{"id":137295,"date":"2015-01-17T12:53:40","date_gmt":"2015-01-17T07:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=137295"},"modified":"2015-02-14T15:55:13","modified_gmt":"2015-02-14T10:25:13","slug":"beyond-5050","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/beyond-5050\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond 50:50"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dayan Jayatilleka<\/span><\/a> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka<\/p><\/div>\n

The jury is in on the Presidential election. Here\u2019s how it went down, according to an interesting source which can hardly be described as anti-Tamil, or Sinhala racist. Listen to Mr. Erik Solheim:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026The election victory was possible due to massive support from all Sri Lankan minorities. Mr. Rajapaksa won 90 out of 160 electoral districts and came out on top in nearly all Sinhala-dominated provinces. Mr. Rajapaksa roughly won the Sinhalese vote by 55 per cent. This was compensated for by Mr. Sirisena winning around 80 per cent of the Tamil vote and an even bigger share of Muslim votes. For this was payback time\u2026\u201d<\/strong> (\u2018Can The Unknown Angel Deliver?\u2019 Erik Solheim, the Hindu<\/em>, Jan 15th<\/sup>, 2015)<\/p>\n

So Mahinda Rajapaksa<\/span><\/a> indubitably won the majority of the majority of the island\u2019s citizens: 55% of 70%. He lost. The winner failed to win a majority of the majority. He won. To a great many, this structural asymmetry makes the mandate look and feel like a doughnut.<\/p>\n

Mr. MA Sumanthiran<\/span><\/a> a liberal and a moderate Tamil nationalist, spells it out still more clearly in the Sunday Leader<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis election has shown that Maithripala Sirisena\u2019s victory was assured by those people who are numerically in the minority and therefore the weight of their votes equal to the weight of the vote from the majority community.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is at the core of the larger argument which he rolls out as follows:<\/p>\n

\u201cBasically, the communities that are smaller in number must also have equal access to power. That is the whole issue of majoritarianism. This election has shown that Maithripala Sirisena<\/span><\/a>\u2019s victory was assured by those people who are numerically in the minority and therefore the weight of their votes equal to the weight of the vote from the majority community.<\/p>\n

What we expect is that people would be treated equally as equal citizens and that means even as communities, not as individuals, but collectively as different communities also people should have equal access to decision making processes and state powers. And we expect that this particular phenomenon of this election of those communities making the decisive vote would cause difference in approach and the government in power will be conscious that this is not a homogeneous society but consist of different people. As different people, we must build the nation together.\u201d (\u2018We All Gave to Accommodate Each Other\u2019, MA Sumanthiran, the Sunday Leader, <\/em>January 11th<\/sup>, 2015)<\/p>\n

What Mr. Sumanthiran is saying is very simple. The Tamil struggle is not for equal rights as citizens\u2014something which, by his airy dismissal, he implicitly concedes has already been achieved. It is for something else. It is for the political equality of the majority and the minority\/ minorities. How this can possibly be the case in a democracy one fails to understand. It must be said however, that Mr. Sumanthiran is not merely frank, but well within the tradition of Tamil nationalism and its pre-Independence claim of 50:50\u2014rejected by DS Senanayake\u2014namely that the combined minorities should have equal political weight, or a share of state power equal to the majority.<\/p>\n

What is startlingly clear is that at this presidential election 2015, the minorities achieved that outcome. They outweighed the political weight of the majority of the majority.<\/p>\n

Then there are the domestic geopolitical and geo-strategic dimensions of the electoral outcome as symbolized by the (post) electoral map. It sure reminds me of the crab-claw like Tamil Eelam map publicized by the EROS, the terrorist outfit that bombed Maradana in 1987 causing a large number of civilian casualties. That map was based not on the concept of ethnic Tamil nationhood but on that of the \u2018Tamil speaking people\u2019, which embraced the Northern and Eastern Tamils, the Muslims and the hill country Tamils of recent Indian origin.<\/p>\n

Little wonder then that Velupillai Prabhakaran<\/span><\/a>\u2019s staunchest ally in Tamil Nadu termed 9th<\/sup> January 2015 as the happiest day of his life: “Today is the happiest day in my life and every Tamil family is celebrating the fall of Mahinda Rajapaksa,” Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam general secretary Vaiko said in Thanjavur on Friday\u2026Mr. Vaiko claimed that Mr. Rajapaksa has been thrown out by Sri Lanka’s voters, with an overwhelming majority in the Tamil-dominated North and East going against him\u2026\u201d<\/strong> (\u2018It\u2019s the happiest day of My Life\u2019: Vaiko on Sri Lanka Poll Verdict, L. Renganathan, The Hindu<\/em>, January 9th<\/sup> 2015).<\/p>\n

Now none of this would really matter in a first world society in which the issue of national identity has been historically resolved for the most part. Not so in the far more unevenly developed ex-colonial societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America, still under hegemonic pressure from the West. Ideally it shouldn\u2019t matter in Sri Lanka either, but here\u2019s the rub. In the North and East which voted against Mahinda Rajapaksa, if a referendum were held tomorrow in which the question was \u201cIs your preference for President Sirisena or a separate Tamil Eelam?\u201d one isn\u2019t sure how the vote would turn out. (Well, to be honest, I am fairly sure how it would turn out.) Therefore, the problem is not that President Sirisena\u2019s victory was decided by the huge majorities in the North and East which is mainly Tamil speaking, or that those were revanchist <\/em>votes against Mahinda Rajapaksa rather than for Maithripala Sirisena but precisely because those areas have a dualistic, almost schizoid political identity\u2014one does not know whether or not they are committed to the single, indissoluble, indivisible, united, political community.<\/p>\n

The map of the election results corresponds uncannily not only to the Tamil Eelam map of the EROS, but more interestingly to the idea presented by the late Prof Samuel P. Huntington in his \u2018The Clash of Civilizations and the Re-making of World Order\u2019 He posited the grand thesis that the post-Cold War world would be driven not by ideologies or even national interest but by a clash of various civilizational constellations which he went on to itemize. This much is well-known. What is little known is his allied thesis of civilizational \u2018fault lines\u2019 and his contention that conflict takes place along the fault lines of various civilizational zones or systems.<\/p>\n

What is least known among local readers is that he made mention of Sri Lanka. He said that the conflict in Sri Lanka was on the \u2018fault line\u2019 between the Indic-Hindu civilizational zone or sphere of influence and the Buddhist civilizational zone or sphere of influence.<\/p>\n

What the map of the electoral result in Sri Lanka and the areas won by President Sirisena and outgoing President Rajapaksa corresponds to is pretty much the fault lines of the Indic-Hindu civilizational sphere of influence (the North and East, the plantations and in part, Colombo city) and the Buddhist sphere of civilizational influence on the island.<\/p>\n

Beginning with Lebanon in 1958 and in the 1970s, manifesting itself in Malaysia in the late \u201960s and currently sweeping through the Arab societies with Sunni-Shia minority\/majority composition, there is a mountain range of evidence of the polarizations caused by such asymmetries embedded in the power bases of regimes, compounded by such uneven domestic geopolitical patterning and cross-border interfacing, and accentuated by the centrifugal dynamics of weakened central state structures. With the abolition or drastic truncation of the executive presidential system (\u201clook Ma, I shrunk the State\u201d), and the kaleidoscopic process of political re-composition that is already underway, the convergence of these factors on the North-South\/external-internal axis of Sri Lanka\u2019s politics may transmute into irreconcilable \u201cantagonistic contradictions\u201d which President Sirisena, an ex-Maoist will surely need all his old knowledge of Maoist philosophy to \u201ccorrectly handle\u201d.<\/p>\n

Just as the removal of the civic rights of Madam Sirimavo Bandaranaike<\/span><\/a> did not help the stability of the system or sustained economic growth in the 1980s and indeed shunted the contradictions onto extra-systemic lines, both ethnic and ideological, any vicious act of framing Mahinda Rajapaksa for a ridiculous putsch attempt will not help bridge the deficit in the new administration\u2019s mandate. Notwithstanding the co-optation of the SLFP MPs, the JVP and the JHU as a protective body armor around an essentially UNP government now in unelected occupation of Temple Trees, such a myopic move will only add to the systemic and structural sources of instability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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