By H. L. D. Mahindapala
M. Sivasithamparam, the doyen of Jaffna Tamil politics, has returned, after a three-year absence from Sri Lanka, carrying with him the political baggage of his past. As a politician who has lived through the twists and turns of Jaffna-centric politics he should be in a position, even at this late stage, to give new directions to the violence that came screaming out of the bloody womb of Jaffna. So can his return help to hasten the peace process or will it postpone the dawn of peace beyond his life time?

He has returned to an elevated position which makes him the ‘sole national list representative of the Tamil parties’. This unofficial ranking, conferred on him by the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), confirms once again that birds of a feather cannot help but flock together. But, as everyone knows, this ranking is far inferior to the unchallenged position of the ‘sole representative of the Tamils’. That is reserved for Velupillai Prabhakaran who will, no doubt, eliminate anyone who tries to unseat him from that position. Sivasithamparam knows this more than anyone else because he has seen the Tamil rivals aspiring to that position either gunned down or blasted to bits by the ‘sole representative of the Tamils’.

What thoughts went through his mind when he witnessed the cold-blooded murder of his veteran Tamil colleague Appapillai Amirthalingam who was sipping tea and eating biscuits with him one afternoon in 1990 have not been revealed. But those bullets spoke louder than words: it told Sivasithamparam and his vellahla mob that they can kiss good-bye - at least as long as Prabhakaran is alive — to their domination of Jaffna politics.

After escaping death at the hands of agents of ‘the sole representative of the Tamils’ one would expect that such a nightmarish experience would endear him to non-violent politics. At least, the permanent scars in his body and mind, left by the bullets of the ‘sole representative’, should tilt him towards ‘moderate politics’. But Sivasithamparam has returned to openly embrace Prabhakaran ö the man who passed death sentence on him.

This marks not only the abandonment of moderate parliamentary politics but also the acceptance of the violence of Jaffna-centric extremism. He has returned to the TNA which has declared that Prabhakaran is their ‘sole representative’ and any negotiations must be through him. Some sections of the TNA have even apologized for opposing his violent politics. This deliberate move to close ranks with Tamil violence (Prabhakaran is the epitome of it) is in keeping with the historical trend of Jaffna-centric politics succumbing to ethnic extremism. Joining Prabhakaran mocks their claim to be ‘moderates’.

All this means that from now on Parliament will be used by Sivasithamparam and TNA not to strengthen democratic politics but to cover-up and justify the use of Jaffna-centric violence aimed at establishing a mono-ethnic enclave. By embracing Prabhakaran they have publicly signed up to serve in the voluntary regiment of monomaniacs fixated on the gun and not to redeem their people through moderate or democratic politics.

This shift from the so-called ‘moderate’ politics to violent Prabhakaranism is not alien to the political culture of Jaffna. Its casteist violence goes back to centuries of vellahla hegemony. The vellahlas ruled Jaffna with the brutal force of institutionalized oppression of their fellow-Tamils. Hindu casteist violence has been the lashing whip that kept the low-castes in total submission to the vellahlas. They were reduced to miserable slaves, says H. W. Tambiah. For a brief moment the idealistic youth of Jaffna flirted with Gandhism in the early thirties. But the vellahlas scrubbed out any movement that would undermine their authority. They snubbed and, in devious ways, snuffed out the seminal Gandhian movement which was only a modest attempt to give some dignity to their own ‘minorities’ — the euphemism used by Sivasithamparam and his vellahla gurus to describe their oppressed low castes.

First Guru

Sivasithamparam’s first guru, Ponnambalam, and his second guru Chelvanayakam refused to confront the horrors of vellahla casteism and reform Jaffna society on humane or liberal principles. When the Jaffna Tamils cried from rooftops that they were being oppressed by the Sinhala majority a cry that was twisted and exaggerated to promote their separatist politics - they did not tell the world that they had the worst record of oppressing their own people in the most inhuman ways unknown to any other community in Sri Lanka. Other than passing bombastic resolutions on this issue the vellahla leaders dominating Jaffna politics did not take any meaningful steps to eradicate the most inhuman evil of Sri Lankan society.

When they asked for equality they did not mean equality for all the people of Jaffna. No! They meant that the vellahlas were more equal than all the other communities put together and that assumed higher status should be granted to them, irrespective of the cost to the rest of the nation. When they demanded rights and power-sharing they meant that the feudal and colonial rights and powers of the vellahlas should be guaranteed to them even if the seas rise and wipe out the peninsula from the face of the earth.

A common tendency of the Jaffna Tamil is their incurable addiction to political myths. For instance, they believe that the vellahla casteist ‘purity’ elevates them above the low-castes of Jaffna and/or that their intellectual ‘superiority’ places them a cut or two above the rest of humanity in the island. Sivasithamparam’s guru, Ponnambalam, symbolized this vellahla arrogance. He had no compunction in treating his own people with utter contempt. Though the fathers of Tamil extremism are dead their epigones carry on the old traditions with a vengeance. Sivasithamparam inherited this dehumanizing political culture and stands today as the last surviving figure of the preceding generations that bred Tamil extremism. And, oblivious to the fact that he is the ‘sole representative’ of a decadent culture, he blithely walks down the path of Tamil extremism dressed in the garb of a non-violent moderate.

The remarkable feature of his career is that it runs parallel with the accelerated trajectory of Tamil extremism. It began with Ponnambalam and now is set to end with Prabhakaran, the last of his political gurus. His first political mentor, G. G. Ponnambalam, (Snr), who, though regarded as a ‘moderate’ in hindsight, was an extremist in the context of the politics of the forties. He launched the ‘50-50’ cry which was rejected by the Soulbury Commissioners preparing the ground for decolonizing Sri Lanka..

Moderate

Sivasithamparam has all the appearances of a ‘moderate’ with his soft voice and gentle mannerisms. But that is very deceptive. It hides the successive stages of his politics that moved inexorably towards violence. Step by step, he moved from (1) the ‘50-50’ politics of Ponnambalam to (2) Chelvanayakam’s Tamil State Party and then finally (3) to Prabhakaran’s politics of violence. He has played a leading role in all three movements advancing towards Tamil extremism. No other group of extremists has managed so successfully to market their image as ‘moderates’.

His career illustrates the internal dynamics of Jaffna-centric politics which had no space for moderates. The fortunes of peninsular politicians depended on traveling with the Tamil extremism of the day. Both the ballot in electoral politics and the bullet in the post-Vaddukoddai Resolution forced the Tamil leadership to gallop from ‘50-50’ to the Tamil State Party of Chelvanayakam (long before Bandaranaike emerged with assertive Sinhala nationalism in 1956) and then to the Vaddukoddai Resolution (1976) which declared war on the Sinhala people, whilst proclaiming to the world that they were non-violent moderates.

If Sivasithamparam stood steadfastly and honestly by the principles he professed he should be leading a movement in Jaffna to reinforce non-violent politics that would return the war-weary peninsula to peace and stability. But he knows that those who marched for peace in Jaffna (e.g. the Japanese monk) would have a very short span of life. Only by embracing the violence of Prabhakaran can he survive and be the leader of the TNA.

He survived in the fifties by following Ponnambalam. After the death of Ponnambalam, he survived by following the extremism of Chelvanayakam’s Tamil State Party launched on December 18, 1949, long before ‘Bandaranaike’s ‘1956’. And now he survives by embracing Prabhakaranism, the most brutal form of violence unleashed by Jaffna-centric politics. Sivasithamparam had a hand in each of these three escalating stages that ended in the violent extremism of Prabhakaran. Each stage of this extremism roused ethnic tensions and eventually destroyed the harmonious inter-ethnic relations.

Ethnic politics of Jaffna

He is the archetypal representative of everything that went wrong in the ethnic politics of Jaffna. The stoking of Tamil extremism in the Jaffna electorate and the subsequent surrender to the ethnic forces whipped up by rival Tamil leaders, the dragging of Jaffna away from a multi-cultural democracy by escalating demands, the refusal to cooperate or compromise with other communities like the way the Muslims and the Indian Tamils did with the majority Sinhalese, worshipping the cult of Tamil violence, (be it Veerappan or Prabhakaran), digging their own graves and watching their own people being sacrificed at the altar of their extremist politics are some of the common characteristics that he shared with the vellahla leaders of Jaffna.

When the opportunities were there for accommodation they took whatever they could grab and then proceeded to increase ethnic tensions by demanding more and more. Their definition of Sinhala chauvinism amounts to nothing more than the refusal to give into each and every demand that disrupted the ethnic harmony and balance. In short, they deliberately denied and distorted the actual possibilities there were to ‘gain some rights, if not all of what we (Tamils) expected, through the method of cooperation’ - S. M. Rasamanickam, President of the Tamil State Party in his presidential address to the annual convention of 1969 (quoted by Prof. A. J. Wilson in his biography of his father-in-law, S. J. V. Chelvanayakam - p. 111).

Wilson describes the Dudley Senanayake - Chelvanayakam’s national government (1965 - 1970) as ‘the golden years of Sinhala-Tamil reconciliation’. Not giving into their extremist demands is categorized by them as ‘betrayals’. It was this cry of ‘betrayals’ that was used to stir up ethnic hate in the Jaffna electorate and paint the Sinhala-Buddhists as the bogeymen who had betrayed their interests. Rival politicians branded each other as ‘collaborationists’ if they cooperated with the centre. Sivasithamparam knows this only too well because his first guru, Ponnambalam was accused of being a ‘collaborationist’ by his second guru, Chelvanayakam.

The tragedy is that Sivasithamparam has returned to pursue the venomous politics of his predecessors. His commitment to violent and intransigent extremism was stated openly when he addressed the first press conference after he returned. In it he made two major political demands which are listed below:

The first was reported by the Indo-Asian News Service (Christine Jayasinghe. Jan. 7). : "It is absolutely essential that the ban is lifted for talks to be successful. Which militant group will want to talk with a gun held at its head?" asked M. Sivasithambaram, TULF president.

The second point was reported by Tamil Net (January 05, 2002 18:43 GMT): "We have clearly told the United National Party (UNP) and the People’s Alliance (PA) that no political solution could be found to the Tamil national question within a unitary form of government", said Mr. M. Sivasithambaram, President of the Tamil United Liberation Front and the Tamil National Alliance national list parliamentarian at a press conference held Saturday in Colombo.

Principal demands

The two principal demands — for the moment — are: 1) lifting the ban on the LTTE and 2) dismantling the unitary state for the Tamil separatists to grab a greater share of constitutional and territorial powers. (Don’t worry, there’s more to come from him and his cohorts) The LTTE, however, is playing a more subtle game. It is not demanding that the ban be lifted. Instead, it has adopted a devious route to enter Indian through the backdoor. Like the proverbial camel in the Arab’s tent, the LTTE first plans to put the heads of Anton Balasingham and his wife, Adele Balasingham, inside Chennai or Bangalore, knowing that the tail could slip easily later. This is supposed to facilitate Balasingham’s helicopter rides to the Vanni. In reality, what the LTTE asking is an easy ride into India which, if granted, would be a de facto ‘leading perhaps to a de jure’ lifting of the ban.

In one stroke, Prabhakaran aims to neutralize - if not win over - India and also upstage Ranil Wickremesinghe who has jumped ahead of him in wooing India. The pretext for requesting Indian bases to conduct negotiations is the health of diabetic Balasingham who, presumably, would be the chief negotiator. But isn’t the more important question to ask whether this would affect the health of India and Sri Lanka? In any case, what’s the difficulty in Balasingham living in the Wanni, close to Sri Lanka’s Milosevic, now that the ban on all medical supplies has been lifted? In fact, if asked, Dr. Jayalath Jayawardene would be only too happy to attend to him in person. All expenses too could be written off as an item in the budget allocated for the rehabilitation of those running out places to live in the civilized parts of world. So what’s the problem?

Equally, significant is Sivasithamparam’s demand that the unitary state be dismantled to make way for ‘the Tamil nation’. Mark you, Devenesan Nesiah (Harvard), in his latest research published by MARGA, says that there is no hard evidence for this mythical Tamil nation. But that doesn’t deter the mythomaniacs promoting the fictitious notion of a ‘Tamil nation’.

Sivasithamparam and Prabhakaran both need these myths to perpetuate their separatist and violent politics. Without these myths they cannot sustain their extremist intransigence. Myths are the common bonds that tie and hold together a gun-toting, school drop-out like Prabhakaran and an educated lawyer like Sivasithamparam. In repeating the myths and making demands based on the myths Sivasithamparam is acting as the hired ventriloquist for Prabhakaran.

His credibility is at greater risk when he has one foot in parliament to pose as a moderate and simultaneously keeps the other foot in Prabhakaran’s camp to pursue politics of violence. If he is asked to make a choice between the two what will he do? Silly question to ask, no? He has already made his choice. He has voted with his feet to be with Prabhakaran which means he is for violence which means that peace is as far away as it ever was. At a time when the nation is gripped with an overestimated optimism - somewhat similar to the time when Jaffna women wore ‘Chandrika bangles’ when she came into power in 1994 - the return of Sivasithamparam sends some pessimistic vibrations. The return of Sivasithamparam embracing Prabhakaran lock (of discharging gun powder), stock (of ammunition) and barrel (of gun) does not augur well for peace.

Paradoxically, he has returned to fall at the feet of Prabhakaran when Chennai is up in arms against Prabhakaran. Even the DMK president M Karunanidhi is distancing himself from Prabhakaran. Challenging the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister O. Pannerselvam to prove his charge that the DMK government had given "tacit support" to the LTTE in the past, Karunanidhi said: "We withdrew our support to the LTTE, after it indulged in killing Sri Lankan Tamil leaders like A. Padmanabha and A. Amirthalingam. We never supported the LTTE’s violent activities on Indian soil," he said. (Chennaionline News Service - January 10).

The revulsion of the international community (and this includes their Tamil bretheren in Chennai) against the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Prabhakaran is not reflected in the words or deeds of Sivasithamparam, one of the so-called Gandhians of Jaffna. Why? Why is it that the conscience of Karunanidhi, for instance, a close ally of the LTTE, has forced him to turn against Prabhakaran for killing Amirthalingam while the conscience of Sivasithamparam, who saw him gunned down, leads him to swear allegiance to the assassins of his leader?

Should we be surprised? Isn’t this turning of the blind eye to inhuman horrors the innate tendency of those brought up in the violent Tamil political culture? Hasn’t this Tamil culture relied on terror to retain the rule of the vellahlas down the ages in Jaffna? A political culture that has sunk to such lower depths of cruelty could hardly survive a decade in the South. But in the North inhuman cruelty of the Tamils against the Tamils has become a way of life. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear Sivasithamparam glorifying the Frankenstein of Sri Lankan politics.

So what chances has peace? The history of peace-making warns us not to expect a cessation of hostilities in one single stroke. The road ahead is blocked by the likes of Sivasithamparam and Prabhakaran. Going by their past performances, there will be no end to their demands. Peace cannot be gained by appeasing. But it can be achieved by compromising.

And compromise depends on give and take. Sivasithamparam’s mouthing of Prabhakaran’s demands informs us in advance that it is going to be only ‘take’ and no ‘give’. This confirms Radhika Coomaraswamy’s conclusion that the path to peace is blocked by the intransigence of the Jaffna Tamil leadership. (Norwegians, please take note!). It has been so in the past and the signs are that it will be so in the foreseeable future too.