THE LANGUAGE CARROT FOR RECONCILIATION…

2016-08-26

Former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga is on record as having said that the Sri Lanka Freedom Party failed...back in the late 1950s...to balance off the language issue by not introducing legislation whereby the government should have constitutionally provided for a reasonable use of Tamil.

It took boldness and moral as well as political integrity for her, especially in the cauldron of deep racist overtones from several political parties and organizations, to come right out and say that the 1957 Act providing for a reasonable use of Tamil has not been implemented to this day, and even during and after her tenure as President, was not implemented because of these very racism-tinged divisive politics such as that encouraged by the former regime via the BBS and other similar organizations. "Every government in this country excelled in sweeping the Bill under the carpet and thereby not giving the Tamil language its rightful place."

That was not merely her way of saying mea culpa but was a sweeping indictment of the depth and extent to which southern politicians from every political party have been pandering to the whims and fancies of extremists in their desire to hold sustainable power in their hands. To rouse the ire of these extremist elements would be to risk being rejected at the hustings and thereby concede defeat to the party that panders to these extremist elements.

Remarkable guts

CBK has shown remarkable guts in daring to address this explosive issue at a public event. That a daughter of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike can strike a blow for the rights of the Tamils at such a crucial juncture in the country, especially at a time that President Sirisena has his hands full blunting renegade SLFP attacks on him, is indeed a bold step to take, especially in the full knowledge that crucial Local Government Elections can be held by the year's end, a mere 100 days away. This could not have been an off-the-cuff statement because she is in constant touch with the President and hence knows it rhymes with his own thinking. Taken together then, this is a sort of watershed statement because it shows that the SLFP under Sirisena, with her as the ideal lieutenant, is prepared to take on all detractors to prove its honest commitment to racial re-integration and reconciliation. It's perhaps the President's way of saying to the diaspora and other extremists including CM Wigneswaran that 'here we are, what you see is what you get'...and that makes it obligatory on the Tamil leadership to back off from their collectively irresolute though nationally defeatist and negative stance demanding 'self-assertion', federalism and what have you. That stance totally negates the positive moves by the government to forge sincere rights-based reconciliation as a positive step towards sustainable peace. The Tamil leadership must realize that even while sections in the South led by the SLFP [I don't include the renegade JO in that reckoning] takes tentative steps towards them in all honesty, that leadership must also recognize the destructive potential for greater destabilization that its die-hard stance can generate among extremist forces in the South.

Said CBK, "This may be a small initiative...but this is the first time that in post-independent Sri Lanka that a government is making the effort to create an enabling environment to allow its citizens to communicate with the government in their language of choice."

The problem here would at closer range appear to be the new phenomenon that the Tamils, especially in the North, have increasingly begun looking upon the Tamil National Alliance controlled Northern Provincial Council as being 'their government' with Colombo beginning to look like a distant force that holds resented power to determine their future. Here we find another phenomenon in the nature of the TNA having progressively in not so subtle moves imbued in the Tamils a stronger sense of Tamil nationalism than Prabhakaran ever did. In this, the TNA has extended the mental and psychological parameters of the then nascent sense of a Tamil nationalism strong enough to press harder for something approaching autonomous power.

One wonders how well the government has understood this phenomenon and blindly continues to presume that it is still dealing with the immediate post-war mindset of the TNA, the diaspora and the Tamil community. These facets taken together have morphed into a clear and implacable force demanding, though in less aggressive ways than did the LTTE, the maximum devolution approximating self-rule.

From being a community within a nation the TNA leadership has progressively transformed the Tamils into a 'Nation' on whose behalf they are not any more 'asking' for more power but have all but articulated the demand in clear terms for the establishment of a 'comity' of nations with Colombo.

They have in other words accomplished 'Tamil national' segregation and are working towards seeing that dream come to fruition.

This is what President Sirisena, the government, CBK and the UNP need to understand fully. Else, they will continue labouring under the impression that 'conceding Tamil language rights' will suffice to force a lasting reconciliation. Yes, from the Tamil stance that will also be the objective. The difference is that the demand today is by a people whose political leaders have clearly articulated a demand for recognition of the Tamils as a 'nation' and not as a community within a Sinhala-Buddhist nation. As CBK put it, successive governments have failed.....but successive governments were then dealing only with a separate community's demand for equal rights. That demand today is for the assertion of 'National' recognition.

It's a matter of too little too late. This is the awesome magnitude of the reality of the challenge before the Sirisena Presidency. Dealing with JO pales into insignificance in the context of the mammoth dimensions of the Tamil demands of today compared with the demands of the LTTE.

It would then appear that the military defeat of the LTTE accomplished nothing... nothing. Let me stress that fact.

When the diaspora, TGTE etc. persuaded the Tamils to vote the TNA into power and later together vote this government into power, they had their own objectives.

Pay day is at hand...I'm not too sure a mere facility to use their language 'to communicate with the government', is what was in the minds of those who helped vote this government into power.

The Bandaranaikes should have listened to Colvin R. de Silva who warned that one language would create two nations.

CBK is probably 40 years too late in reading the signs of the times. But in the national interest, one would desperately hope not.