no issue with Kandyan dancing being brought in, but to let it be one of the items on the stage. Hitherto what has been done was that the procession carried traditional Tamil cultural dance.

But somebody had decided to bring in the Kandyan dance in between that which resulted in the issue. The students had called for the President of the entire Jaffna Students Union, Sasitharan, to help solve the problem, and he had been assaulted. Poor fellow, I don’t think he had anything to do with this and was brought there in order to bring about a settlement. Now I also find, that as soon as Sasitharan was taken to the Police, a new Facebook account was opened in his name sprouting separatist, pro LTTE rhetoric. Now he had his own account for a long time, and this new account has been opened by someone else.

The idea seems to be to show that the Tigers are still active and this incident was done to drive out the Sinhalese student, which is not true. That is why in the recent message I gave with the Opposition leader- I said that this must not be looked at through an individualistic prism. You have to look at the problem in its entirety. The matter of political power, the issues of war crimes not being looked into, children being brought to the North from the South etc. In some places 60% of the children are from the South in these universities. So there are other matters that have to be looked into and taken into consideration and a fully fledged solution must be brought about. That is one aspect.

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