The All Party Representative Committee (APRC) interim report has engendered a mixed reaction. Those who are striving to create a federal state are frustrated while the government has readily accepted it and undertaken to initiate action to set up an interim Provincial Council for the North. Minister Prof. Tissa Vitatarana is in an unenviable position. Earlier on, he gave some hope to the federalist camp but this time round he has granted President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s wish. He has cut a very pathetic figure in the process as is the fate of all academics who make the blunder of plunging into the cesspit of politics. His action reminds us of a ruse that some parents who wanted to give an unattractive elder daughter in marriage resorted to in the olden days. When a prospective bridegroom paid them a visit, they showed him their attractive younger daughter. The poor man would leave agreeing to marriage only to get the shock of his life on the day of his dream wedding. The fate of the matchmaker concerned in such a situation goes without saying. Prof. Vitarana who tried to arrange the federal marriage is in a similar predicament. He is up a gum tree!

The UNP has pooh-poohed the interim report as a farce and lashed out at the government for not presenting a credible power sharing arrangement. Ironically, wasn’t it the UNP which introduced the Provincial Council system at the behest of India? It also shot down President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s Regional Council Package, which went beyond the Provincial Councils. The JVP is in high dudgeon. It has vowed to campaign against the APRC package until it is withdrawn.

Those who pinned hopes on the APRC in a bid to get federalism or something coterminous with it have no one to blame but themselves. As Sri Lanka’s civil society is to the international community, so is the APRC to President Rajapaksa. He can sway it the way foreign envoys manipulate the peace lobby. How can the poor professor stand up to the mighty President?

The real obstacle to federalism is neither President Rajapaksa, nor the JVP nor the JHU nor the APRC. It is the Indo-Lanka Accord, which contains the maximum devolution that India can permit in this country without jeopardising its own interests. In his recent heroes’ day speech, Prabhakaran compounded India’s fear of his struggle having a spill over effect on its soil by making a reference to 80 million stateless Tamils. A fully fledged federal unit in the North and East of Sri Lanka, as we have pointed out earlier, is a frightening proposition for India, given the latent separatism in Tamil Nadu.

The Indo-Lanka Accord is far from dead. It is the basis on which the Provincial Councils have been set up. Due to the LTTE’s intransigence and the attendant violence which torpedoed the North-East PC, the efficacy of the Indian remedy couldn’t be fully tested. India was determined to make it work and took on the LTTE militarily for that purpose. Before it achieved that objective, the late President Premadasa sent the IPKF away. Today, President Rajapaksa is doing exactly what India did in the late 1980s. He is using military force to neutralise the LTTE with a view to making the 13th Amendment work. SLFP General Secretary and Minister Maithripala Sirisena has said the Northern PC will be given powers as regards the police, land and the judiciary.

The arbitrary retention by all governments of those powers and functions is also one reason why the PC s have failed to be effective. Southern Province Chief Minister Shan Wijelal de Silva has recently berated successive governments for robbing the PCs of their powers and functions. "How can you expect the people of the North and the East to have their faith in PCs?" he is reported to have asked at a public function in Galle. So, the other PCs are also likely to agitate for the aforesaid powers.

All the critics of the 13th Amendment except the LTTE have accepted the PCs and gained representation in them. Whoever thought the SLFP and the JVP would ever contest PC elections! The government appears to think that if the LTTE factor is removed from the equation and the 13th Amendment is fully implemented, the PCs will function properly. However, the current demerger, which the JVP was instrumental in effecting by moving the Supreme Court, will be a problem for the government to overcome.

Now that the war has reached a crucial phase, the federalist lobby fears that the crushing of the LTTE will mark the end of their federalism campaign. Their fear is not totally unfounded. Hence the high octane performance on their part to get a federal solution as soon as possible. A fundamental mistake they have made is they put all their federal eggs in the LTTE’s basket. Their partiality to the LTTE caused federalism to be viewed by the people abhorring terrorism as something being offered to the LTTE by way of appeasement. A federal solution came to be seen as a stepping stone to secession.