By

N Sathiya Moorthy

Now that there are budding hopes to the possible revival of political discussions between the Government/SLFP and the TNA, for finding a negotiated settlement to devolution-driven ethnic issue, both sides need to re-visit the past and ensure that they do not commit the same old mistakes all over again. It does not mean that they could afford to commit new mistakes, either.

It had begun with the Government of the day and the Tamil community leadership of the times banking more on distrust than seeking to identify elements of mutual trust. Blaming it on past experience, dating back to the post-independence fifties, they enumerated what the other side did, or did not do. Habitually, they have become incapable of acknowledging their own contribution to the process.

The failure of the B-C Pact in the Fifties is still a case in point. It failed not only because then Prime Minister, the slain S W R D Bandaranaike went back on his commitment. Three days after the signing of the Pact, Tamil leader, the late S J V Chelvanayagam, declared at a Batticaloa rally of agitated supporters that ‘it’s only a first step’. Post-war, TNA leader Sampanthan said almost the same thing when negotiations were on with the Government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

An added element involved the TNA claiming credit for the US war crimes resolution at the UNHRC. The party was negotiating a political resolution bereft of accountability issues when it made the claim. It was sure to have consequences. The Government walked out of the talks but without the kind grace that had made the negotiations possible in the first place. Both were once again playing to the gallery, and that was it.

The grace or lack of it in the Government’s approach to the negotiations flowed from the confusion that prevailed in its attitude from the very beginning. Having reportedly sent out invites for the TNA Five personally under the seal of the President’s Office, it would later clarify that the negotiations were only with the SLFP leader of the ruling UPFA. It owed to absence of prior internal consultations within the UPFA. It should have mattered the most given the reality of southern sensitivities.

Having decided to commence the talks with only bullet-points like reference to issues and without a pre-prepared text, the Government soon demanded a written set of demands from the TNA. The TNA obliged. Until the talks broke out, the Government never ever came up with its response/version. And when the talks broke down, the Government did not have the grace and courtesy of informing the TNA, officially.

When the talks broke down, the Government asked the TNA to go to the yet-to-be constituted Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) with its demands. Again, it did not reveal its cards to the TNA or the rest of the nation’s polity or outside world. Having backed the Government in its war on terror, the international community felt that it had a legitimacy and justification for expecting an early end to the ethnic issue on the political front, as well. The UNHRC probe, they say, though without full justification, flowed from the Government’s inconsistency – and of shifting the goal-post, constantly, more so, post-war.

Shifting the goal-post again was a two-way game. The Government would constantly complain that the TNA was coming up with new demands, every now and again. Demands on de-militarisation of the North, the TNA backing for UNHRC probe into accountability issues involving the nation’s decision-makers and the armed forces, and intermittent charges of Sinhala colonisation did not form part of the political negotiations. Yet, under pressure from Tamil civil groups, inside the country and outside, the TNA was adding one after the other to their list of demands.

It’s possible that the Government’s decision to engage the TNA in political negotiations leading to a permanent solution to the ethnic issue may have flown also from the concern on the UNHRC front. It’s another matter that President Rajapaksa might have only revived his repeated war-time calls/invitations for the TNA to negotiate a power-devolution package. Whatever that be, when the TNA added ‘accountability issues’ and ‘de-militarisation’ to its existing list of demands, the Government seemed to have felt that the party wanted to have the cake and eat it, too.

The Government might not have been wide off the mark when it saw in all this an unforgettable LTTE trait and tactic of adding new demands at every turn after a part of the earlier list had been addressed. Such lists had included both tactical issues (like de-militarisation) and long-term politico-strategic concerns of the Tamil community at large.

The TNA did nothing to erase the impression that it was deploying the worn-out LTTE tactic, and could hence get equated to the LTTE in conceptual terms, too. It haunts the TNA even more after the party identified with the UNHRC probe and demand. Considering that it concerns the nation’s armed forces, too, every government in the place of the incumbent in Colombo, would be concerned even more than the present one.

Over the past decade in particular, it has become fashionable for the Sri Lankan ethnic stake-holders to blame India-induced 13-A for their faults, errors and wrongs. After a brief lull, when it talked only about apolitical solution acceptable to all communities within a united Sri Lanka, India brought back 13-A into its Sri Lankan ethnic lexicon only after Colombo itself constantly referred to 13-Plus.

The TNA itself is not without blame or confusion on this score. At the commencement of the post-war negotiations with the Government, the TNA referred near-exclusively to five earlier studies on power-devolution, sponsored by the respective Government of the day. There was at that time no real mention of 13-A. If anything, the TNA would remind listeners how the then precursor-moderate TULF leadership too had rejected the India-Sri Lanka Accord in 1987, as the LTTE.

The TNA’s tactically unsure approach to 13-A had remained so through much of the UNHRC processes at Geneva. Through this stage, India got at best a passing and casual mention in the TNA’s scheme and statements. It suited the Government to drop all references to 13-A after India voted for the US resolution at the UNHRC.

When now the TNA seemed to have realised that the Geneva process is more about punishing the Government, the armed forces or both, and not necessarily about facilitating (?) a political solution to the ethnic issue, there is a noticeable tilt towards India, at least in public. Hence, 13-A has become more visible in TNA’s statements than in the previous year or two.

For possible success of any revived political negotiations, both sides need to de-link politics from the processes on hand. It should be exclusively based on substantive issues of power-devolution. Any other issue, including de-militarisation and de-colonisation should be handled outside of the said negotiations, maybe in and through Parliament, the nation’s human rights and judicial mechanisms.

The Government too may want to be cautious in approaching the negotiations, both in politico-electoral and State-structured administrative terms. It does not mean that it has to eternally listen to dooms-day predictions from within. It has to display an element of cautious optimism while approaching and dealing with the TNA and the larger Tamil population in the country. In doing so, the Government should have full realisation on what it entails in terms of its inherent responsibility to secure the nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity on the one hand, and protect the law-abiding sections of the nation’s population, ethnicity, language and religion, no bar.

In all these and more, the Government cannot shift the responsibility to the party of the other part, and blame the Tamils or the rest, as it had happened during the hay days of the LTTE. What applied then to the LTTE also applied to the militant form of JVP. Today, the Sri Lankan armed forces are way ahead of the ceremonial army that the nation had at the turn of the ‘first JVP insurgency’. At the time, the Government of the day did not wake up to the militant possibilities of the future. The nation paid a heavy price on either side of the ethnic divide, one longer and costlier than the other.

As the dictum goes, no army wants its men killed in battles, not certainly in battles with its own people. This is not to context the valour and dedication of the men in uniform, more so in contemporary Sri Lanka, where they have proved their worth. They are there to ensure peace, restore permanent peace, where it has been lost particularly to asymmetrical warfare of terrorist, non-State actor kind.

The Government cannot continue to crow about victory over terrorism for too long without someone in the sidelines singing a jarring note, hurting sentiments all-round. That’s not what socio-political reconciliation is all about, either. Instead, it is about a successful post-war Government negotiating with courage and conviction, confidence and self-assurance. It has once made it, and it can always make it, should have been its approach and attitude. It should be so, at least now, full five years after the event.

There is a more serious issue germane to a negotiated settlement. The TNA has not understood or acknowledged the political reality that by seeking to be thesole representative and hence sole negotiatorof the Tamil people, the party has ended up sowing seeds of suspicion in the minds of the larger Sinhala population across much of the rest of the country. It’s the slogan and symbol that the LTTE had arrogated to the self, through crude and cruel elimination of every other representative of the very same Tamil people until the latter got habituated to falling in line.

The Northern Provincial Council polls and results might have lent certain justification to the TNA’s claims. Prior to that in the parliamentary polls of March 2010, the party got just over half the total number of votes that Sarath Fonseka got with TNA support only months earlier. There are those in the TNA who now argue that the TNA support ensured Fonseka lost, and incumbent President Rajapaksa won. Five years earlier, the LTTE ensured poll-boycott by Tamils, and Candidate Rajapaksa won.

The Tamil leadership, political and social, need to acknowledge their inability to assess the national voter-mood and strategise for their people in politics and elections. Their isolationist approach to national politics has not helped either the leadership or the community. Nor would their belief that one day they could return to the centre-stage of national politics, a la 1977, when TULF became the main Opposition party in Parliament. That was an aberration and owed to extraneous reasons over which the Tamils had no say or clue.

(The writer is Director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, the multi-disciplinary Indian public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi.)