Most of the Tamil educated people and I suppose all the Tamil parties want a federal state as a solution to the so called ethnic problem. With the Muslims it is not the case and there are some Muslim parties that do not oppose a unitary state. The Muslim and Tamil nationalisms in Sri Lanka are led by the political parties unlike Sinhala nationalism which is led by people. The political parties follow Sinhala nationalism, whatever the party may be. Those parties such as the Marxist parties which follow a certain dogma in the name of a so called science, and did not win a single seat in Parliament, (they have only MPs appointed on the national list) neither follow the Sinhala people nor are followed by the Sinhala people. In fact, their position with respect to the Tamil people is not different from that with respect to the Sinhala people. It is known that the Tamil and other minority educated people are in the process of collecting signatures for a letter to be sent to the President requesting him to drop the word unitary. Though they are still collecting signatures they have thought it fit to release (or leak) the document to the press, perhaps due to the urgency of the matter.

What I find intriguing is the inclusion of some Marxists among the so called minority intellectuals. Could a Marxist consider himself or herself to be a minority community member? What would happen if the Sinhala intellectuals too begin to write letters to the President requesting him not to drop the word unitary? One can be certain that there would not be any Marxist on a list of such signatories as they would not consider themselves to be members of the majority community. It appears that in Sri Lanka Marxists can be members of minority communities but not of the majority community. The Marxists can expect to be praised by the Tamil educated people who together with the Marxists sign letters to the President on the solutions to the so called ethnic problem.

Now why do the Tamil parties and some Tamil educated people insist on a Federal state, while some other Tamil elite want at least to drop the word unitary? What is so immoral with the word unitary? Do they object to the word unitary simply because the terrorist leader Prabhakaran, who is after all their creation, would not accept it? If that is the case, then it cannot be a good reason as it implies that they would agree only to a solution that is acceptable to Prabhakaran. At present Prabhakaran wants Eelam and that is a demand that the Sinhala people would never yield to, especially after so many victories by the armed forces in the recent past.

The Tamil parties and the Tamil educated people cannot be thinking of the Tamil people also, when they reject unitary, as the Tamils in general follow the Tamil parties and the elite when it comes to nationalism in this country. In this country neither the Tamils nor the Muslims have lived long enough to gain the consciousness of being belonging to a race or nation on their own, and they always follow the leaders of Tamil/Muslim political parties, unlike in the case of Sinhala people who have lived for more than two thousand years and created a unique culture in the country, that is very clearly distinguishable from any other culture in the world.

The Tamils and the Muslims have not lived long enough in this country to evolve their own culture independent of any other culture in the world, and they unlike the Sinhalas look up to their leaders when it comes to nationality. Thus the Tamil political party leaders and the Tamil elite are in a position to convince the ordinary Tamil that unitary is the best form of government, if they wish to do so. This is a luxury that the Sinhala leaders do not enjoy as the king Pandukabhaya had made use of that benefit thousands years ago.

However, it is the Tamil elite who are responsible to the state of affairs. Though there would have been a clamour for a federal state by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike soon after his arrival from Oxford, not knowing the history of the country, and on the other side of the coin canvassing to amalgamate with India by J. R. Jayawardene and others, it was S. J. V. Chelvanayakam and the so called Federal Party that made federalism a political ideal in order to have a separate country and state for the Tamils led by the Jaffna Vellalas. They wanted a separate state because unlike the Ponnambalam brothers and G. G. Ponnambalam, Chelvanayakam realised that it was impossible to reduce a majority to a minority by artificial means. Thus instead of agitating with the connivance of the British governors for fifty fifty at the centre he demanded a federal state as a stepping stone for an Eelam. His strategy of little now more later is revealed even in the name of the party which meant federal in English but separate state in Tamil.

Except perhaps Belgium, all the other federal states have been formed as unions of sovereign states, and in Sri Lanka we have had eksesath rajya, at least from the time of King Devanampiya Tissa except for a few years when the Epas and Mapas and others who ruled but not reigned in the name of the king became powerful and established "independent" states. Even then it was the king at the Capital who was considered as the king of the country or Sinhale. This is quite evident from the records of the Portuguese historians such as Quaros who referred to the king at Kotte as the emperor. Quaros who did not know anything on the eksesath rajya had to be contended with the concepts he knew from his limited European experience to observe the state in Sinhale. He knew of emperors and kings only, and thus referred to the king in Kotte who was the king of Sinhale as the emperor and referred to the others in Seethavaka, Raigama and Jaffna as kings. There was only one king of Sinhale and the others were regional kings who had become powerful due to the weakness of the Kotte king. These regional kings were not only called kings of Sinhale, but as evident from historical records the Arya Chakravarthi king of Jaffna had to take permission from the king of Sinhale who was then at Gampola to use the title of king.

Even when Sinhale had a weak king the so called regional kings who should have been only Epas and Mapas under normal circumstances, were subordinate to the king of Sinhale. In order to clarify the concept of eksesath rajya, we could ask what would have happened to Sinhale if Portuguese did not arrive in the first decade of the sixteenth century. A "scholar" groomed up in the western historical tradition would quote E. H. Carr or some other western historian and proclaim proudly that it is not scholarly to ask what would have happened in history as there is no way of observing "events that did not take place". However, it is not a bad idea to have "thought observations" in History and Social Sciences following "thought experiments" in western Physics, used heavily by Einstein in order to formulate concepts and theories. However, I know that it may not be a "scholarly" idea for some engineers turned sociologists who managed to obtain third class degrees in both fields, and who know only the jargon and repeat others’ ideas as if they were theirs wrapped in the jargon of Sociology, and a heap of other social scientists.

While Bhuvanekabahu was the king of Kotte there were Mayadunne and Raigam Bandara in Seethavaka and Raigama respectively with the Arya Chakravarthi in Jaffna. None of these kings were called kings of Sinhale. The capital of Sinhale was in Kotte and not in Seethavaka, Raigama or Jaffna. This was recorded by Quaros as the emperor of Sinhale (the Sinhale never had emperors) being at Kotte. In the history of Sinhale it was the capital or where the king of Sinhale was, that was shifted from time to time. We refer to the shift of the capital from Anuradhapura to Polonnaruwa, and then to various other places including Kotte but never to Seethavaka or Raigama.