The above could be a poem, I suppose, with appropriate salutation to W.H. Auden, and one that could arguably stretch into several stanzas. I shall postpone that exercise for later. There is much to be said at this moment of victory, much more than can be captured in a political comment for a Sunday paper. So I shall limit this piece to reflection on two things. First, the fact that Tamils in Sri Lanka did not join the festivities for the most part, and secondly the question, ‘is the war really over?’

A friend of mine wanted to have a party to celebrate the defeat of the LTTE but she called it off because she couldn’t find a single Tamil person to come. A lot of people in Colombo are perturbed by the fact that Tamils are not exactly in a celebrating frame of mind. Indeed, some have gone to the extent of accusing Sinhalese of flaunting victory in the faces of the Tamil community.

I agree that there are elements of the overall celebration that is in poor taste - coffins symbolizing Prabhakaran and/or the LTTE, for example. I believe this goes against the cultural ethos of the Sinhala Buddhists. Prabhakaran was certainly no Elara but there is no sanctioning of insulting the dead anywhere in our history, not in the chronicles, the literature or in the folk poetry.

On the other hand, celebrating a victory over terrorism is not something that is beyond comprehension. It is the end of suicide bombings and that’s something to cheer, is it not? It is the end of a war and surely this is something that calls for a smile, an embrace and the cooking of kiribath? I believe a lot of anxiety regarding the spontaneous overflow of emotion after the defeat of the LTTE was announced has to do with personal anxieties, misgivings and Utopias secretly or publicly pursued. When the play does not follow script, some are naturally disappointed, but it is unfair to demand that everyone else should share the unhappiness.

I find the anxieties and the reluctance of Tamils to join the flag-waving masses quite understandable. In 1989, when the entire politburo of the then JVP was massacred, I did not celebrate. In fact it made me sad. I was not pro-JVP. I was anti-JVP. I was a victim of the LTTE’s thuggery while a student at Peradeniya. Neither was I a UNPer or an approver of the then UNP regime led by President Premadasa. There was much to be lamented at the time and the defeat of the JVP did not engender hope in my mind.

For decades, the vast majority of Tamils in this country either supported the LTTE or at least grudgingly preferred the LTTE to the Sri Lankan Government. The LTTE articulated an aspiration that few Tamils could dismiss out of hand: that of a separate state for Tamil people. They were bombarded with propaganda painting the Sinhalese as rabid racists and chauvinists and inflation of felt or real grievances. There was no political space to reject both LTTE and the state in the sense that we were forced to inhabit a political culture that was founded on the principle, ‘if you are not with me, you are with my enemy’. I don’t blame my Tamil friends for maintaining silence. It is a silence we must strive to understand and respect, especially since none of us speak for everyone and none of us can predict what politicians prone to demagoguery can do tomorrow.

Having lived for three decades in a volatile political milieu where ethnicity was a football kicked around by idiots, demagogues, murderers and thieves, it is no surprise that victory/defeat is understood in familiar ways and not always in the most positive terms available. We have had decades of killings, bombs, assassinations, suicide attacks, farcical negotiation, multi-barrel guns, increasing numbers of IDPs, displacement, dismemberment and the devastation of familiar landscapes etc. etc. and a few days of post-LTTE. This is a moment when emotions are high, heart-strings taut. It will pass. There was no repeat of July ’83 as some feared. We should be cautious when indulging in extrapolation, I believe.

It would be pertinent, in order to place things in context, that in 1989 there were many in Colombo who celebrated the defeat of the JVP. I suspect that many of them and their children are the very same people who are finding it difficult to come to terms with this particular victory, not least of all because it is Mahinda Rajapaksa who has been crowned king and not Ranil Wickremesinghe. Such people, I am sure, would not have really worried about the fact that ‘1989’ came after 60,000 people were killed, almost all of them the children of parents living in rural areas of the country.

I didn’t hear anyone in Colombo write poems about the need to be sensitive about those families. There was no internet to speak of then, but if there was, I am fairly sure that there would have been very few bloggers, if any, who would have poured out in excruciating terms the anxieties they felt regarding the celebratory tones common to politicians and Colombo society. That is if they felt anxious at all.

Now to the second post-LTTE issue. Is the LTTE dead? A columnist for the Ravaya newspaper, Sudharshana Gunawardena, predicted sometime in October or November last year that the Government’s ‘war balloon’ would burst in Kilinochchi. Now that was not an objective assessment of the ground reality. It was merely an echoing of LTTE propaganda. In an interview earlier this month, this person, still unable to employ his tongue to utter the inevitable, chose to take the aerial route: ‘the idea of the LTTE will survive’. Next he might say that the LTTE’s next avatar will come dressed as an extra-terrestrial. I would not be surprised. These are, after all, people whose livelihoods depended on comfortably interchanging ‘Tamil’ and ‘LTTE’ as though they were synonyms.

D.B.S. Jeyaraj, prolific commentator on the conflict, in his column in the Daily Mirror of May 23, 2009 also seeks, in a more subtle manner, an afterlife for the LTTE, doing his best to paint the less-than-heroic end of Prabhakaran in more honourable colours, even as he admits that he doesn’t know what really happened.

My concern is not the LTTE. We must remember that the LTTE became the LTTE that lived, killed and destroyed because its image was inflated, its war-chest filled, its men and women armed and invincibility conferred upon it by interested parties, most of who are not Tamils and moreover didn’t give a hoot per se for humanitarian issues. Let us remember also that until the very last moment, they did their utmost to save the LTTE leadership. Such people, such forces didn’t die with Velupillai Prabhakaran. They are very much alive and we can expect them to fold up their act only at great risk.

There are elements in India that do not want to see Sri Lanka emerging out of this war with head held high and moving rapidly along the path towards prosperity. There are others whose interest lay in our resources. In this regard, we must always keep in mind that subsequent to the determinations pertaining to the Law of the Sea, our territory has increased several times to encompass mineral-rich areas of the continental shelf. Destabilizing is a time-honoured strategy to make way for intervention, control and outright plunder.

This is why the David Milibands and Bernard Kouchners of this world with a million skeletons (of Iraqis, Afghans and of course the dead of all the countries they invaded to rape and plunder) in their historical cupboards want to complain about probably non-existent skeletons in ours. They will, if given half a chance, stomp on all our traditions, destroy our monuments, rob our people and install puppet regimes in the same way they did in Iraq, where they went to look for non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

This is not the time to go overboard with our celebrations and not only because we have to keep in mind that our fellow-citizens in the Tamil community are not exactly euphoric. It is the time to be sober because the undeclared war against Sri Lanka by the Milibands and Kouchners of the international community is not over.

This is the time when we have to be even more vigilant. If the political leadership so chooses to defend the country against this very real threat just as the country was secured from the threat of terrorism, then it is up to all of us to be as vigilant as we were with respect to the possibility of an LTTE attack.

We can hope for support from our friends in the international community, but that’s never a given. We have to resolve to stand on our own feet. We have to work hard. We have to work really hard. We have to rediscover our heritage for that’s the solid rock on which the edifice called ‘Future’ is going to be built. We have to come together as a nation of citizens who are proud of who their parents are and who recognize and acknowledge the right of people in different communities to be likewise proud of theirs. We have to begin to live within our means, wean ourselves from the mindless consumerism we have become addicted to and get our democratic institutions sorted out so that citizens are insulated from corrupt, boastful and thuggish politicians.

I didn’t wave a flag. I stood up for the national anthem though. I saluted the soldier. I bent my head in respect for all the dead, all of whom were my fellow-citizens regardless of what they did when they were alive. I mourn the tragedy, I welcome its end. I have hope. And therefore I choose to be vigilant. More so now, than before.