In last week’s column I spoke of the crisis of Tamil nationalism and briefly dwelt on what I thought was the way in which Tamil politics should conduct itself in the period ahead. Today I will use the Central Province and Kurunegala District PC election outcome as a platform to discuss the surge in Sinhala nationalism. At this moment in time we are passing through the crest of a pan-Sinhala wave and President Mahinda Rajapakse is at its and his personal apogee. The chauvinists are in seventh heaven, but I have wasted enough paper and ink on this motley lot previously and have no more to say on neo-fascism today (the Sinhala regime’s Tamil fellow traveller, Anandasangaree, by calling for the banning of the TNA, has become the latest to mouthpiece neo-fascist slogans).

An anonymous Tamilnet analyst

Our regime’s version of democracy does not allow us to read Tamilnet, but we can find out what’s in it. An unnamed Sinhala academic wrote as follows when the PC election results became known, the website said. The report, edited for length, is reproduced below since, irrespective of whether the said individual is real or apocryphal, this argument will be a recurring theme of Tamil nationalism, especially in the diaspora.

Quote: An expatriate Sinhala academic commenting on the record victory for Rajapaksa’s ruling UPFA, said: "The frame of mind of the Sinhala majority is reflected unequivocally in the impressive electoral victories secured by Mahinda Rajapasa’s government in the elections for the provincial councils of Central and North-West Provinces. In the process, the Sinhala majority virtually concedes the need for partition, if any polity acceptable to human civilization should prevail there. Envisaging a political solution or expecting a pluralistic polity of liberal democracy is running after a mirage. Any peace process for a political solution within a united Sri Lanka will be thwarted by those of this frame of mind, for whom solution means total subjugation. The transformation from totalitarianism to liberal democracy is possible only through partition, benefiting both the Sinhalese and Tamils".

First the electoral statistics themselves; the Matale and Kurunegala Districts I believe are quite typical of overwhelmingly Sinhala and largely rural electorates. In both cases the UPFA polled 70% and the UNP 28%. However it is telling that in the Nuwara Eliya District, where a significant number of Tamils live, the pattern was markedly different; the UPFA polled 51% and the UNP 45%. Even more significant is that of the nine UPFA candidates elected in Nuwara Eliya only three are Tamils, but of the seven UNP candidates elected, five are Tamils. It is absolutely clear that the voting was overwhelmingly on ethnic lines. It is also clear that even the Upcountry Tamils (UcT) have revolted against the government.

We can draw this conclusion with confidence because both so-called heavy weight UcT leaders, Thondaman and Chandrasekaran, threw their lot in with the regime, but failed to deliver. It seems that Mano Ganesan’s organisation and leadership, and UcT breakaways Palani Alagan Digambaram, Prakash Ganesh and Mylvaganam Udayakumar, have made a breakthrough into the Upcountry Tamil electorates cutting the ground under feet of the traditional leaders. Since the UcTs are not the Tamils most affected by the war - not Jaffna, Wanni and the EP - one can confidently extrapolate that anti government bitterness in the "Ceylon" Tamil community is more astringent.

Admittedly, there is the caveat that not all who voted UPFA are drunk on war euphoria, nor are all UNP voters anti-war - the declared position of the UNP is that it loves war with a passion surpassing the UPFA. Hence some cross voting between war aficionados and party loyalties surely occurred, but undoubtedly, there has been an overwhelming electoral endorsement of the Sinhalese war victory.

The regime has won the war and lost the Tamils; not that it will lose any sleep about that! To the extent that the PC elections show a sharp divide between the Sinhala and Tamil people the case of the anonymous academic has a point. The hostility is now sharp enough to overcome the Thondaman-Candrasekan factor and penetrate even UcT thinking despite, or because of, triumphal Sinhala marches and the Dutugemanuesque presidential showcase. Notably, this is different from the past; in former times, in marginal electorates, ‘plantation workers’ voted Left in 1948, and Left or SLFP in 1956 and 1970.

But is partition the answer?

I intend to leave to one side the immediate and contingent reality that partition is out of the question at this time for both military and international (especially India) reasons. But I suggest we look 10 and 20 years down the road when today’s battles will be episodes for the chronicler, as the LTTE victories at Elephant Pass and Mulaitivu have become in a decade, or as Anuraddha Ratwatte’s Sapumal Kumaraya legend turned into Osymandian effigy fallen in the sand. Such events quickly pass away, but the contingent impact on the consciousness of a people does not. Legends that reinforce deeply held beliefs of identity are inducted and live on, those that do not, are erased from consciousness; the humiliation at Elephant Pass is already erased from the Sinhala story, the defeat of the LTTE circa 2008-9 will live on in the people’s mythology.

Now look, I know damn all about anthropology and I don’t want to wax eloquent in ignorance, so let me hasten. The point is, are we inexorably bound by the outcome of the war to such a decisive partition of our national consciousnesses (please note the plural) that we are on the way to a partition of the island itself? Paradoxically, had the outcome of the war been the other way around, there are those who will say that we would have been on an express train to partition. (Let me inject my two cents worth; Thamil Eelam would not have been possible even if the LTTE fought the Sinhala Sate to a stalemate for reasons which I have adumbrated many times previously). So as the anonymous Sinhala academic says are we bound for partition in the long run, whether on the express train or the hell-black night train? We can get there on different routes, we can get there on different schedules, but has the deep antagonisms of peoples’ self awarenesses and separate identities reached a stage where, hell and high water, LTTE or no LTTE and more likely the latter, eventually we will arrive at two separate lonely destinations?

The answer is blowing in the wind

Is partition better than going on like this? Is partition eventually inevitable? I will not attempt to answer either question definitively in a historical sense though I have said that the latter is infeasible in the medium term, that is the foreseeable future. Let me however generalise a little and inject the notion of uncertainty. Uncertainty is so obvious in social and historical matters and in economics that it hardly needs underscoring, but it is no stranger in the sciences as well.

The brilliant German scientist Werner Heisenberg enunciated the ‘Uncertainty Principle’ which became a cornerstone of quantum physics in 1927. The principle goes like this; if you want to know several things about particles such as electrons (of course it applies to everything else) the more accurately you determine one thing the less accurate your knowledge of other properties. A good example is the speed (actually called momentum) and position; the more precisely you determine position the more uncertain your ability to know the speed, and vice versa. This is an intrinsic property of the physical world regarding all pairs of complementary (‘conjugate’) variables. It is not something to do with difficulty of measurement, rather, the universe is inherently constructed like this. In fact the relationship between the uncertainty in knowing momentum and position for example is very precisely related by an equation, or more technically, an inequality. (The product of the momentum and position uncertainty standard deviations must exceed a value known as Plank’s Constant). Make your knowledge of one of these properties more precise and your knowledge of the other becomes inversely less precise. You can try to design ever better instruments but you will never lick this problem; it is a fundamental law of physics.

The concept of uncertainty is no stranger to the biological sciences either. Neo-Darwinian notions of random mutation, adaptation to ever changing and unpredictable natural environments and survival of some species and elimination of others is at the heart of evolution. As they say, if you rewind the tape and run the story of evolution all over again from four billion years ago, you will end up, not with us and the natural biological order as we know it today, but with something different.

Then is everything totally unpredictable and unknowable? No not at all, there are quite sensible statements one can make with reasonable certainty on a macro scale and even a micro scale within reasonable time horizons – just don’t exceed the bounds of reasonable uncertainty. Marx was a master at leavening economic determinism with contingent history, human intervention and activity. A doctor can say with some sense that a terminally ill patient may not survive three months but not that he will pass away on the 22nd of April; most of the time he will be right and occasionally wrong. We can say with reasonable certitude that the Tamils are in for a raw deal for the next five to ten years but not exactly how the Northern PC election are likely to be contrived. We have pretty shrewd notions of fair or rigged and which quisling imposed; but eventually we will be only half-right on the details.