To say something will never be resolved, I guess, means, not for a generation, not within the foreseeable future, no light is visible at the end of the tunnel. Then, I am prepared to go out on a limb and say that I cannot see Palestine-Israel, the Kurdistan issue and its extension into Turkey where more than half the world’s Kurds live, Kashmir, and Tibetan autonomy within China, finding resolution within a hundred moons. These are candidates that belong in the beyond-resolution category. I am increasingly coming to the view that the Sinhala-Tamil national question belongs in this basket, rather than the South Africa, Northern Ireland, North-South Sudan, East Timor and Ache category, where racial, religious or ethnic conflicts, finally found a satisfactory degree of resolution. Because of enormous great power, mainly US interest and involvement, and because of the clout that derives from the oil resources in the possession of the Arab states and Iran, extraordinary international pressures are being brought to bear on Palestine and Israel, hence this may, just may be the one exception, but there is nothing similar in the other cases, Sri Lanka included.

This is no blame game article

This is not a blame game article; it is not a Sinhalese are like this and the Tamils are like that, Bandaranaike drove a wedge Rajapakse a stake, kind of article; individuals when mentioned are merely actors playing out their role on a stage larger than themselves. Rather, I want to explore the mythological, emotional, cultural and modern socio-economic and political variables that underlie the predicament we have landed in; our sorry state. Sorry state! The whole Sinhalese South is celebrating final victory over 30 years of chaos, dancing in the streets, marching with triumphant flags, how dare I say this! Be patient.

Let me, to begin with, say what I read to be the cultural-emotional timbre of the Sinhalese people; but let me also add that there are exceptions, internationalists, the truly religious, history scholars, and archaeologists who see this whole Sinhalese-Tamil divide as pure bunkum when anthropologically referenced. What I am about to say is not new, it is common knowledge, and furthermore, I make no moral judgement or implied criticism in this restatement. In a nutshell, then, the Sinhalese Buddhists regard Sri Lanka as the land of the Sinhala race and language and the repository in which Buddhism was preserved and protected for two millennia. This feeling is fortified by myth and anecdote, by irrigation-based civilisations, kings and kingdoms and by resistance to foreign invasions. Such is the stuff of all civilisation-mythologies from Timbuktu to Taprobane, Cossacks to Cambodia’s Khmers, Huns of Hungary to Hottentots.

So far so good, but in the context of post independence history this emotional and cultural nexus has assumed another dimension in statecraft and politics. A senior army officer told an interviewer in Canada something which I believe is on the minds of most Sinhalese. Many of my friends say the same thing frankly, and ask what is wrong? In one sense, in an old fashioned sense, there is nothing wrong.

The gist of it is this: The Sinhala Buddhists form the overwhelming majority of the population, they are the nation’s primary citizens, members of the minority communities must be respected and afforded equal rights and opportunities on an individual basis, but they must understand that as a group, as a collective entity, they are a minority. Minorities cannot expect their group or collective rights to be on par with those of the Sinhalese – for example state religion, equality of linguistic recognition, asymmetric powers in respect of constitutional change as in federal dispensations, expectation that one of their number will rise to the highest offices of state, and finally, influence within the government and armed forces beyond guarded limits. Some would go further and advocate a temporary ‘bumiputra’ policy (university entrance standardisation, for example) to correct for past disadvantages suffered by the Sinhalese, but this is not a core issue. If this is the mood of most members of a majority community, you may well ask, ‘what the hell, it’s not that bad. Why not accept it and get on with it? There are plenty of avenues for minority community members to advance themselves, and a great many have’.

Events, however, did not pan out in this way. Class and socio-economic realities after independence cut across in a different way releasing a cascade of successive events that assumed a momentum of their own. At the best of times, a ‘don’t ask for equal group rights and parity of community-status, rather be satisfied with and accept equal individual rights’ deal, would have been a hard trick to pull off, but the social ferment in the petty bourgeois classes in the semi-urban sectors of the country in the post-1956 phase became a huge impediment. Vernacular spiced subaltern class conflict marinated cultural and emotional loathing in grotesque ways.

The absence of one single Sinhalese or Tamil politician of statesman like stature, N.M. Perera and some of his Sama Samaja colleagues (not including Phillip Gunawardena) excepted but for other reasons irrelevant, meant a complete lack of national leadership springing organically from within the two communities themselves. The leaders of the organisations and parties rooted inside the aspirations of the two communities per se could not rise above the mediocrity of tribal chieftainship. It was like having Nehrus but no Gandhi – not enough social cement. This deadly mix of myth and anthropology with post independence class conflict, and a leaderless polity, sealed Lanka’s fate in blood and tears.

Tamil minority nationalism

The political narrative of post independence Tamil politics from Ponnampalam through Chelvanayagam and Amirthalingam to Prabaharan is as well known as the Sinhala political narrative from DS and Banda, through JR, to Mahinda. But what is the Tamil equivalent of what I have referred to as the cultural-emotional timbre of the Sinhalese? I think at the core there is a recognition of their own separateness, a feeling that they form a distinct community with an identity of its own. A Christian Tamil is first a Tamil; though caste is a scourge in Tamil society, Karayar, Nalavan, Vellalan, and all, are Tamils first. (I don’t think Vellala Tamils would have voted for a Govigama Sinhalese if the Marcus Fernando, Arunachalem incident had been played in reverse). The character of Jaffna society affirmed this sense of separateness of identity. There was, until recent times, a stronger awareness of being a Jaffna man, than, say, Sinhalese sentiment about which bank of the Bentara Ganga one was conceived on, or the Udarata self-gratification of those domiciled on the more primitive side of the Kadugannawa Pass.

Am I exaggerating a little about Tamil identity? Yes, so what, I don’t have all day to make a point do I? More important is that identity awareness among Tamils reacted against notions of subordinating this shared identity, or making do with democratic rights awarded to individuals. This was further complicated by denial of even individual rights in numerous cases in the 10 years from 1956 to 1965. The latter is what is loosely termed discrimination. If Tamil demands had been limited to discrimination – meaning jobs, promotions, facility to transact business with government, etc – the conflict may have been tractable. But they were not designed or limited to this low key; there was an unwavering demand for group and community discrimination, chief among these was equal status for the Tamil language and Regional Councils or some such unit of self-administration.

This is when an irresistible force met an immovable obstacle. No way where the Sinhalese people willing to grant territorial devolution of power on an ethnic basis, whether Federalist or Regional, and no way were the Tamils willing to give up on the demand for recognition of their identity. We see the persistence of this all the way to the Thimpu talks in 1985. All Tamil political entities, the LTTE, other militant groups, the TULF including the present TNA, and if memory serves me right all the Tamil parties now allied with the government, endorsed the principles then enunciated. The Four Thimpu Principles were the minimum common platform on which all Tamil nationalist and democratic entities were willing to unite; viz, recognition of the Tamils as a nation, the homeland concept, right to self-determination and citizenship. Citizenship refers to the Up-Country Tamils, now a solved problem. In the other three we see the self-assertion of a community which announces itself as possessing a separate identity and demands recognition of that identity.

I am making heavy weather of this because this is just what the Sinhalese community is, and will in the future, have difficulty in accommodating. This is where the aforesaid force and obstacle collide; that is, even if we whittle self-determination down to something less than the right to secession.

I am aware that there is a mood of goodwill in Sinhala society at this moment: ‘Alleviate the pain of the IDPs, rebuild wartime devastation, invest, reconstruct, now is the time for renewal’. Yes, this is wholesome and welcome, but in the final analysis it is a separate matter from the formal recognition of another national identity within the parameters of a multi-ethnic state.

How much longer?

The military war is over and the LTTE has called off the armed struggle; the political one has hardly started. There are the optimists, colleagues and ex-colleagues of mine in left or once-upon-a-time antiwar movements, there are also decent and able journalists some writing to this newspaper who have exposed chauvinism and state and militant terrorism, and there are also do-gooders. The political among them live in cloud cuckoo land; they imagine, now that the military war is over, they can trot up to Temple Trees, petition in hand, and have the 13th Amendment-plus implemented, free and fair elections in the North, and savour the fragrance of democracy in Jaffna. Soon the optimists will exchange their petitions for dunce caps. They see the Rajapakse government changing its spots in uncharacteristic ways, to devolve, democratise, and do-away with the military occupation of Jaffna. But stories from IDP camps and overseas accounts of the massacre at locations like Pinak-kaadu in the final assault, tell another macabre tale; they speak another mind-set. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon called the sight of the camps from the air the most appalling in his international career (The Times, 26 May).