{"id":130598,"date":"2014-09-21T00:00:42","date_gmt":"2014-09-20T18:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=130598"},"modified":"2014-09-27T13:20:38","modified_gmt":"2014-09-27T07:50:38","slug":"the-scotland-vote-and-sri-lanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-scotland-vote-and-sri-lanka\/","title":{"rendered":"The Scotland Vote And Sri Lanka"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Malinda Seneviratne<\/a><\/span>\u00a0–<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Malinda<\/a>

Malinda Seneviratne<\/p><\/div>\n

On the face of it, the referendum held last week<\/span><\/a> on the future of Scotland and therefore the future of the British union, has some relevance for Sri Lanka.\u00a0 After all it was about separation.\u00a0 This is why it excited the Eelamist commentariat.\u00a0 The fact that the Scottish people chose, by majority, to remain in the union need not dampen their enthusiasm because the \u2018unionists\u2019 bent over backwards to offer concessions and the \u2018losers\u2019 can demand that they deliver.<\/p>\n

The analogy applied to Sri Lanka would run on the following lines: \u2018Those in Tamil areas demand a referendum.\u00a0 If they win, that\u2019s Eelam on a platter. If they don\u2019t, they can prevail on Sri Lanka \u201cunionists\u201d to deliver on concessions pledged during the election campaign\u2019.\u00a0 In other words, a win-win situation.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where the comparison stops, though.\u00a0 In the first place what Scotland is to the British Isles is not what \u2018Eelam<\/span><\/a>\u2019 (as defined by the LTTE, TNA and others) is to Sri Lanka.\u00a0 More than half the Tamils in Sri Lanka live outside the boundaries of the Eelam Map.\u00a0 The \u2018traditional homeland\u2019 claim is at best dubious.\u00a0 Historical evidence doesn\u2019t support the contentions. Archaeological evidence rebels against such fantasies packaged as \u2018history\u2019.\u00a0 There was never \u2018annexing\u2019 by one party of another, apart from invasions from what is now South India and adventures by the land-grabbing likes of Velupillai Prabhakaran<\/span><\/a>. The lines have no basis in any history apart from the whims and fancies of a pen pusher in the British colonial government. There were no \u2018Tamil areas\u2019 which even the wildest imagination coincide with creative Eelamist cartography.<\/p>\n

But there are lessons to be drawn from the Scotland vote. \u00a0Thrishantha Nanayakkara<\/span><\/a> makes some valid points.\u00a0 First of all, he alerts us to the value of the main political parties (i.e. those that are not \u2018ethnic\u2019 or \u2018regional\u2019) having a strong footing across the country and among \u2018minority\u2019 groups.\u00a0 He observes that if conservatives and labor were not strong among Scots, Scotland would today be an independent country.<\/p>\n

There is a lesson there. Neither the SLFP-led UPFA nor the UNP have any support worth mentioning among Tamil voters in the Northern and Eastern Province.\u00a0 They\u2019ve gone in general for coalition options in elections. The inability to \u2018move\u2019 in the way Labor and Conservative have in Britain could stem from multiple factors.\u00a0 First there is a manifest reluctance to engage with Tamil nationalism in a civilized and democratic manner, especially when Tamil politicians adopted racist, chauvinistic and unreasonable political positions. The pernicious communalist lines adopted by many Tamil political entities have not helped either. They\u2019ve more often than not played to what could be called a primordial angst of that community at not having a \u2018country\u2019 that is Tamil-made of the by Tamils, with Tamils and for Tamils kind.\u00a0 In this respect, the Scottish National Party does not have a political equivalent among Tamil political groupings in Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n

Thrishantha points to \u2018a remarkable level of integrity and moral high ground that is associated with the SNP<\/span><\/a>\u2019. They did not feed a Scottish version of an embryonic LTTE the way the TULF and before them the Federal Party did in Sri Lanka.\u00a0 Indeed, the values of democracy and tolerance championed by the SNP found currency in the imagination of the Scottish polity; again something we have not seen in the Tamil community here in Sri Lanka. Perhaps this is why the Conservatives and Labor could sanction a referendum where they would naturally seek a preservation of the union.\u00a0 In Sri Lanka neither the main parties nor the \u2018separatist\u2019 have operated in a manner made for \u2018democratic-trust\u2019 if you will.<\/p>\n

Another interesting element in the Scottish vote that is relevant to Sri Lanka is the economics of resources and control of the same. Scotland is resource-rich in a way that would-be Eelam is not. The \u2018union\u2019 had a commercial stake in keeping Scotland in its folds. What Scotland would gain from remaining in the union is not too clear at this point.\u00a0 But in Sri Lanka \u2018resources\u2019 hardly constitute the heart of the matter. It is more about identity, belonging (or lack thereof) and also a convenient garb for problems that are not peculiar to the Tamil community.<\/p>\n

This is why when the TNA wants international observers present in the event of talks with the Government, it is logical to either reject it due to the bad experience with such \u2018facilitators\u2019 or to demand \u2018local observers\u2019 too for the TNA was after all the proxy of a terrorist organization and the people of THIS country have a far greater stake in observing negotiations than any non-Sri Lankan entity.\u00a0 The Scottish affair did not at any point require third-party presence but this was not on account of mutual distrust being absent.\u00a0 Different contexts, different modalities \u2013 it is as simple as that.<\/p>\n

Still, it is not enough to blame the TNA and the previous avatars<\/i> of Tamil communalism. The question of belonging has not been addressed in a manner that the Tamil community finds satisfactory. Grievance, perceived or real, deserves the \u2018grievance\u2019 tag and in a democratic polity there has to be space for articulation and address.\u00a0 This, more than anything else, will force everyone to substantiate claim and if this is not possible for such claims to be struck off the agenda. The weight of evidence is against the positions generally taken by Tamil nationalist elements at least to the extent that even devolution (forget separatism) to lines drawn by the British advantageous to expansionist visions of Tamil communalists is untenable.<\/p>\n

Indecent as the British have been over the past several centuries including that country\u2019s support of genocide by clinging to Washington\u2019s coattails, the way \u2018Scotland\u2019 was handled is of a kind that is far superior to how the political leaders of Sri Lanka engaged with (or refused to do so) with territory-based demands of Tamil nationalism.\u00a0 Now that\u2019s a plum that can be picked from the Scottish political pie.<\/p>\n

*Malinda Seneviratne is the Chief Editor of \u2018The Nation\u2019\u00a0and his articles can be found at\u00a0www.malindawords.blogspot.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":105560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-constitutional-reforms"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Scotland Vote And Sri Lanka - Colombo Telegraph<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-scotland-vote-and-sri-lanka\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Scotland Vote And Sri Lanka - Colombo Telegraph\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[…]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-scotland-vote-and-sri-lanka\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Colombo Telegraph\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-09-20T18:30:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-09-27T07:50:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/Malinda-Seneviratne-150x150.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"130\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"135\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"COLOMBO TELEGRAPH\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"COLOMBO TELEGRAPH\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-scotland-vote-and-sri-lanka\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-scotland-vote-and-sri-lanka\/\",\"name\":\"The Scotland Vote And Sri Lanka - 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