By Vishwamithra –

“If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.” ~ W. Somerset Maugham   

Appapillai Amirthalingam

Many a book, many a sermon and many a demonstration has been written, pontificated and staged by the forces of the two sociopolitical extremes in Ceylon. They claimed to have represented the true meaning of patriotism and devotion to their racial sect. In actual fact, it was a tribal mindset that was released by man’s primordial instincts. Religion and ethnicity, time and time again, played their respective demonic role and turned once-a-cohesive society into one more divided, a country more tortured and a dual mindset more perturbed.

The Southern Appuhamy and Northern Natarajah have continued to suspect each other more than ever before. Each segment has cornered itself into a ‘comfort zone’ from which any exit to the outside world is not even pondered upon. Sinhalese, well entrenched by their religious leaders, Buddhist Monks, and Tamils by their political and militant leaders.

How did this happen? How did such a peaceful people who lived under the colonial powers, Portuguese, Dutch and British, as one single nation, as one single people, resort to the most inhuman and dastardly unimaginable treatment on the other community. Adults were murdered, hacked and burnt to death while children were dashed on the ground and their mothers raped in front of her children’s eyes. All these macabre executions were done in public for any bystander to behold; the perpetrators seemed to have enjoyed every second of their temporary indulgences. Men of both communities were totally intoxicated, not necessarily by alcohol or any other drug but by their own beliefs in a fake superiority over the other community. They cloaked their acts in pseudo nationalism or fake patriotism. Any person who had the courage and bravado to interfere met with the same ferocity and fury of that phony patriotism.

When one attempts to trace the origins of this unfortunate and cruel fissure between the two communities, one would see 1956 for Sinhalese Buddhists and 1976 for Tamils as somewhat decisive and game-changing years. 

For Sinhalese Buddhists, specifically the average not-so-privileged class, 1956 was the year in which their ‘place in the sun’ was assured. Albeit Independence was ‘won’ from British colonialism in 1948, thanks to the intense propaganda spearheaded by the left-wing parities such as the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and the Communist Party (CP), that Independence was merely a luxury state of affairs passed on by the British masters to the local rich and super rich class who inherited massive wealth from their parental bequeaths and consequential education abroad of Oxfordian kind.

Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike was one of them. Born to a wealthy, political family, he studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Christ Church, Oxford, and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple. Returning to Ceylon, he entered local politics by joining the Ceylon National Congress. Having been elected to the Colombo Municipal Council  in 1926, he was elected from his family seat in Veyangoda to the State Council of Ceylon for two consecutive terms between 1931 and 1947, while serving in the second term as Minister of Local Administration in the Board of Ministers. Having founded the Sinhala Maha Sabha in 1936 on Sinhalese nationalist lines advocating for self-rule in Ceylon, he joined D S Senanayake by dissolving the Sinhala Maha Sabha and merging it with the United National Party (UNP) at its formation in 1947. 

Bandaranaike was known to be a very crafty politician whose leadership was defined in reversible terms. Instead of spearheading a well disciplined crowd of men and women and leading them to a set goal along a prescribed set of national policies based on ideological grounds, he was one who identified where the followers are and led that crowd where the crowd wanted to go. Being a creation of such a mob-oriented local political stream, Bandaranaike introduced one of the most destructive political forces in the country. ‘The common man’ in 1956 was more of a slogan rather than an outcome of an empathetic feel SWRD had for the common man. He was more entrenched in his own reflection for the betterment of his own political aims. The political stream that consisted of ‘the common man‘ and the so-called ‘pancha maha balavegaya’ (five-pronged movement) was introduced which was socially destructive and divisive, economically unsustainable and morally bankrupt.

Yet he managed to draft a pact with the then Federal Party led by SJV Chelvanayakam whose enigmatic charisma continued to grow among Tamils both Northern and Eastern regions in Ceylon. Chelva, as he was fondly called, however, operated within the strict confines of non-violence. The Satyagraha campaigns organized by Chelva’s Federal Party did not bring any comfort to Tamils in the country, especially whose lives were limited to the Northern part beyond Vavuniya.

Successive governments headed by Sinhalese politicians failed to pay any attention to the hardships, both financial and cultural, suffered by Northern people. The gross negligence of Sinhalese politicians was palpable. Having failed to introduce the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam pact in 1957 and Dudley-Chelvanayakam pact in 1966, our leaders of yesteryear punted the ball instead of running with it and scoring a touchdown!

It was into this disappointing scenario a young lad from Pannakam near Vaddukodai in Northern province of Ceylon entered into  Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (Federal Party) in 1949 and became its Youth Front and became its leader.  His name was Appapillai Amirthalingam. In the year 1976, exactly after twenty years from the rise of Bandaranaike, Amirthalingam had become the Leader of the opposition and the Federal Party had become the main partner of the Tamil United Liberation Front. 

Even though Chelvanayagam was relatively a passive opponent, Amirthalingam had become more assertive and close to be militant in his approach to gaining concessions from any central government led by Sinhalese Buddhists. In 1972 the ITAK, ACTC (All Ceylon Tamil Congress) and others formed the Tamil United Front later renamed Tamil United Liberation Front. Amirthalingam was delivering leaflets along with other leading Tamil politicians such as M. Sivasithamparam, V. N. Navaratnam, K P Ratnam and K. Thurairatnam in 1976 when they were all arrested on government orders. Sivasithamparam was released but the others were taken to Colombo and tried for sedition. All the defendants were acquitted after a famous Trial at bar case in which 72 Tamil lawyers including SJ.V Chelvanayakam and G. G. Ponnambalam appeared for the defense. S.J.V Chelvanayakam, leader of the TULF and ITAK, died in April 1977. Amirthalingam took on the leadership of both organizations. 

It was in 1975, one year before the TULF was formed, Alfred Durraiappah, the Mayor of Jaffna, was murdered in broad day light, presumably by a young man named Velupillai Prabhakaran. Amirthalingam’s sympathies were always with the youth in Jaffna and he clandestinely helped the militant organizations and was alleged to have been supplying both moral and financial support to the youth organizations in the peninsula. In other words, he did unleash a hitherto concealed political force in the North. But he did not know that he, himself with Yogeswaran, Jaffna MP, would become victims at the end of these youth’s guns.                   

In an effort to bring about unity amongst the Tamils, Yogeswaran made contact with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) and met with them several times. He arranged a meeting between the Tamil Tigers and the TULF leaders at their Bullers Road residence. On the evening of 13 July 1989 three men, Peter Aloysius Leon (Vigna), Rasiah Aravindarajah (Visu) and Sivakumar (Arivu), arrived at the residence. Aloysius and Visu went inside the house whilst Sivakumar remained outside. The two men met with Yogeswaran, Amirthalingam and Sivasithamparam in Yogeswaran’s apartment on the first floor. The meeting seemed to be going well when suddenly Visu pulled out a gun and shot Amirthalingam in the head and chest. Yogeswaran stood up but was shot by Aloysius and Visu. At the behest of Prabhakaran, the leadership of the TULF was eliminated.

Amirthalingam, of course, had not learnt a lesson from the Bandaranaike playbook. If one were to play tough man with militant organizations, one had to take immense precaution as to how far one could go with such organizations, terrorist or otherwise. It’s so hard to keep control of what is going to develop along the way. Instead of you controlling the momentum, the very momentum would ultimately control you. That is the sad story one has to learn from such flirtations with terrorist organizations. 

Bandaranaike in 1956 never understood the power of the Pancha Maha Balavegaya and ‘the common man’. When the leadership of the Pancha Maha Balavegaya was in the hands of some thugs in saffron whose ideal is not so much consistent with that of the common man, inexperienced and self-centered men, what entails would be far too unpalatable to societal development. Bandaranaike’s pronounced ideals may have had a novel and daring appeal to the common man, but its romanticist journey will unfailingly lead to social stagnation and political instability.     

As much as SWRD Bandaranaike did not learn the harder lessons of politics, neither did Amirthalingam. Both were sides of the same coin.

*The writer can be contacted at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com