By Mahesan Niranjan –

Prof Mahesan Niranjan

I have two Tamil friends. Their names are SriLankan Tamil and Tamil Sri Lankan. “Aren’t they the same?” you ask. No, the order in which the identifiers appear is significant. Tamils often use their dads’ name followed by a given name. My friend Thevaram, son of Sivapuranam, writes his name as Sivapuranam Thevaram. Formally, he is known as Mr Thevaram, yet informally he is addressed as “Hey Thevaram.” He is found under T in the phone book. The British war criminal Tony Blair has the identifier Blair inherited from his father and Tony given to him at birth. “Hey Tony,” is how his friend – the other war criminal — calls him, he is “Mr Blair” in a formal setting and is found under  B in the phone book. Thus, order matters (except in the case of my other friend, Ting Ting).

My friend SriLankan Tamil (SLT for short) has the following take on the politics of Sri Lanka. History started on 4 February 1948, the day the suddhas (white folk) left the island after 500 years of colonial rule, leaving us to run our own business. Our independence was not won in a fight. The struggle in India, the weakened state of Britain after the war, and the discovery that to have a flow of wealth from the poor to the rich, you need not physically control them, were elements that made the suddhas leave. SLT is saddened by the decline since 1948. “Have we built a single yard of railway line on our own?” he often asks. “Have we developed the capacity to build and maintain clean toilets?” he often laments.

My friend Tamil Sri Lankan (TSL for short) has a different view of history. He starts further back in time and claims that we were different nations (the Tamils and Sinhalese, that is) before the suddhas arrived. And now that they are gone, we should get back to where we were and go our separate ways.  “Otherwise, the majority will simply destroy the minority,” he fears. And his fears are not without foundation.

Nationalism articulated by TSL has two causes that eminent scholars of social and political sciences find hard to disentangle. One is the realization by Sinhala politicians that manufactured racism is a big vote winner, and in recent years they have developed it to perfection.  Second is a superiority complex entrenched among Tamils they must necessarily be clever because the suddhas chose them to run post offices. Had you lived in Jaffna in 1976, when the Vaddukkoddai resolution calling for separation was passed and in 1977 when the TULF won a landslide victory with that resolution as mandate, you would have noticed how one type of racism served both as trigger and cover for the other.

SLT thinks that the 13^th Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution can give a workable level of devolution to the provinces. Its implementation will be a framework in which Tamils, in parts of our country where they have lived for generations, can be empowered to make their own decisions in terms of preserving their cultural heritage and identity. That is no threat to the majority. Nor is it in any way a challenge to the territorial integrity of the Sri Lankan state. The autonomous region of Trento in Italy, the federal governance structures in India and Switzerland are all examples that a small amount of local decision making power actually makes the global state stronger, not weaker.

TSL disagrees. He thinks that the 13^th Amendment is a non-starter. He has studied its provisions with a microscope. An example of something hilarious he has found is this: there is asymmetry in how the centrally appointed governor and the elected Provincial Council are supposed to share power. The Governor has discretionary control over certain things which over-rides powers of the elected local body. Now, who decides the topics in which the Governor exercises discretion? It is the Governor himself! “Funny,” do I hear you say?

We can also understand the differences between my friends from their professional training.

SLT happens to be a statistician. As such, his interest lies in average-case analysis. If life for his people can improve on average, he is rather pleased. He is aware that in situations that are polarised – bimodal distributions, the technical term for it — averages can be misleading, but usually ignores this fact. Let me explain. Two World Bank economists trained in statistics went hunting. They encounter a tiger. The first guy takes his gun out, aims and shoots. He misses by a foot to the left. The second guy takes his shot and misses by a foot to the right. The tiger attacks, kills and eats them. Later, when they meet in their reserved corner of Hell, one says to the other: “Machan, on average, we got him.”

TSL is trained in law. As a lawyer, he is interested in worst-case analysis. He concerns himself with each and every potential scenario in which things can go wrong, for it is when things go wrong he gets to earn a living. Let me explain. Once when our TV stopped working, we called in a repairman. The guy took just one look, knocked hard on one side of the TV and it started working again. “50 Rupees,” he asked for that work. Outrageous, but we paid up. Later that evening, we asked our lawyer friend if it was allowed to charge Rs. 50 for just one knock. “Yes,” he replied, “100 Rupees.”

In Tamil politics, my two friends never manage to reach agreement by discussion. Their exchanges on facebook, for example, have very short time constants. It goes like this. One of them copies an article favourable to his particular point of view and clicks “like”. The other makes a comment critical of it. And next we see are blows below the belt. “Oh, you sound just like VP,” SLT would say, to shut TSL up. “But that is just what MR is also saying,” TSL would say. They then part company, agreeing that facebook wall is not the place to have a political discussion — and repeat the same in a few months.

Have you noticed that debate has never been a way of resolving issues in Tamil politics? My friend Thevaram has come up with a theory on that. It has to do with intonation in language – a tool used stress parts of your speech. Such use of intonation for emphasis is not common in spoken Tamil. Let me explain. When Thevaram and his wife Manimekalai disagree on something, their kid Senguthu complains: “why are you guys shouting?”  “No, darling, we are discussing,” the parents would tell him. “No you are shouting,” Senguthu would insist. Note with a slight change of pitch, he can stress the “are.” Handicapped by the lack of intonation, the unfortunate couple have to raise their decibels to stress or emphasize a point. Beating people up when they disagree, tying them to lamp posts and shooting them, are all predictable manifestations of this, Thevaram’s theory claims.

 Enter Hon. Mathiaparanan Abraham Sumanthiran, Member of Parliament.

Terminology from consumer electronics helps to understand Sumanthiran MP. First, we had the radio, converting electromagnetic waves to sound. Then there was the tape recorder which played back recorded material. Remember, these were being sold separately during the Sixties until someone figured out you can package the two in a single box? A Two-In-One it used to be called, and served as a prize gift from a friend returning from a trip overseas. Set the switch to the right, it will act as a radio, switch to the left it will play cassette tapes. And possession of one made the neighbours envious, too!

MP Sumanthiran is the two-in-one of Tamil politics. He has both my friends, Sri Lankan Tamil and Tamil Sri Lankan, integrated in one.

Sumanthiran is appointed to parliament by the Tamil National Alliance. These guardians of Tamil Nationalism claim that, post-war, their call for separatism has ended. To show this to the world, they ditched from membership a gang of three, perceived to be closest to the LTTE. But whether they have indeed distanced themselves far enough from the evils that were committed in my name without my consent, is not entirely clear to me. This is particularly hard to judge because the TNA are exceptionally talented at saying different things at different times to different people, and though Sumanthiran’s discomfort in that setting sometimes shows, his appointment by the TNA puts him in good company of my friend, the Tamil Sri Lankan.

In parliament, Sumanthiran has delivered some admirable speeches, playing a one-man-band of an opposition.  His contribution when the 18^th amendment to the constitution was passed, removing the last remaining rusty bolts holding Sri Lanka’s democracy together, was excellent. I found it to be of similar quality to the speech by P. Kandiah, former MP for Point-Pedro, in the debate on the Official Languages Act of 1956. When our hopes were further dashed by the removal from office of our country’s Chief Justice, Shirani Bandaranayake, Sumanthiran rose in Parliament to make another remarkable speech. These make him the perfect Sri Lankan Tamil.

So the coin that we see rolling along has two sides: the Sri Lankan Tamil and the Tamil Sri Lankan. How do we wish this man to go further? More to the point, how do we see in the choices he can make, the future of our country? Here is one suggestion in the form of two challenges.

Here is my challenge to Sumanthiran: Leave the TNA.

Recognize that the Tamil Nationalist politics has not made the lives of the Tamil people any better than in 1948. The way our nationalism was articulated has not won us any friends in the world. Promises made to the people, “vote for us, we know how to get federalism” to “accept us as sole representatives, we will carve out a separate state in which milk and honey will flow” have been miserable failures. It is time to think outside the box than sing from the same old hymn sheet.

Here is my challenge to the electorate in the South: Elect Sumanthiran to Parliament.

Recognize that there are issues, serious issues, we Sri Lankans have to address, and they have to be analysed and vocalized. In economic development, in good governance, in education, in irrigation and drainage, in electricity pricing, in running better railways, in building clean public toilets, in making appointments of Vice Chancellors, and in maintaining law and order — just to mention a  few — we have much to develop.  This man is highly talented and can speak on behalf of us all. Recognize also that speaking of the issues specific to the Tamil community — and believe me, there are such issues — is not separatism, for the Tamil people are also Sri Lankan.

If Sumanthiran and the southern electorate — the first time voters of the facebook generation in particular — can rise up to this coupled pair of challenges, and he is returned to parliament on a non-ethnic vote, that would be the desperately needed ray of light at the end of the long dark tunnel our country has travelled through in the last 60 years.

That also will be the beginning of the reconciliation we so urgently need, in memory of the thousands of Sri Lankans we have massacred – some of whose skeletons we are discovering in orderly deep graves in Matale, and others we are refusing to discover in chaotic shallow bunkers of Mullivaikkaal.

Are these graves to be our only achievement since the suddhas left us to mind our own business?