At a time when there is hope of the government and the LTTE agreeing to resume the stalled peace talks, an argument is being peddled that Mahinda Rajapakse has become President with the votes of the majority community only and as such his mandate is without endorsement by the minorities. It may be difficult to subscribe to that contention coloured by political and communal prejudices. If one were to accede to it for whatever reason, then it would lead to a far more complicated question of representation in politics as well as the peace process.

UNP Presidential Candidate Ranil Wickremesinghe failed to get a mandate from the southern electorate and it is argued that had the Tamils been allowed to exercise their franchise in the Wanni, he would have won, though there is no way of proving that an overwhelming majority of the voters trapped in those areas would have voted for him. A logical conclusion would therefore be that if he had won, he would have won with the votes of the minorities. And in such a situation, his mandate would have been without endorsement by the majority, which constitutes over seventy per cent of the population.

There is another would-have-been situation: More than 1.5 million Sri Lankan migrant workers were without voting rights. As much as the Tamil civilians were barred from voting due to an LTTE-instigated polls boycott, those men and women toiling abroad to keep the national economy ticking have been deprived of their fundamental right to elect their leader due to the callous disregard of politicians and bureaucrats, who didn't devise a mechanism to enable them to vote.

The real issue however is none of the above. Mahinda and Ranil are two leaders commanding popular support and one's victory and the other's defeat at the recently concluded polls were determined by the people democratically. One candidate lost because both of them couldn't win at the same time. This can never be said of the LTTE or its leader who hasn't faced any electoral exercise in his life or been at least an Urban Councillor. (Instead, he started his terror campaign by killing a Mayor!) The LTTE has become what it is today through sheer terror at the expense of the democratic rights of the people under its jackboot.

Strangely, those who are quarrelling over the mandates of democratic leaders turn a blind eye to the LTTE, which has appointed itself not just a representative but the sole representative of the Tamils and is blocking Muslim representation in the peace process. If the LTTE is acceptable to the world as the representative of the Tamils, sole or otherwise, then Saddam Hussein's Baath party and Taliban must also be recognized as representatives of the Iraqis and the Afghans respectively. For, the modus operandi of all three of them is the same - terror. Sauce for the goose must be the sauce for the gander as well.

To comply with the LTTE demands and exclude others from the peace process is to give in to terror and spurn democracy - the very antithesis of the policy of the Co-Chairs of Sri Lanka's peace process towards Iraq and Afghanistan and even Uganda, where the International Criminal Court has issued warrants for the arrest of the leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The European Union polls observers in their report on the 2004 parliamentary elections have called the situation in the LTTE-controlled areas 'antithesis of democracy.' But those donors have put the Sri Lanka government in a strait-jacket and are pressuring it to negotiate with the very destroyers of democracy and show some progress to qualify for aid.

The danger of allowing the LTTE to act as the sole representative by dominating the peace process and excluding others that no solution could be evolved, unless it is endorsed by the LTTE, however much it may be acceptable to the democratic others; the vast majority of Tamils, the Muslims and the Sinhalese. The LTTE must be denied such veto power as it is tantamount to throttling democracy. Therefore, the goal of future negotiations mustn't be to find a solution to appease the LTTE but to solve the problem proper by identifying the causative factors and eliminating them once and for all. Else, it would be like treating a patient by administering to him the drugs prescribed by a thug who brings him to hospital claiming to be the guardian and holds the doctor at gun point!