{"id":18285,"date":"2013-03-14T20:52:32","date_gmt":"2013-03-15T00:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=18285"},"modified":"2013-03-14T22:22:54","modified_gmt":"2013-03-15T02:22:54","slug":"why-tamils-and-tamil-national-alliance-are-bogged-down-in-deep-pothole-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=18285","title":{"rendered":"Why Tamils and Tamil National Alliance are Bogged Down in Deep Pothole Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

By<\/p>\n

Vishwaguptha<\/strong><\/p>\n

“An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.” \u2013 Theodor Adorno
\n <\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

G.G.Ponnambalam & S.J.V.Chelvanayagam<\/p><\/div>\n

T<\/strong>he Tamil National Alliance (TNA), led by R. Sampanthan and his Party, Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), do not seem to realize the gravity of serious politics, essential features of which include, among others, hard bargaining, postures one should adopt when confronted with an adversary who is backed by an overwhelming majority of people, the fine art of negotiating from a position of weakness, how not to antagonize the majority by being dogged and inflexible and the whole enchilada of political survival in harsh and unsympathetic conditions.<\/p>\n

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R. Sampanthan<\/p><\/div>\n

The Party that began its turbulent journey 64 long years ago and whose origins and birth belonged to a totally bygone era that was dominated by a totally different class of politicians and statesmen, has carved out an image of an ‘elitist and educated clan’ representing an unsuspecting people. And the people too had been reposing their unqualified faith and confidence in a successive set of leaders, who first established their political party in the early 1940s as the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC).
\n
\nBrothers Ponnambalam<\/strong><\/p>\n

However, prior to the formal creation of the ACTC by its founder, the charismatic G.G. Ponnambalam, the Independence struggle launched by the then Ceylon National Congress had two great friends who hailed from the North \u2013 the Ponnambalam brothers, Ramanathan and Arunachalam, who were both knighted by the British for their exemplary service to the country of their birth. The Ceylon National Congress was in fact more the brainchild of the younger Ponnambalam Arunachalam than that of any other Sinhalese leader at the time.<\/p>\n

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A. Amirthalingam<\/p><\/div>\n

While the younger brother got involved in national politics after he retired from the prestigious post of Registrar General (in fact, Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam was the first Ceylonese Civil Servant) in 1918 and until he left the Congress in 1923, the elder brother Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan made a name for himself, especially among the Sinhalese elites and in the country in general, when he took up the case of those Sinhalese leaders, who were imprisoned after the infamous ‘Muslim Riots’ in 1915. The single-minded dedication that Ramanathan exhibited during this period earned him much praise and admiration of the majority Sinhalese people, apart from the elites of Colombo.<\/p>\n

Both brothers were friends of the leaders of the Congress, the Senanayakes (FR and DS), Sir D.B. Jayatilleke, Sir James Peiris, E.J. Samarawickrama and the rest. The identification with non-communal issues at the time and rendering their mite to the national cause of Independence paid rich dividends and the Ponnambalam brothers are still being recognized and accepted by a great majority of Sinhalese Buddhists, not excluding the common masses. Their being let down later by the James Peiris-Samarakkody duo as well as by the rest of the Sinhalese leadership of the Congress is recorded history. Professor K.M. de Silva in History of Sri Lanka addresses this question quite lucidly and with authority.<\/p>\n

Successive leadership<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Soon after the new Legislative Council met,” Professor de Silva writes (page 487-A History of Sri Lanka): “influential Tamils began to campaign for the restoration of the proportion of Tamil to Sinhalese representation that had existed before 1920. It was against the background of this demand that a written undertaking given in December 1918 by James Peiris and E.J. Samarawickrama, in their respective capacities as presidents of the Ceylon National Association and the Ceylon Reform League, regarding the creation of a special seat for the Tamils in the Western Province, was revived. <\/p>\n

Surprisingly, Peiris and Samarawickrama asserted that their pledge involved no precise commitment to this peculiar concession but was merely an agreement to accept any scheme which the Jaffna Association may put forward so long as, it was not inconsistent with the various principles contained in the resolutions and the most important of which was that of territorial representation,” Professor de Silva continues: “In a few months, this seemingly trivial issue assumed the proportions of a major controversy both within the Congress and without. Manning (the British Governor at the time), in fact had little to do but watch the ‘constitutionalist’ leadership shuffling from one costly blunder to another in coping with the problem. The d\u00e9nouement \u2013 Arunachalam’s departure from the Congress \u2013 was as shattering in its impact on that organization as it was unexpected.”<\/p>\n

With the departure of the two Ponnambalam brothers from the arena of politics, successive leaders of the Ceylonese Tamil community, starting from G.G. Ponnambalam, Chelvanayagam, Amirthalingam and Prabhakaran to Sampanthan have increasingly alienated themselves from the mainstream and got entrenched in the communal politics of the day. This resulted in them being treated as exclusively ‘communal’ politicians not only by the Sinhalese leaders, but more significantly by the larger majority of the Sinhalese Buddhist population in the country.<\/p>\n

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Saumyamoorthi Thondaman<\/p><\/div>\n

This alienation of the Tamil leadership from the common masses, whether Sinhalese, Tamil or Muslim, occurred mainly due to the fact that these successive leaders of the Tamil community chose to talk and agitate about and advance exclusively the cause of the Tamils and related socio-political issues. The burning issues of the national agenda that affect the entire population irrespective of colour, creed, caste and faith seem to evade the Tamil leadership.<\/p>\n

These nationally important issues affect the Tamils in the North of the Island as much as they bear an impact on the Sinhalese, Muslims and Burghers residing in all corners of the country. So the ‘communal cocoon’ into which the Tamil leaders retreated since the departure of their foremost leaders of esteem, the Ponnambalam brothers and the Coomaraswamys, may have served as a self-evading sense of security, but it has imprisoned them and consumed and ultimately destroyed the very spirit that captured the imagination of a nation in the early decade or two in the 20th century.<\/p>\n

Emergence of militancy<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a result, this self-evasive and self-imposed isolationism has been more responsible for the ostensible attitude of communalism and racialism attributed to all Tamil leaders since the demise of the Ponnambalam brothers. Entrapped in this self-imposed isolationism, the Tamil leaders from 1940s onwards up to this very day, have become increasingly cocooned in ‘communal’ politics; their demands and struggles have revolved round these parochial issues \u2013 though the issue of the aggrieved Tamils was never paid serious heed to by the Sinhalese leaders either \u2013 resulting in the majority of the Sinhalese people suspecting their motives and challenging their methods.<\/p>\n

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A. Jeyaratnam Wilson<\/p><\/div>\n

A. Jeyaratnam Wilson in his book, The Break-Up of Sri Lanka makes an attempt to portray the emergence of militancy in the Tamil ‘struggle’ and the eventual birth of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and Prabhakaran as a logical step on the sequence of events and episodes that developed as a result of the non-conceding postures adopted by the successive Sinhalese leaders, from D.S. Senanayake to J.R. Jayewardene. He, however, forgets to mention that the Tamil leadership barring the Ponnambalam brothers never entered the mainstream politics of Sri Lanka in a way the majority Sinhalese could relate to or directly identify with. The issues that cropped up during the last four to five decades did not relate to the ethnic question alone; on the contrary a great many issues in fact consisted of purely non-communal ones and they were mostly non-social too. The majority of our people time and time again, prior to 1983, have rallied round leaders who held a more promising economic destiny for them than those who offered any other socio-ethnic concessions<\/p>\n

The Break-Up of Sri Lanka<\/strong><\/p>\n

In such a context, Wilson’s The Break-Up of Sri Lanka has some astonishing writings. In Page 223, Wilson writes thus: “Thus the concept of Ceylon being the birthright of the Sinhalese Buddhists has ended less than forty years after the Island obtained its Independence from Britain in 1948. The argument of centuries of foreign oppression of the Sinhalese Buddhists \u2013 an exaggeration because the whole island was under British occupation only from 1815 to 1948, with the Portuguese and the Dutch previously occupying parts of the maritime districts only \u2013 and that the Tamils received favoured treatment during Britain’s rule cannot be the true reason for the present repression of the Tamil people.”<\/p>\n

Written and finished long before the military defeat of the LTTE, Wilson’s book tends to make some glaring misreads and completely erroneous predictions. Wilson’s (mis)judgments are fundamentally flawed with regard to the inherent stamina of the militants of the Tamil cause and in the determination of the Sinhalese security forces. But Wilson has no answer to the most fundamental question that I raised at the very outset of this column: “When did the Tamil leadership assume responsibility and burden for the entire Sri Lankan nation?”<\/p>\n

Today’s TNA is bogged deep down in this pothole; so long as their agitations, their cries and protests and their demands do not go beyond the boundaries of race and their own community, they will be perceived by the majority of Sinhalese Buddhists \u2013 aggravated by their parochial leaders \u2013 as an ethnic minority, steeped in racial limbo bordering on ‘apartheid’ politics.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC), the other Tamil party that has been playing a significant role in forming governments and originally led by the late Saumyamoorthi Thondaman, has become exclusively a Trade Union. COURTESY:CEYLON TODAY<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Vishwaguptha “An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.” \u2013 Theodor Adorno The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), led by R. Sampanthan and his Party, Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), do not seem to realize the gravity of serious politics, …<\/p>\n

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