By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

The results of the local government elections were a boon to government critics whose primary pre-occupation is nitpicking the NPP government. As the LG elections faded into the background came the month of May anniversaries and with them more ammunition to keep cavilling at the government. The anniversary focus is on the end-of-the-war in May 2009 and criticisms have been about the government’s apparent reluctance to show the same level of enthusiasm in commemorating the war heroes as the Rajapaksa family showed when they were in power, on the one hand; and the government’s reported decision not to fuss too much about Tamil observances of the end of the war as Remembrance Day for the victims of war, on the other.

Both observances used to be held on the same day, May 18, until President Maithripala Sirisena separated the two by making May 19 the official Commemoration Day observed by the government and leaving May 18 free of any government events. Perhaps to give Tamil memorialization its own space. That may have been one of the minor symbolic  concessions to the TNA’s co-habitation in the yahapalana government. But the government of Sri Lanka has no control over the Tamil Diaspora and the diaspora has been able to influence host governments in their new countries to elicit symbolic gestures, such as organizing Tamil Remembrance Day abroad. The Remembrance Day is now variously recognized by governments from New Zealand to Canada, with the added allusions to Tamil genocide, and more recently a remembrance monument has been installed in the City of Brampton in Canada, a South Asian suburb not far from Toronto.

All of this feeds into the simmering political cauldron in Sri Lanka, precipitating ineffectual calls for governmental responses to alleged misrepresentations abroad. Commemoration and Remembrance of the war are quietly becoming established as the two sides of the irreconciled aftermaths of the war. One might call them the civil society versions of the annual UNHRC theatre in Geneva.   What is new and different this year is that there is a new government in town with no prior experience in the observance of anniversaries, except perhaps those of its own political anniversaries.

Political Anniversaries

As political anniversaries go, four years have gone by since the country marked the 50^th anniversary of the JVP’s 5^th April 1971 insurrection. The late Ian Goonetilleke began his contemporary assessment of the insurrection quoting T.S. Elliot, “April is the cruellest month.” Like many other academic’s at that time, Ian took a socio-politically sympathetic view of the insurrection – more so for its compulsions, if not its methods. AJ Wilson called the uprising as manifesting the “predatory aspects of Marxism.” The official Left, then part of the UF government, denounced the uprising as “ultra-leftist misadventure.” Pieter Keuneman, the first UF government Minister to hit the airwaves in the days after April 5^th, called it on what was still Radio Ceylon, “an infantile form of negative nihilism.” Even the more sympathetic N. Shanmugathasan dismissed it as “petit bourgeois romanticism.” All that is now water, and blood, under the bridge.

Yet there are other anniversaries besides 5^th April 1971 and 18^th & 19^th May 2009. There is a third anniversary in May, viz., 22^nd May marking that day in 1972, a year after the insurgency, when Sri Lanka became a Republic, shedding its Dominion status. In contrast to the war anniversaries of May, the Republican anniversary is barely mentioned let alone honoured or commemorated. Dr. Nihal Jayawickrama who might be the only living Sri Lankan with proximate knowledge of the making of the First Republic, has often bemoaned the non-observance of the Republic Day in Sri Lanka, unlike in India where both the Independence Day and the Republic Day are celebrated every year.

Now that we are in June, let us not forget the Gemini month’s own political milestone – June 5, that Tuesday in 1956 when the Sinhala Only Bill was tabled in parliament and the Tamil Federal Party organized a Satyagraha on the Galle Face green to protest against the bill in parliament. “One language, two countries; two languages, one country,” prophesized Colvin R. de Silva. One official language will create “schisms in the structures of the state,” warned GG Ponnambalam. All warnings to no avail.   

As it turned out, the First Republican Constitution that Colvin ministered gave the only official language a constitutional status. That and the rather exclusive process of constitution making not only provoked Tamil separatism but also pretexted a second constitution within six years. The Second Republican Constitution of 1978 that JR Jayewardene presided over wholly repealed and replaced the first, supplanted the parliamentary system with a presidential system, but left intact the status of the official language.

The First Republican Constitution is widely believed to have been a provocative factor in the rise of Tamil political violence. The latter was also a demonstration-effect of the 1971 JVP uprising, albeit the Tamil version of it. By the time the Second Republic was being made, war was at the doorstep of the state, but nothing was done in the constitution to address the political misgivings of the Tamils. That was in spite of the pre-1977-election understanding between JR Jayewardene and the TULF leaders.

An unintended but belatedly positive consequence of the rise of Sri Lankan Tamil separatism was the quick resolution of the long-vesting citizenship question of the plantation Tamils. A different outcome was the unprecedented appointment of quite a few Tamils to high positions in the state and government machinery. This was the classic, if not colonial or cynical, co-option response to a serious political question. The upshot was a war of many sorts that lasted nearly three decades.

Even the belated constitutional response that came in the form of the 13^th Amendment by 1987/88 was not enough to put an end to the war which kept on going for another twenty years or more until the total defeat of the LTTE on 18^th May 2009. Hence the anniversaries. Although the 13^th Amendment is best (or worst) known for its devolution provisions, it also finally settled language question. The ‘parity of status’ between the languages, which the old Left valiantly fought for, is now enshrined in the constitution. The country took an awfully long 36 years to get there, but the intervening war had shifted the goal posts several times over.

Language is no longer the central feature of the Tamil question. Nor is it land grandly conceptualized as ‘traditional homelands. The urgency now is about a basic human condition, or its restoration. It is about the return of residential and farming properties of families that were sequestered by the military in the name of national security while violating the security and rights of those who were dispossessed of their land.   

We can see the interconnectedness of these anniversaries even though only two of them (May 18^th and May 19^th) are faithfully and controversially observed year. The aftermaths of the war are manifold with different implications for the Tamils, Muslims and the Sinhalese, as well as for the whole organization of the state and its functions. Encompassing them are the unresolved constitutional legacies and adding to the cauldron of discontents are the economic problems that were a late addition and the lasting legacy of the Rajapaksa family rule.               

The NPP’s Challenge

The still new NPP government has no control over what has transpired, nor can it be selective about its political inheritances especially those involving the anniversaries that I have been recounting. June 1956 is now old testament, even though it is still the watershed year that spawned a whole political generation known as the “children of 1956.” That poetic cohort did not encompass all the children of Sri Lanka for there are those who have been left out – the elect and the reprobate, so to speak. Or the official language beneficiaries and its reasonable users. The languages now have parity, but there are people waiting for the return of their land.

As for the May anniversaries, every governing party or coalition partner that has been associated with them is now out of government, out of power, and even out of parliament. The governing JVP/NPP has never been in government in any significant or consequential way, never had anything to do with state power in any way, and had only three MPs including national list recruits in the last parliament.

The JVP/NPP government is not only new to office, but it is also generationally new. The vast majority of its members were born in the late sixties or after. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, born in 1968, was a mere three year old when the JVP launched the 1971 insurrection, and a four year old when Sri Lanka became a republic in 1972. Even before he could have heard about this reasonably momentous transformation, or read the First Republican Constitution of 1972, the Constitution was gone, and the new 1978 Constitution was in place. President AKD would have been only ten years old.

The JVP was not totally out of the picture and implicated itself significantly with its second uprising in the late 1980s. The JVP opposed the Indian intervention and everything that came with it including the 13^th Amendment. It ratchetted up its violent attacks perhaps learning a thing or two from the methods of the LTTE. The old JVP leadership was killed off long before the LTTE was decimated. But the JVP’s political base made it possible to transform itself and enter the mainstream political process in spite of it military defeat. Something that was not possible with LTTE.

It is fair to say that President AKD and other current leaders of the JVP would have been initiated into politics during the second uprising and would have come of age during the transformatory phase of the JVP. AKD’s political rise from the time he entered parliament at the millennial turn in 2000, has been meteoric. In 2004 he won re-election as part of a strong JVP contingent of 39 MPs, and served as Ministry of Agriculture in the Chandrika Kumaratunga government. He became leader of the JVP in 2014, founded the NPP in 2019, and in ten years he earned the goodwill of the electorate to be elected as President and lead his NPP alliance to a landslide electoral victory.

The almost universal question in Sri Lankan politics now is whether the JVP/NPP can sustain the success it reaped last November. Put another way, can the JVP/NPP win the next election? Those who constantly imply this question without openly asking it are really not happy that the JVP/NPP won the last election, let alone so massively. They will not say it outright just as they will not outright say that the JVP/NPP is not going to win the next election. But they will not miss an opportunity to chip away at the government and keep implying that the JVP/NPP is an L-board government that will not be returned a second time.

The challenge to the NPP government is in answering these questions and clearing the doubts more through actions and less through polemical repartees. A good balance of both will make politics in Sri Lanka worthwhile. The government has a singular advantage that no other previous government had. There is no opposition that is organizationally equipped and credible to replace the NPP government even if the people were to sour on it. That only increases the onus on the government and the President to meaningfully succeed. Failure would be bad for the NPP and worse for the country.