The Appapillai Amirthalingam Eightieth Birth-anniversary Memorial Lecture ',A Time for Tamil Introspection and Reassessment in the midst of Myth and Propaganda '; delivered by Prof. S, Ratnajeevan Hoole on London, 26 August, 2007Chairman Sir, Madam Amirthalingam, Mr. V. Anandasangaree, Distinguished Guests, Friends: It behoves me to begin this talk by first thanking the Organizing Committee and the family of the late Hon. Appapillai Amirthalingam, the onetime Leader of the Opposition in Sri Lanka, for honoring me by inviting me to be the speaker today. I am as humbled as I am beholden.
While this is a memorial talk and not one on Mr. Amirthalingam himself, please permit me to digress a little as seems fitting, to say a few things personally about Mr. Amirthalingam and the Federal Party that he so ably led in dark and difficult times.
I make bold to speak here on this occasion because given the times in which I grew up, the Federal Party or FP is part of my make up and being. My family has for long been associated with the FP. The late M. Tiruchelvam, Neelan Tiruchelvam, Uduvil Dharmalingam, C. Vanniasingham, and Kopay Kaithavetpillai were all relations of sorts. SJV Chelvanayagam’s niece Samathanam Muthiah married my uncle Peter Somasundaram who was an FP Member of the Jaffna Municipal Council. My uncle, the late K. Nesiah, was one of the principal civilians who prevailed upon the FP and the Tamil Congress (TC) to merge into the Tamil United Front, which later became the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF).
As a tribute to the great leaders of the FP and for old times’ sake, I would like to go through the members of Parliament listed in this old 1960 calendar, under Mr. S.J.V. Chelvanayagam:
1. Mr. Rasmananickam, President
2.Mr Rajavarothayam M.P. Trincomalee
3. Mr Amirathalingam M.P. Vaddukottai
4. Dr.E.M.V. Naganathan M.P. Nallur
5. Mr.V.N. Navaratnam M.P. Chavakacheri
6. Mr. Balasundaram M.P. Kopay
7. Mr Sivasundaram Kilinochchi.
8. Mr Thurairatnam M.P. Point Pedro
9. Mr Ehamparam M.P. Muthoor.
10. Mr Manikavasakar M.P. Kalkuda
11. Mr. Dhramalingam M.P. Uduvil
12. Mr V.A.Kandiah M.P. Kayts
13. Mr Alahakone M.P. Mannar (I remember his speaking to the Mannar GA with authority at a meeting while I was a school boy in the GA’s bungalow listening on. MPs those days were men of confidence. Among today’s MPs, I have seen Mr. R. Sambanthan commanding similar respect among Sinhalese and those in authority.)
14. Mr Ahamad, M.P.Kalmunai
15. Mr.C. Rajadurai M.P. Batticaloa
After the settled Dudley regime, which saw the FP in cabinet, we enter the era when I as a youth came into contact with Mr. Amirthalingam. His leadership of the FP was then becoming more obvious as SJV Chelvanayagam aged.
The new United Left Front government came into office in May 1970. Shortly thereafter the first university admissions were announced. These were to Peradeniya’s Faculty of Engineering. Previously out of the 150 vacancies, Tamils got 75 or so places. This time due to some sudden quirk, there were 103 Tamil medium students and only 30 Sinhalese medium students. The rest were the last English medium students. A campaign was begun in the South and our admissions were suspended.
What is relevant here is that the Mahnavar Peravai was born. All Jaffna schools joined in street demonstrations. It is significant that the demonstrations were not elsewhere. Waragoda – a Sub-Inspector (SI) – was noted for his uncontrolled violence. It was believed he was on punishment transfer in Jaffna as if to say “If your psychotic disposition compels you to beat up people, go and beat up Tamils.” Waragoda beat us up at the demonstration. Lucky, my classmate and a very happy fellow with a perpetual smile had been mauled. People like Sivakumaran were involved. Late in August 1970, a brother of mine, two friends and I were badly assaulted by Waragoda while cycling down Kachcheri-Nallur Road. Apparently some youth had passed comments on girls going to the Nallur Thiruvila and their parents had complained to the police. Waragoda jumped at the opportunity to thump a few more Tamil boys in the area as an example. My father was quite upset. We called up the Tamil Superintendent of Police (SP) to say we were coming to make a complaint. He, the author of a recent article in Tamil Week glorifying the peacefulness of his era in Jaffna, told us not to come to him because, if we came to him, he would need to take action! His very own words! He suggested that we go to the Officer-in-Charge, OIC Sivendran, who was till recently writing a Colombo column on rugger in the newspapers. Sivendran was very courteous and even sympathetic for he knew well his officer Waragoda. But it was obvious that our recorded complaint would go nowhere.
That was when the FP was consulted. My father and Uncle Nesiah consulted Mr. Kaithiravetpillai and Mr. Amirthalingam. It was determined that, in the absence of action by the SP, a private plaint would be filed by me against Waragoda for assault and battery. Retired District Judge Thambithurai of the FP and of Thinnavely volunteered his services on behalf of the FP. It is worth remarking that Mr. Thambithurai’s son Kumar of the Tamil Eelam liberation Organisation (TELO) was the first Tamil to get political asylum in the US. His grand-daughter is married to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or the LTTE’s Rudrakumaran.
In the event, after several court appearances we were thwarted as lawyer Rasa Viswanathan ably defended Waragoda against me, calling me all kinds of names. Despite several court dates, the case was never heard as hearings were postponed using a note from the Tamil SP claiming that Waragoda could not be present because of emergency duty at Elephant Pass. It was a time when, in the FP frame of mind, particularly for the Peravai, the three relations GG Ponnambalam of the TC, Alfred Duraiyappah of the SLFP and the SP were the agents of the state, traitors advancing personal well-being through cooperation with the state.
Alfred Duraiyappah, a politician with a significant following in Jaffna, had barely lost to C.X. Martyn who was elected in the 1970 general elections but he was still Mayor of Jaffna. He was working with Mrs. B. to build up the SLFP in Jaffna. His trick was to get a monopoly on bicycle tyre sales though the Coop. Everyone who needed a tyre – that is almost every male in Jaffna – had to go to the Mayor for a permit which was duly given on giving Rs. 2 and signing the SLFP membership form. As party membership swelled, Mrs. B. thought he was really building up her party and sent more and more perks for distribution through him. I too went to him and queued up at the municipality in desperation and the Mayor, a master at personal relations, greeted me thus: “Hello young Hoole! What can I do for you?” He immediately gave me a permit without asking me to sign the party membership, even though he knew me as from a family not in his camp. In another instance, he gave a lift to a person who had written against him and instead of quarrelling with him, simply asked him with a smile to be kind to him the next time he wrote. I suppose that is how the gracious Mayor won over many people and always had a good third of the people of Jaffna behind him. With the rest of Jaffna divided between the FP and the TC, he always had a good shot at being MP for Jaffna as well as Mayor.
It is no secret that Alfred was seen as a traitor by many, while a good number believed that he represented the Tamils well by steering a non-confrontational course. It is difficult to dispute that when Alfred was Mayor he developed the city (and perhaps as his defenders would say, ate a little of the hay much like a threshing bull) – I say this because when the FP was in charge of the city, we made good thundering speeches about Tamil freedom and did little about bread and butter issues like pipe borne water for the city and the new market that Alfred was so good at.
With volcanic student anger now mounting against the SLFP, its offices were broken up several times by the Peravai. On one such occasion, after the SLFP Office was broken up, the police suspected that Sivakumaran and party were sheltering at the FP office. It was the first time I had seen Mr. Amirthalingam in action. A police SI pointing a submachine gun and men to back him up came storming to the FP office. Mr. Amirthalingam, on hearing the commotion, stood there unmoving, holding his right hand across the doorway in his hallmark verty, the Tamil kurta and his neatly folded chahlvai. The policeman with his armed party behind wanted entry to search the premises for suspects. “Where is your search warrant?” demanded Mr. Amirthalingam in his booming voice. “Move or I will shoot,” replied the policeman very threateningly. “Over my dead body!,” thundered back Mr. Amirthalingam with absolutely no concern for his safety. The policeman was visibly flustered. He left shouting several threats. It is a moment I can never forget. My whole face and torso literally tingled with pride then, given how we felt about the iniquitous treatment we were getting as a people and how we felt about the police.
It was strange times in a strange nationalist mindset those days. For example while asking for the right of the Tamil people to be free, as a party we always made speeches in parliament with little sympathy for the Palestinians in similar plight. Mr. V.N. Navaratnam a fine and great gentleman whom I accompanied to his lecture at University of Pennsylvania after the riots, would hold forth in Parliament on behalf of the FP in favour of Israel. Ariam, a founding leader of the Peravai with Sathialeelan – both of them are disillusioned and abroad today – was in close contact with the Israelis and went about with piles of magazines from them on how Jaffna could be made to boom agriculturally. At that time we were all enraged by the government and admired Israel. Though we were fighting for liberation based on liberal principles, here we were oblivious to the rights of the Palestinians! – I suppose because the Israelis were a small group in the vast Middle East showing how powerful a minority could be, we took vicarious pleasure in Israel’s might.
Where I actually got to know Mr. Amirthalingam personally was at the Tamil Conference in Nanuet, NY after the 1983 riots. His description of the happenings in Jaffna and Colombo was clinical and without exaggeration. Numbers relating to Tamil victims he mentioned were well below the numbers mentioned by expatriate Tamils. Mr. Amirthalingam mentioned 2000 dead in the riots besides 200 killed by the forces in Jaffna after the bomb blast, while the expatriates had previously mentioned “thousands upon thousands” before a Senator. Anyone listening to his account, despite the total lack of exaggeration, still came away with a clear idea of the huge enormity that had been visited upon us Tamils. The Tamil organizers of the event though were hostile to him and Mr. Sivasithambaram. The organizers worked through youth from Germany to attack the TULF at the conference, calling for a full push for Eelam. Nowhere was the chasm between US Tamils and the Sri Lankan Tamil leadership more evident than at this conference. The organizers from the Ilangaith Thamil Changam who had donated more than $10,000 each for the conference wore purple ribbons on their lapels proclaiming their wealth. Invitees from India and Sri Lanka including our leaders, some refugees in India and students who could not pay the registration fee, were given yellow ribbons announcing their pauper-like status. When the organizers, in showing off their new loyalties and identity, called for a toast for Eelam at the conference, Mr. Amirthalingam and Mr. Sivasithambaram, did not rise but sat through stoically looking at the floor, seated with their arms folded across their chests, as the others stood and raised their glasses of liquor. Mr. Amirthalingam’s objection I found out was not to Eelam but the use of liquor in a Tamil function, showing the widening chasm between the local and overseas leaderships.
To be continued …….
About Lecture, S. Ratnajeevan Hoole, Scholar Rescue Fund Fellow, Institute of International Education, New York, NY Drexel University, Philadelphia and former Vice Chancellor in University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka
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