By

Vishnuguptha

“He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche

Ever since the cessation of the armed conflict between Sri Lankan security forces and the Tamil militants led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE), the Tamil constituency in the North and East has been able to project a very cohesive and united political front. In all the elections that followed the end of hostilities, Tamils, especially the Northern segment, cast their votes as one single person voting, displaying a remarkable unity of expression and cogency of assuredness that usually accompanies self-trust. It reached a zenith during and after the elections that were held for the Northern Provincial Council.

The candidature of C V Vigneswaran for the position of Chief Minister, in addition to being portrayed as an extremely clever choice on the part of the Tamil leadership, hardly left the opposing parties with any alternative but to keep tight-lipped about a retired Supreme Court Justice whose unblemished judicial record was an aberration in the context of questionable judgments and judicial arbitrations reached by some other major players in the wake of the passage of the infamous Eighteenth Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution.

However, that unity in the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) is appearing to be in great danger of being shattered; the togetherness, especially in purpose and the length and breadth to which the Tamils could extend their influence in shaping the majority of their own community, their seemingly impenetrable coherence and lucidity of argument for more power sharing at all levels are being challenged. Whether these apparent fissures in principle and policy are more fundamental than superficial will be seen sooner than later. The great speed at which the country’s body-politic is moving towards another confrontation in the cool climes of Geneva in March, would only accelerate the process of the TNA’s political evolution, particularly in the last couple of months leading up to the same summit in Switzerland.

One cannot pay scant respect to the troubled and turbulent history of the movement that has now closed in on the threshold of the Tamil National Alliance. A serious disagreement in policy and principle, primarily in their most significant and defining purpose- their raison d’être- of sharing power with the majority Sinhalese community, if exploited cleverly by politicians among the majority Sinhalese, would again lead not only to a sense of disunity among the politically-active Tamils both in the North and East and in the plantation sector, it may also create a sense of doubt about their leaders and the real purpose and objectives of their struggle.

A disagreement on the main platform issue, particularly among the top leadership, could indeed be very counterproductive to the movement. This was shown in the late Nineteen Forties with the parting of ways by the then Tamil leaders, G G Ponnambalam and S J V Chelvanayagam. With Ponnambalam, the then leader of the Tamil Congress joining the D S Senanayake Cabinet, Chelvanayagam and his immediate cohorts broke away from the Tamil Congress and formed the Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), more popularly known as the Federal Party (FP). The Tamil Congress gradually died a natural death while the ITAK continued as the sole representative political platform of the Northern and Eastern Tamils.

Yet, that parting of ways between the Tamil Congress and the ITAK did not seriously harm either the way the majority of Tamils in the North and East treated their leaders or their main struggle. With each successive Sinhalese-dominated government passing legislation perceptibly to the detriment of the Tamil people as an emerging regional power in the two provinces of North and East, the sharpening of measures and tactics adopted by the ITAK paved the way for grave suspicions among the Sinhalese people who were being brainwashed by the Sinhalese-Buddhist clergy and their devoted loyalists on the political side.

Both sides polished their ethnic blades and sharpened their edges in order to score points and superficial victories. To leap forward thirty years, the unity of the Tamil community in the North and East remained intact during and after the cessation of military hostilities in 2009. Even a slightest of fissures was not visible to either the outsider or the inner party activist.

This is where the context of the assertion by C V Vigneswaran that “the Tamils cannot expect total power sharing” would be coming into play, not only among the locals but more so in the international fora. While addressing the ‘National Conference on Post-war Socio Economic Development of the Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka’ held at Hotel Taj Samudra in Colombo, Northern Province Chief Minister made a seemingly reconciliatory concession, a clear departure from his Party’s publicly acknowledged stance on power-sharing. However, it should also be noted that when the Chief Minister met with United Nations Assistant Secretary-General (UNDP), Haoliang Xu in Jaffna last week, he laid emphasis on the significance of a third party involvement, especially the engagement of the United Nations, in resolving the Lankan Tamil question.

Meanwhile Vigneswaran’s Party leader, Sampanthan, at a seminar in Chennai last week stated that the Tamil question in the island could be settled only through an Indian-style Federal System. Sampanthan was thus showing the same rigidity of Chelvanayagam and Amirthalingam. However, the perceptible flexibility that the Northern Chief Minister shows might be too sweet for the current Government and its nationalist elements, but Vigneswaran does not seem to have considered the short and long-term ramifications of such a declaration by the one of the ‘big three’ of the TNA (Sampanthan, Sumanthiran and Vigneswaran constitute the ‘big three’ of the TNA today). Discipline at the very top is a must for any political party; the absence of such scrupulous discipline and the resultant disarray in a political party would lead to the erosion of the vote bank of the Party as is manifestly evident in the United National Party (UNP) today.

More simply put, a more disciplined and controlled demeanor on the part of a man of the stature of a retired Supreme Court Justice such as Vigneswaran would have been expected. Unfortunately it did not happen that way. As in the case of the UNP, when such political differences are brought before the public, well before they are argued, counter-argued and settled within the walls of intra-party meetings and conferences, the brand of the Party, its very DNA and its basic identity tend to take a huge beating. The other political vultures in the guise of Douglas Devananda and their cohorts would invariably pounce upon such situations. The resulting confusion is incalculable, both in terms of psychological perception and strength of the vote-base.

If, on the contrary, one single platform is adopted by all leaders of the TNA, then it would not only be immensely helpful in their cause, it would also put the Central Government back to the wall, making it exceedingly difficult for them to just resort to sloganeering and self-deception of their own.

What compound matters for the TNA is that this display of disagreement has appeared on the horizon just prior to the forthcoming United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) meeting in Geneva in March. Chelvanayagam’s approach to finding a solution to the Tamil question had been one of gaining concessions on a gradually increasing scale – little now and little later. It did not bear any fruit. The other solution, a violently militant one as imposed on the Tamil population by Prabhakaran too had its devastatingly destructive consequences.

Both Vigneswaran and Sampanthan may well be advised that what needs to be done is not to seek ‘solutions’ but to reach ‘resolutions’ with a view to making peace with the majority ethnic group in Sri Lanka.

The writer can be contacted at vishnuguptha2012@gmail.com