By: Siva SivapragasamThis article is being published in commemoration of Late Kumar Ponnambalam’s Birth Anniversary which falls this month.
“Why is this age worse than earlier ages?
In a stupor of grief and dread
Have we not fingered the foulest wounds
And left them unhealed by our hands?” -Anna Akhmatova, Russian Poet
Kumar Ponnambalam was the proud son of a more proud father.
Kumar’s brutal killing by an assassin’s bullet was indeed a tragic loss to the Sri Lankan Tamil community and it stifled the independent voice of a leader who expressed his opinions without fear or favour.
My association with Kumar dates fifty years ago when we were both schoolmates at Royal College, the prestigious educational institution in Sri Lanka. As a youngster, Kumar was a non-assertive, shy boy quite often smiling away at the school boy pranks of his fellow mates. But even at the tender age of ten, he displayed a certain amount of forthrightness and frankness in whatever he spoke or said. It is perhaps these traits in his character that blossomed in later years of his life as a lawyer and politician. His father the late G.G.Ponnambalam, the silvery tongued orator and brilliant criminal lawyer cum politician, was the founder champion of the Tamil cause with his famous political slogan of the fifty-fifty campaign, a cry for equal representation for the Tamil minorities in the Legislature. This had its effect in the classroom when Kumar was nicknamed “fifty fifty” by his Math teacher “Conner Rasa”.
In later years, Kumar once told me that he was unaware at his young age what this “fifty-fifty” was, and he gathered guts to ask Appu (fondly referred by him of his father) what was all this fuss about “fifty fifty”. The little lecture the son received from the patriarch was perhaps the foundation on which he built his political career and understanding of Sri Lanka’s chequered political history .Ponnambalam Snr. was so wedded to this fifty-fifty theory that he put forward this political dogma before the Soulbury Commission on constitution making and laboured for two long days to prove his point This is reminiscent of what the powerful and controversial former Indian Defense Miinister Krishna Menon did when he championed India’s cause for hours before the United Nations General Assembly on the Kashmir issue.(incidentally, Menon, who was running a high temperature when he spoke, slumped in his chair after the marathon speech and was wheeled out of the U.N.Assembly rostrum-(source:Krishna Menon by T.J.S.George)
History is now repenting that reasonable requests of minorities in a multi-racial country had been ignored at an early stage and now resulting in much bloodshed and almost a parting of the ways for the two communities. Astute political leaders like Dr.Colvin R.De Silva and Mr.S.J.V.Chelvanayagam were prophetic when they remarked in the Legislature on more than one occasion that if reasonable requests of minorities are not granted it could well lead to more drastic demands which can end up in requests for a separate state. Unfortunately we have now reached that stage in Sri Lanka’s troubled and chequered political history.
Kumar’s tragic death is in a way a reflection of violence in politics for differences in opinion and political thinking. Perhaps his boldness and frankness in his thoughts, speeches and writings made him pay the supreme sacrifice with his life. It is very unfortunate that our politicians have not arisen to a level to at least give the opponents their right to differ in thinking. The great French philosopher Voltaire once remarked “I may differ from what the other man says but will defend till death his right to say it”. Kumar’s contribution to the Tamil community and political thinking is that he expressed his thoughts publicly in a forthright and frank manner. Whether we agree with his thinking or not is a different question. Speaking from the capital, in an environment of fear psychosis, among the minority community, he did not mince his words or camouflage his thinking when it came to espousing the cause of his community’s rights and obligations.
Kumar’s loss to the community at this juncture of its history is both tragic and irreparable. Let us sincerely and truthfully hope that his cherished vision of fair and just rights for his community will one day come true in the near future. The future pages of History will only reveal that .In conclusion it could be said that ‘His life was gentle, the elements were so mixed in him that Nature would stand up and say-This was a man’.
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