{"id":103396,"date":"2013-09-03T00:05:31","date_gmt":"2013-09-02T18:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=103396"},"modified":"2013-09-06T15:16:18","modified_gmt":"2013-09-06T09:46:18","slug":"13a-and-npc-elections-extreme-sinhalese-and-tamil-disaffections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/13a-and-npc-elections-extreme-sinhalese-and-tamil-disaffections\/","title":{"rendered":"13A And NPC Elections: Extreme Sinhalese And Tamil Disaffections"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rajan Philips<\/a><\/span> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rajan Philips<\/p><\/div>\n

Disaffection has two different, not necessarily opposite, meanings:\u00a0 hostility and disillusionment.\u00a0 13A<\/a><\/span> and the NPC elections have provoked both hostility and disillusionment.\u00a0 Those who are hostile insist that 13A was imposed on a weak Sri Lankan President, is an infringement of and a threat to Sri Lanka\u2019s sovereignty, and is not acceptable to the Sinhalese. On the other hand, those who are disillusioned claim that the Tamils never accepted 13A as a fair basis for a political solution, and that it is structurally disempowered and will be ineffectual in execution in the Northern Province.<\/p>\n

As well, the hostile camp led by the Secretary of Defence tried hard to forestall the NPC election and have 13A repealed.\u00a0 The disillusionment camp has been calling upon the TNA just to do the opposite: boycott the NPC election<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 Writing in The Hindu (7 August), Kumaravadivel Guruparan has asserted that \u201cthe 13th<\/sup> Amendment is no starting point to a political solution.\u201d He offers no suggestion as to what would be an alternative starting point.\u00a0 The significance of the article is that The Hindu carried it, thus appearing to mark a departure from the paper\u2019s editorial policy in recent years of lionizing President Mahinda Rajapaksa<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 If so, the departure is indicative of the growing disenchantment generally among Indian politicians, and the hostility particularly in Tamil Nadu, to the Rajapaksa regime.<\/p>\n

The main hostile argument in Sri Lanka is that 13A was forced by New Delhi on a beleaguered JR Jayewardene, who in turn forced his MPs (allegedly with their letters of resignation in hand) to vote for 13A.\u00a0 If that was so in 1987, the question in 2013 is why Mahinda Rajapaksa not acceding to the trenchant advice of his brother and the BBS<\/a><\/span> to repeal 13A and not have the NPC election?\u00a0 Why would he not do that and assert Sri Lanka\u2019s sovereignty once and for all? Is President Rajapaksa not doing it because he is not as powerful as he appears to be?\u00a0 Is Mahinda Rajapaksa as weak and beleaguered as JR Jayewardene is constantly accused to have been when he signed the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement that led to 13A?<\/p>\n

The one dangerous difference between JRJ then and MR now is this: Between 1983 and 1987, JRJ fired Cyril Mathew and isolated the chauvinists who had been wielding undue influence in his cabinet and government, whereas President Rajapaksa, after the end of the war in 2009, has been courting chauvinists and allowing those in his cabinet and government to sponsor their schemes. \u00a0I am not casting any aspersion on the good person of Mahinda Rajapaksa.\u00a0 All the President\u2019s good friends and his better advisers are saying the same thing.<\/p>\n

Truth and half-truth among the Sinhalese<\/strong><\/p>\n

The truth of the matter is that whereas JRJ was able to corral the MPs of his Party to vote for 13A, MR has not been able to gather enough MPs for his negative purpose of ridding 13A despite his years of groundwork to entice MPs not only from his Party but from every Party in parliament.\u00a0 The tipping point against the repeal-13A move came courtesy of a small group of SLFP MPs who decided to take a stand on this matter even though some of them had earlier folded all too easily before presidential power in impeaching Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranaike.\u00a0 These SLFPers give the lie to the common assertion that the SLFP has always opposed to the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement and the 13th<\/sup> Amendment it produced \u2013 because that assertion is only half-true.<\/p>\n

The other half is that under Chandrika Kumaratunga the SLFP changed course and changed its position.\u00a0 Although the SLFP had earlier boycotted the first election to Provincial Councils, Chandrika Kumaratunga as the new leader started her winning march against the UNP by herself contesting and winning the Southern and Western Provincial Council elections.\u00a0 What is more, she went on to win presidential and general elections not on a platform of repealing or diluting 13A but on the promise of going beyond it.\u00a0 So where was the SLFP under Chandrika Kumaratunga, including Mahinda Rajapaksa?\u00a0 The latter was without his brothers then, and is flanked by all his brothers now. Therein is a damning clue as to where the SLFP is now.<\/p>\n

While at it, what has happened to the JVP that too opposed the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement rather destructively at that time?\u00a0 Its political positions are far more nuanced now than they were at that time.\u00a0 Electorally the JVP has not been able to establish anything except as an appendage to ruling coalitions.\u00a0 Its only achievement against 13A has been through the Supreme Court, a strange route for an organization that in its first coming described all courts as bourgeois fraud.\u00a0 And the Supreme Court has been all over the map in offering judicial opinions on constitutional matters, especially concerning 13A, to be of any positive use on them.\u00a0 As well, after the impeachment of its own Chief Justice it will take at least another political generation before that once hallowed institution could regain even a semblance of its former credibility, not to mention pride.\u00a0 Would Solomon or Sirimavo Bandaranaike have ever countenanced getting rid of a Supreme Court Judge through a Parliamentary Select Committee?<\/p>\n

My point is that while there is no denying that the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement and 13A were highly controversial when they were created, there is little truth in the assertion that the vast majority of the Sinhalese people were impeccably opposed to the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement and 13A at that time and have been consistently insisting on their repeal ever since. \u00a0If it is argued that President Rajapaksa would easily win a referendum among the Sinhalese against 13A, it could just as well be counter-argued that the selfsame President Mahinda Percy Rajapaksa would equally easily win a referendum among a good majority of the Sinhalese and more overwhelmingly among the Tamils and Muslims not only for 13A, but even for 13A+.\u00a0 To those who dream that in such a referendum Gota (against 13A) will best Mahinda (for 13A, or 13A+), there is a simple answer from recent past: Sarath Fonseka.<\/p>\n

I am not suggesting that Mahinda Rajapaksa is going to do any of this.\u00a0 In fact, being too clever by half, he is trying to have it both ways \u2013 allowing the JHU to go on agitating against 13A and asking Douglas Devananda<\/a><\/span> to carry on campaigning for 13A.\u00a0 The 13th<\/sup> Amendment has become a political football that is conveniently kicked around, with the President constantly blowing the whistle and shifting the goal posts in every direction so that neither side can score!\u00a0 How long can this go on? Will the NPC election bring matters to a head?<\/p>\n

And the truth about the suffering Tamil half<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Tamils have their own same-side, national and transnational, football game over the Thirteenth Amendment, with the TNA playing the game in Sri Lanka mal-refereed by the President.\u00a0 The President has his permanent bench of Tamil \u2018reserves\u2019 with scars of infamy from either their association with the LTTE, or by their opposition to it, or both.\u00a0 So it is not surprising that the TNA\u2019s decision to contest the NPC election and its choice of Justice C.V. Wigneswaran<\/a><\/span> as the candidate for Chief Minister elicited a plethora of opinions in the Tamil political universe.\u00a0 Mr. Guruparan\u2019s piece in The Hindu<\/em> is among the more reasoned of the criticisms targeting the TNA and Mr. Wigneswaran.\u00a0 Some of the attacks on Wigneswaran are beyond the pale and many of them are mangled nonsense posted on the internet by maladjusted anonymities.\u00a0 These attacks add nothing to Tamil politics or to addressing the existential challenges facing the Tamil people in the North, but say everything about the attackers who have never put pen to paper in their life but can now post a pathetic paragraph on the internet to prop their own wormy self-esteem.<\/p>\n

The challenges facing the TNA and a potential TNA-led Northern Provincial Council with Wigneswaran as Chief Minister, are fundamentally different from the challenges that faced Tamil political leaders before the eruption of the \u2018Eelam wars\u2019, and the challenges that overwhelmed Tamil society during the \u2018war years\u2019.\u00a0 The challenges now are more fundamental in that they have to deal the postwar existential problems of the Tamil people in the Northern Province.\u00a0 The people are resourceful enough to keep running the only public institutions that ever flourished in Jaffna \u2013 schools, hospitals and places of worship, despite the severe physical damages that the war had inflicted on them.\u00a0 On the private side, retail commerce is holding its ground in the face of blatant intrusions by the Sri Lankan military.\u00a0 Farming and fishing the economic mainstays of the Province are still light years behind what they were before the war.<\/p>\n

A large number of people who were evacuated during the war have not been able to get their property back.\u00a0 Worse, the government and the military are on a land-grab mission in the land-starved Jaffna Peninsula.\u00a0 The affected people have petitioned the courts in the proper way, rather than sending postcards of complains that the de facto Chief Justice<\/a><\/span> had suggested as a way of symbolically opening the Supreme Court doors to the people after the Court had been forced to literally bang its door on his de jure predecessor.\u00a0 Even as Colombo is said to be basking in the shadow of a new statue for the late, lamented Sri Lankan patriot, Lakshman Kadirgamar, his son is petitioning the court to stop the government from seizing his father\u2019s ancestral property in Jaffna.<\/p>\n

The Sri Lankan courts have a stellar record in dealing with crimes and in adjudicating disputes between private parties, but a very tainted record when it comes to the equality of rights of the minorities, viz. the citizenship of the plantation workers, language rights, terrorism laws, North-East merger etc.\u00a0 The \u2018land cases\u2019 present a thorny dilemma to the hapless courts torn between the principles of justice and the expediency of Rajapaksa politics.\u00a0 Many, not just the petitioners, will be watching on which side the courts will land.\u00a0 And the courts will have to be watchful of a former brother Justice potentially commenting on their decision in his new capacity as an elected Chief Minister of the Province where the subject lands are located.\u00a0 All of this may be very exciting to political onlookers and judicial watchers, but the human anguish underlying the efforts of the petitioners to reclaim their rightful property must not be lost sight of.<\/p>\n

Much has also been said and written about provincial police powers.\u00a0 According to Mr. Guruparan, this is nothing more than shadow boxing for in reality, regardless of legal pettifogging, the police strings are firmly in the hands of the President and his brother Secretary.\u00a0 This is a national problem that has created different regimes for dealing with crime and deciding punishment.\u00a0 Some crimes are punished, some are ignored, and some may even be rewarded.\u00a0 The specific problem in the North and East, and it has always been following the police and military recruitment criteria developed under N.Q. Dias in the early 1960s, is that the people living in those provinces and the police and military personnel posted among them have no shared medium of communication. What has made it worse is the continuing expansion rather than the abatement of the military after the war in the Northern Province, in general, and in the Jaffna Peninsula in particular.\u00a0 If the army could do what it did in Weliweriya, in the South, it does not need much imagination to figure out the daily predicament of the people in the North.<\/p>\n

Possibilities and Options<\/strong><\/p>\n

That the government is to be blamed almost entirely for this postwar \u2018state of nature\u2019 in the North, is a no-brainer, but the practical question is how does one begin to transform this situation without making it worse for the people who are already suffering. \u00a0The victims of war \u2013 orphans, young widows, women and men without vision and\/or limbs – are a harrowingly large proportion of the population.\u00a0 They need redress now, and they cannot afford the luxury of self-determination for a future generation.\u00a0 There is a necessity to build an administrative platform, however rudimentary, for reconstruction and rehabilitation.\u00a0 There is an urgency to deal, not confrontationally, but firmly with the military governor and the intrusions of the army.\u00a0 There is a need for an elected leader to empathetically and purposefully mediate between the needs of the people in the North and the political powers in Colombo.\u00a0 And there is no alternative to start addressing these issues through the only political and administrative mechanism that is now available to the Tamil people.<\/p>\n

No one is assuming that any or all of these tasks can be successfully accomplished.\u00a0 In fact, the whole exercise may turn out to be a frustrating failure.\u00a0 But it is important to establish that the exercise failed because of the obduracy and the intransigence of the government.\u00a0 Establishing that failure is in itself a necessary political task in the context of both Sri Lankan politics and Tamil politics.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, and viewed positively, a TNA Provincial government in the North would create a new opportunity for President Rajapaksa and his government to undo the postwar misdoings and finally start the long neglected process of reconciliation.\u00a0 The two sides must start working on specific issues to find solutions rather than endlessly debating abstract generalities.\u00a0 The Rajapaksa government at the Centre may or may not respond positively to a TNA government in the North.\u00a0 But it would be wrong to blame the TNA for not boycotting the NPC election on the assumption that the Rajapaksa government will not do anything different after the election, or predictably will only make matters worse.\u00a0 That may well be, but sensible politics is not only about the art of the possible; it is also about exhausting all options.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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