Mano Ratwatte’s article on applying the Obama victory to Sri Lanka is interesting to say the least. He correctly points out that Ambassador Blake might be a little premature in patting his country on the back.

However, Ratwatte seems to have missed the point somewhat. When Ambassador Blake wishes for a non-Sinhalese, non-Buddhist President to be elected in Sri Lanka, he is equating the Tamil population with the oppressed Black African American populace of the USA. This simile simply does not hold, except in the case of the Estate Tamils.

The Black African Americans constitute a large chunk of the poverty-stricken in the USA, and have occupied that position since the days of slavery - so much so that ‘black’ is almost a synonym for ‘poor’. They were mostly disenfranchised and subject to a variety of discriminatory and humiliating laws until the mid-1960.

On the other hand, the Tamils of Sri Lanka, taken as a whole, were not subject to discrimination, historically - rather the opposite in fact. Nor was there a feeling among the Sinhalese of superiority vis-a-vis the Tamils, such as occurred (and occurs) in the USA against the Black population.

Indeed, whereas the American ruling class has been particularly virulent in its racism, the Sinhalese upper class was less so. Until the British started stirring up anti-Dravidian feeling in the mid 1930s (in order to split the independence movement) there was little Sinhalese-Tamil animosity. Indeed in the elections to the Legislative Council in the early 20th century, the Sinhalese elite regularly voted for the prominent Tamil Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan over Sinhalese candidates.

Actually, the Sinhalese Goigamas (Vellalas in the colonial nomenclature) voted for Sir Ponnambalam, a Vellala Tamil, against ‘low-caste’ candidates. For, prior to the 1930s, the elite was not divided on ethnicity but on caste lines. When Anagarika Dharmapala called for Sinhalese to unite, this was not so much a call against other ethnic groups as against casteism.

Caste in Sri Lanka mattered in relation to marriage, jobs and politics. AE Goonesinghe, the founder of the Labour Party and a member of the depressed Hinna caste, had difficulty finding marriage partners for his well-educated children. Even now, caste struggles appear in workplaces, particularly in relation to the engineering and teaching professions. And in politics, caste was particularly entrenched.

As late as 1967, Colvin R de Silva was considered a pioneer when, as a Salagama, he won a by-election in the (majority Goigama) Agalawatte constituency.

In this context, our own Obama was probably President Premadasa. However, the latter’s achievement was possibly greater. Obama, although African-American, did not come from the indigenous slave-origin community, but from the East-African elite. His was a privileged background and he was able to attend elitist universities. On the other hand, Premadasa came, like his mentor AE Goonesinghe, from a depressed caste, and from a poor background. His was a true ‘log-cabin to White-house’ tale, all the more pronounced that he rose through the ranks of the status-concious United National Party, past elite mandarins such as Gamini Dissanaike and Lalith Athulathmudali.

For America’s achievement to surpass that of Sri Lanka’s would require the Rev. Jesse Jackson to become a Republican President. Let us hope that this is now possible.