“Backed by escalating Jaffna-centric violence the politics adumbrated in the Vadukoddai Resolution attained the status of the gospel truth. The writing of history was taken away from the independent scholars in the pre-politicized era and ethnicized by the new privatized schools mushrooming in NGOs.”
Read Part II
(August 23, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) The cynical use of Tamil civilians by the Tamil leadership to serve their political ends is a stark fact of the dark side of the Jaffna political culture. The Sansoni Commission report on the riots of 1977 documents how Appapillai Amirthalingam, the leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front, who was projected as a “moderate”, had secret links with the Tamil Tigers in provoking the riots. In 1982 Prof. A. J. Wilson (cited earlier) outlined the callous tactics of the Tamil extremists to provoke the lower-level leadership of the Sinhalese to attack the Tamils in the south for the northern leadership to gain political mileage.
Nothing has change since then. The latest Amnesty International report confirms this primitive trend of the Tamil leadership to sacrifice their people for the survival of the one-man regime run by Velupillai Prabhakaran. The BBC summary of the report states:
"The Tamil Tigers are keeping them (the Tamil people in Vanni seeking safe havens from the war advancing into Tiger territory) in harm's way and the government is not doing enough to ensure they receive essential assistance."
“Amnesty accused the Tamil Tigers of imposing a pass system - and in some cases forcing family members to stay behind - so that other family members would come back to areas under rebel control.
"These measures seem designed in part to use civilians as a buffer against government forces - a serious violation of international humanitarian law. The Tamil Tigers have also engaged in forced recruitment," the Amnesty report said. (BBC – August 15, 2009)
Going back in time to feudal and colonial times, authoritative archival reports reveal the manner in which the Vellahala upper-caste, operating behind the cadjan curtains, imposed its casteist terror on the lower-castes to retain their feudal and colonial status, privileges and power. The ubiquitous cadjan curtains in Jaffna symbolized the nature of the closed society in Jaffna that kept the non-Vellahla “outsiders” (including the low-castes) out. (See Dutch and British administrative reports).
The intrinsic characteristics of the insular peninsula caste/class refusing to open its doors to the influences of modernity, pluralism, democracy, liberalism (Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan, fiercely opposed the political empowerment of the low-castes through universal franchise proposed by the Donoughmore Commission of 1929) established the consolidation communalism in mainstream politics. In Jaffna extreme Vellahala casteism struggling to retain its dominance over the “other” morphed into extreme communalism. No other ideology was allowed to take root in Jaffna by the Vellahlas. Communalism was the ideology that replaced casteism. Casteism was institutionalized internally, with the blessings of Hindu ideology, to exclude the lower-castes. Communalism was directed externally to keep the other communities from inter-acting and blending with the Jaffna Tamils and dismantling the grip of the Vellahlas on Jaffna society. This retrograde step of clinging on to Tamil communalism was also the main means of the dominant Vellahala caste (53%) to survive in competing electoral politics. Rival political leaders accused and castigated Jaffna leaders who were cooperating with the southern leaders. G.G. Ponnambalam was labeled as a “traitor” who sold out the interests of the Tamils to the Sinhalese by S. J. V. Chelvanayakam and Chelvanayakam was accused of being a “collaborator” by Ponnambalam when the TULF joined the Dudley Senanayake government in 1965-1970. Raising the communal cry helped to kill the Tamil opponents through the ballot in the pre-1976 period. In the post-1976 period the communal politics was raised to label the Tamils as “traitors” and kill them with bullets. Prabhakaran began his career by assassinating mild-mannered, unarmed Alfred Duraiyappah for his political role of being the SLFP organizer for Jaffna. The bottom line is that those who had hopes of co-existing peacefully with other communities were eliminated, either through the ballot or bullet.
The unrelenting commitment to Jaffna communalism (Jane Russell) which was later described as “sub-nationalism” or “Tamil nationalism” has been the hidden side of Jaffna politics. It escaped the kind of scrutiny that combed the south with fine teeth. Hiding Jaffna-centric politics, based on casteism and communalism, was a means to keep the image of the Vellahala caste clean. Ironically, the Vellahalas categorized and dismissed their oppression of the low-castes as a “minority problem” – meaning the minority of the low-castes as opposed to the majority of the Vellahlas. Internally, they rejoiced and pursued their politics as the dominant majority. But when the Vellahalas took their demands to the world they categorized their problem as “the minority” problem caused by the majority Sinhalese. So the term “minority” was used with different emphases and meanings to suit their political needs. Inside Jaffna the term “minority” was used derogatively to put down their low-castes. Outside Jaffna they used the term “minority” to make them look like the saintly victims of the Sinhala majority.
This is how the critical term “minority” was used to the advantage of the most privileged community in Jaffna. The national political vocabulary was loaded with meanings injected by the Vellahalas that would hide their sins and advance the peninsular political agenda. The vocabulary was tailored to dove-tail neatly into the Vellahla agenda and the tragedy that ensued flowed directly from the left-wing, right-wing and even centrist accepting the vocabulary and the Jaffna-centric agenda uncritically. Any study of the crisis will reveal that the ideologues, intellectuals, academics have never deviated far from the vocabulary or the agenda set by the Vellahala elite who wrote the Vadukoddai Resolution. Their closed minds never bothered to peep inside the cadjan curtain to examine critically the hidden northern forces that operated internally to worsen the external relations with the south.
The world was shown only the Gandhian face and not the pistol packed inside the Vadukoddai Resolution. Even at Gandhian sit-ins the Tamil organizers were distributing wooden pistols. Though the Illankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi (Tamil State Party) was masquerading as a Federal Party the organizers were distributing stamps of the future Eelam to the participants in sit-ins. The ideology and the political machinations were directed strategically towards the creation of a separate state. The Vellahlas were whipping up anti-Sinhala extremism among the youth to ride on their backs to power. In the end they were hoisted by their own petard. They never expected power to slip from their hands into the militant youth from the low castes. This was the fatal mistake they made when they passed the Vadukoddai Resolution endorsing violence. They were in command as long as they kept their politics within parliamentary parameters. Power slipped out of their hands the day after they endorsed violence and asked the youth to take up arms.
This is also the fundamental difference between the Jaffna political culture and that of the Muslims and the Indian Tamils. The Muslim and the Indian Tamil leadership survived because they did not take their people down the path of violence. Violence demands a radical kind of leadership that would ineluctably go against the ruling conservative elite trying to preserve the ancien regime. The natural tendency of the radical youth is to take power into their hands if they are empowered with violence. And the rest is history. The Vellahla leadership paid with their dear lives for handing over the tools of violence by passing the Vadukoddai Resolution. The children born out of the Vadukoddai Resolution did not hesitate to kill the fathers who drafted and passed it in 1976 in Vadukoddai – the electorate of S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the father of separatism,
After 1976 what was visible on the surface in Jaffna was the changing of the guard, from the Vellahla caste to the Karaiyar lower-caste, without any change in the traditional, underlying and over-determining processes of the Hindu-Vellahla fascist culture. There was no fundamental difference in the denial of the basic rights under the oppressive ideologies of Hindu (Saivite) casteism or the cult of the “Sun God” claiming to be the “the sole representative of the Tamils”. Both ideologies relied primarily on fascist authoritarianism. The casteist fascism of the Vellahlas was as oppressive and cruel as the fascism of the “Sun God”. To cover-up the crimes of the Jaffna leadership against their own people the Vellahalas turned the rising wrath of the lower-castes towards communalism. They were quick to exploit principles of modern liberal theories to demonize the Sinhala majority, invoking justice for minorities (meaning only the Jaffna elite and not the other minorities like the Muslims, the Batticoloa Tamils, including their lower-castes. It is logical for Karuna Amman from the east to break away from the north accusing the Jaffna Tamil leadership of discriminating against them. The Indian Tamils too were kept far apart as “coolies” except when they found their numbers useful to boost the Tamil electoral clout. It was useful to have greater numbers even if they came from the despised “coolies”. Tiger ideologues and their predecessors, advocating justice for the Jaffna Tamils, were primarily using the fashionable political theories against the Sinhalese not because they were genuinely committed to liberate their own people from the shackles of feudal casteism or political oppression of the “sole representative of the Tamils” but as politically expedient tools to demonize the majority and win sympathy for the most oppressive systems in Sri Lankan history. For instance, the Tigers are the first to invoke principles of international humanitarian law without having any compunction in committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Jaffna became the most favourite haven of the Vellahla elite because that was the only space on earth which accepted their oppressive Hindu-casteist culture as the ruling ideology. This enabled them to reign supreme as the uncrowned kings over their oppressed people. If the Jaffna Tamils found a sense of equality it was in the south where caste distinctions did not matter. The culture war was between the Hindu-casteist ideology and the open and liberal Buddhist culture of the south. The Jaffna Tamils found the open space in the south too disruptive. It was a serious threat to maintain their monolithic casteist culture that had dominated Jaffna in feudal and colonial times. The south was liberal, democratic, tolerant, open-ended and inviting. The north was intolerant, ill-liberal, authoritarian, closed and uninviting. The cosmopolitan culture of the south broke down caste-barriers and absorbed them as a part of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society. It was so infectious that S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the father of separatist extremism, refused to buy a house in Colombo fearing that his children would be swept away by the liberal, open and tempting culture. (A. J. Wilson – biography of his father-in-law, Chelvanayakam.)
Separatism was seen primarily as a political means of the southern forces threatening to dismantle their casteist castles. Bryan Ffafenberger, the American sociologist from Virginia University, argues that S. W. R.D. Bandaranaike’s Prevention of Social Disabilities Act, 1959, which was aimed at dismantling the entrenched caste system of Jaffna, was detested more than the Sinhala Only Act. He labels Prof. C. Suntheralingam, a “cast fanatic” who fought tooth and nail, to protect the sanctity of the Hindu-casteist ideology. The infiltration of legal, administrative and political forces from the south, were undermining the casteist regime in the north. Communalism was a defensive mechanism to contain the invasions of disruptive forces from the south. They had no other ideology to combat the impact of southern waves of modernity eroding their sand castles of feudal casteism. Casteism had gone past its use by date. Jaffna was rearing to break away from the shackles of oppressive casteism. It was a force that could not be broken down with legislation, administrative fiats and political movements. A violent force was necessary to deracinate Vellahlaism. Eventually, the Vellahlas produced their own grave-diggers when their communal ideology, manufactured to retain their grip on Jaffna, produced the Vadukoddai Resolution. Velupillai Prabhakaran is the monster that came out of the womb of this Resolution. To the credit of Prabhakaran it must be conceded that his greatest achievement is in breaking down the Vellahla grip and radicalizing Jaffna. His greatest flaw is in replacing Vellahla fascism with his own brand of fascism.
Insular isolationism was also a necessary requirement for the extremist political culture of Jaffna which was institutionalized and managed at the top by the Vellahlas to retain their feudal and colonial privileges. But modernity was banging on the closed cadjan gates. The more the forces of modernity – liberalism, Marxism, even shades of Gandhism, Ambedkhar-style Buddhism, market forces etc., – attacked its entrenched position the more the Vellahlas resorted to communalism as the only means of keeping the fragmenting peninsula politics, under increasing pressures of caste infighting, within their fold. (Bryan Ffafenberger). When, for instance, the Marxist, liberal forces joined with the low-castes to bring down the Vellahla barriers at the Maviddipuram Temple the Tamil State Party went into a hibernating silence on this issue, fearing that it would upset the majority Vellahlas. Their response was to intensify the attacks on the Sinhalese to divert attention from the internal divisions. Blaming the Sinhalese for all their problems was the only excuse they had to cover-up their sins against their own people.
The pro-peninsula ideologues fell hook, line and sinker for this blame-the-Sinhalese-for-everything platform concocted by the Jaffna elite. One of the remarkable characteristics of the ideologues and their punditry is the uncritical acceptance of this one-sided account of the modern history without balancing it with the forces that came down from the north and collided head-on with the south. The NGOs, the left-wing academics, and pro-Tamil theoreticians followed the political agenda written by the Tamil State Party in the late forties and early fifties. Though these ideologues came from different angles they never failed to merge at the central point of the political agenda of the Tamil State Party which blamed only the majority Sinhalese. They began to write new histories based on the fundamentals laid down by the Tamil State Party. The left-wing historian, Erik Hobsbawm, referred to the political manifesto of the Tamil State Party written in the forties-fifities and scoffed at it as a crude manifestation of “nationalism”. The essence of this re-written history was summarized in the Vaddukoddai Resolution. The upshot of both – the Tamil State Party manifesto and the Vaddukoddai Resolution – was to produce a whole new gang of ideologues who depended solely on this to for their doctoral theses, newspaper columns, seminars, lectures etc. They were basically carbon copies of the Vadukoddai Resolution and the Tamil State Party manifesto dressed up as the latest “research”.
Backed by escalating Jaffna-centric violence the politics adumbrated in the Vadukoddai Resolution attained the status of the gospel truth. The writing of history was taken away from the independent scholars in the pre-politicized era and ethnicized by the new privatized schools mushrooming in NGOs. Even the incontrovertible monograph written by the foremost Sri Lankan historian, Prof. K. M. de Silva, debunking the myths of a separate homeland, was overshadowed by the overwhelming outpourings from the pro-Jaffna Tamil lobbies. The traditional school of history, which derived its force from the culture of ancient and medieval achievements of the Sinhala-Buddhists, written mainly as anti-colonial politics, and later the Marxist class interpretations (in very rudimentary from) of history, gave way to the manufactured history of the northern Tamil State Party that was encapsulated in the Vadukoddai Resolution. Despite the intermingling, the inter-penetration of both cultures cross-pollinating each other, to co-exist in relative harmony down the passage of time the politicized/ethnicized history was written into the the Vadukoddai Resolution to fit the new separatist agenda of the Tamil State Party. It began by announcing the fiction that from “the dawn of time” the land was divided into two separate entities by the two communities. Ethnicity and not the class war, or the orthodox interpretations of the pre-politicized phase, became the over-riding theme of the social scientists. After “1983” they were looking for theoretical explanations and they were alarmed that there were no theoretical tools to explain the new phenomenon of ethnicity, or the Jaffna Tamil politics that had leapt from the periphery to dominate the centre stage. (Radhika Coomaraswamy)
So the re-writing of history began as a new industry in the privatized schools of NGOs and the American school led by S. J. Tambiah. This new industry not only helped to propagate the political agenda outlined in the Vadukoddai Resolution but also helped to advance the careers of academics like de Votta, H.L.Seneviratne, C. R. De Silva, who were recycling Tambiah’s anti-Sinhala Buddhist propaganda dished out as scholarly “research”. They were joined by the academic mafia in the Colombo University like Kumari Jayawardena and the lumpen Marxist, Jayadeva Uyangoda (alias Marthelis, alias “OOOO-mahathya”). Kumari Jayawardene even provided the raw material for Tambiah’s blinkered view of Sinhala-Buddhists. All this was politicized research. And as any respectable academic would concede all research is political. The uniformity with which all of them ganged up against Sinhala-Buddhists amounted to ideological fanaticism. They never explained how a crisis of the magnitude seen in Sri Lanka could explode only with the sound of one hand. They were not only blind in one eye but also without the vital hand that could provide the missing sound that could project a comprehensive and rounded meaning to the events which are still exploding around us.
To be continued.
( H.L.D.Mahindapala: Editor, Sunday and Daily Observer (1990 - 1994). President, Sri Lanka Working Journalists' Association (1991 -1993). Secretary-General, South Asia Media Association (1993 -1994). He has been featured as a political commentator in Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Special Broadcasting Services and other mainstream TV and radio stations in Australia.)
- Sri Lanka Guardian
Read Part II
(August 23, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) The cynical use of Tamil civilians by the Tamil leadership to serve their political ends is a stark fact of the dark side of the Jaffna political culture. The Sansoni Commission report on the riots of 1977 documents how Appapillai Amirthalingam, the leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front, who was projected as a “moderate”, had secret links with the Tamil Tigers in provoking the riots. In 1982 Prof. A. J. Wilson (cited earlier) outlined the callous tactics of the Tamil extremists to provoke the lower-level leadership of the Sinhalese to attack the Tamils in the south for the northern leadership to gain political mileage.
Nothing has change since then. The latest Amnesty International report confirms this primitive trend of the Tamil leadership to sacrifice their people for the survival of the one-man regime run by Velupillai Prabhakaran. The BBC summary of the report states:
"The Tamil Tigers are keeping them (the Tamil people in Vanni seeking safe havens from the war advancing into Tiger territory) in harm's way and the government is not doing enough to ensure they receive essential assistance."
“Amnesty accused the Tamil Tigers of imposing a pass system - and in some cases forcing family members to stay behind - so that other family members would come back to areas under rebel control.
"These measures seem designed in part to use civilians as a buffer against government forces - a serious violation of international humanitarian law. The Tamil Tigers have also engaged in forced recruitment," the Amnesty report said. (BBC – August 15, 2009)
Going back in time to feudal and colonial times, authoritative archival reports reveal the manner in which the Vellahala upper-caste, operating behind the cadjan curtains, imposed its casteist terror on the lower-castes to retain their feudal and colonial status, privileges and power. The ubiquitous cadjan curtains in Jaffna symbolized the nature of the closed society in Jaffna that kept the non-Vellahla “outsiders” (including the low-castes) out. (See Dutch and British administrative reports).
The intrinsic characteristics of the insular peninsula caste/class refusing to open its doors to the influences of modernity, pluralism, democracy, liberalism (Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan, fiercely opposed the political empowerment of the low-castes through universal franchise proposed by the Donoughmore Commission of 1929) established the consolidation communalism in mainstream politics. In Jaffna extreme Vellahala casteism struggling to retain its dominance over the “other” morphed into extreme communalism. No other ideology was allowed to take root in Jaffna by the Vellahlas. Communalism was the ideology that replaced casteism. Casteism was institutionalized internally, with the blessings of Hindu ideology, to exclude the lower-castes. Communalism was directed externally to keep the other communities from inter-acting and blending with the Jaffna Tamils and dismantling the grip of the Vellahlas on Jaffna society. This retrograde step of clinging on to Tamil communalism was also the main means of the dominant Vellahala caste (53%) to survive in competing electoral politics. Rival political leaders accused and castigated Jaffna leaders who were cooperating with the southern leaders. G.G. Ponnambalam was labeled as a “traitor” who sold out the interests of the Tamils to the Sinhalese by S. J. V. Chelvanayakam and Chelvanayakam was accused of being a “collaborator” by Ponnambalam when the TULF joined the Dudley Senanayake government in 1965-1970. Raising the communal cry helped to kill the Tamil opponents through the ballot in the pre-1976 period. In the post-1976 period the communal politics was raised to label the Tamils as “traitors” and kill them with bullets. Prabhakaran began his career by assassinating mild-mannered, unarmed Alfred Duraiyappah for his political role of being the SLFP organizer for Jaffna. The bottom line is that those who had hopes of co-existing peacefully with other communities were eliminated, either through the ballot or bullet.
The unrelenting commitment to Jaffna communalism (Jane Russell) which was later described as “sub-nationalism” or “Tamil nationalism” has been the hidden side of Jaffna politics. It escaped the kind of scrutiny that combed the south with fine teeth. Hiding Jaffna-centric politics, based on casteism and communalism, was a means to keep the image of the Vellahala caste clean. Ironically, the Vellahalas categorized and dismissed their oppression of the low-castes as a “minority problem” – meaning the minority of the low-castes as opposed to the majority of the Vellahlas. Internally, they rejoiced and pursued their politics as the dominant majority. But when the Vellahalas took their demands to the world they categorized their problem as “the minority” problem caused by the majority Sinhalese. So the term “minority” was used with different emphases and meanings to suit their political needs. Inside Jaffna the term “minority” was used derogatively to put down their low-castes. Outside Jaffna they used the term “minority” to make them look like the saintly victims of the Sinhala majority.
This is how the critical term “minority” was used to the advantage of the most privileged community in Jaffna. The national political vocabulary was loaded with meanings injected by the Vellahalas that would hide their sins and advance the peninsular political agenda. The vocabulary was tailored to dove-tail neatly into the Vellahla agenda and the tragedy that ensued flowed directly from the left-wing, right-wing and even centrist accepting the vocabulary and the Jaffna-centric agenda uncritically. Any study of the crisis will reveal that the ideologues, intellectuals, academics have never deviated far from the vocabulary or the agenda set by the Vellahala elite who wrote the Vadukoddai Resolution. Their closed minds never bothered to peep inside the cadjan curtain to examine critically the hidden northern forces that operated internally to worsen the external relations with the south.
The world was shown only the Gandhian face and not the pistol packed inside the Vadukoddai Resolution. Even at Gandhian sit-ins the Tamil organizers were distributing wooden pistols. Though the Illankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi (Tamil State Party) was masquerading as a Federal Party the organizers were distributing stamps of the future Eelam to the participants in sit-ins. The ideology and the political machinations were directed strategically towards the creation of a separate state. The Vellahlas were whipping up anti-Sinhala extremism among the youth to ride on their backs to power. In the end they were hoisted by their own petard. They never expected power to slip from their hands into the militant youth from the low castes. This was the fatal mistake they made when they passed the Vadukoddai Resolution endorsing violence. They were in command as long as they kept their politics within parliamentary parameters. Power slipped out of their hands the day after they endorsed violence and asked the youth to take up arms.
This is also the fundamental difference between the Jaffna political culture and that of the Muslims and the Indian Tamils. The Muslim and the Indian Tamil leadership survived because they did not take their people down the path of violence. Violence demands a radical kind of leadership that would ineluctably go against the ruling conservative elite trying to preserve the ancien regime. The natural tendency of the radical youth is to take power into their hands if they are empowered with violence. And the rest is history. The Vellahla leadership paid with their dear lives for handing over the tools of violence by passing the Vadukoddai Resolution. The children born out of the Vadukoddai Resolution did not hesitate to kill the fathers who drafted and passed it in 1976 in Vadukoddai – the electorate of S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the father of separatism,
After 1976 what was visible on the surface in Jaffna was the changing of the guard, from the Vellahla caste to the Karaiyar lower-caste, without any change in the traditional, underlying and over-determining processes of the Hindu-Vellahla fascist culture. There was no fundamental difference in the denial of the basic rights under the oppressive ideologies of Hindu (Saivite) casteism or the cult of the “Sun God” claiming to be the “the sole representative of the Tamils”. Both ideologies relied primarily on fascist authoritarianism. The casteist fascism of the Vellahlas was as oppressive and cruel as the fascism of the “Sun God”. To cover-up the crimes of the Jaffna leadership against their own people the Vellahalas turned the rising wrath of the lower-castes towards communalism. They were quick to exploit principles of modern liberal theories to demonize the Sinhala majority, invoking justice for minorities (meaning only the Jaffna elite and not the other minorities like the Muslims, the Batticoloa Tamils, including their lower-castes. It is logical for Karuna Amman from the east to break away from the north accusing the Jaffna Tamil leadership of discriminating against them. The Indian Tamils too were kept far apart as “coolies” except when they found their numbers useful to boost the Tamil electoral clout. It was useful to have greater numbers even if they came from the despised “coolies”. Tiger ideologues and their predecessors, advocating justice for the Jaffna Tamils, were primarily using the fashionable political theories against the Sinhalese not because they were genuinely committed to liberate their own people from the shackles of feudal casteism or political oppression of the “sole representative of the Tamils” but as politically expedient tools to demonize the majority and win sympathy for the most oppressive systems in Sri Lankan history. For instance, the Tigers are the first to invoke principles of international humanitarian law without having any compunction in committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Jaffna became the most favourite haven of the Vellahla elite because that was the only space on earth which accepted their oppressive Hindu-casteist culture as the ruling ideology. This enabled them to reign supreme as the uncrowned kings over their oppressed people. If the Jaffna Tamils found a sense of equality it was in the south where caste distinctions did not matter. The culture war was between the Hindu-casteist ideology and the open and liberal Buddhist culture of the south. The Jaffna Tamils found the open space in the south too disruptive. It was a serious threat to maintain their monolithic casteist culture that had dominated Jaffna in feudal and colonial times. The south was liberal, democratic, tolerant, open-ended and inviting. The north was intolerant, ill-liberal, authoritarian, closed and uninviting. The cosmopolitan culture of the south broke down caste-barriers and absorbed them as a part of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society. It was so infectious that S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the father of separatist extremism, refused to buy a house in Colombo fearing that his children would be swept away by the liberal, open and tempting culture. (A. J. Wilson – biography of his father-in-law, Chelvanayakam.)
Separatism was seen primarily as a political means of the southern forces threatening to dismantle their casteist castles. Bryan Ffafenberger, the American sociologist from Virginia University, argues that S. W. R.D. Bandaranaike’s Prevention of Social Disabilities Act, 1959, which was aimed at dismantling the entrenched caste system of Jaffna, was detested more than the Sinhala Only Act. He labels Prof. C. Suntheralingam, a “cast fanatic” who fought tooth and nail, to protect the sanctity of the Hindu-casteist ideology. The infiltration of legal, administrative and political forces from the south, were undermining the casteist regime in the north. Communalism was a defensive mechanism to contain the invasions of disruptive forces from the south. They had no other ideology to combat the impact of southern waves of modernity eroding their sand castles of feudal casteism. Casteism had gone past its use by date. Jaffna was rearing to break away from the shackles of oppressive casteism. It was a force that could not be broken down with legislation, administrative fiats and political movements. A violent force was necessary to deracinate Vellahlaism. Eventually, the Vellahlas produced their own grave-diggers when their communal ideology, manufactured to retain their grip on Jaffna, produced the Vadukoddai Resolution. Velupillai Prabhakaran is the monster that came out of the womb of this Resolution. To the credit of Prabhakaran it must be conceded that his greatest achievement is in breaking down the Vellahla grip and radicalizing Jaffna. His greatest flaw is in replacing Vellahla fascism with his own brand of fascism.
Insular isolationism was also a necessary requirement for the extremist political culture of Jaffna which was institutionalized and managed at the top by the Vellahlas to retain their feudal and colonial privileges. But modernity was banging on the closed cadjan gates. The more the forces of modernity – liberalism, Marxism, even shades of Gandhism, Ambedkhar-style Buddhism, market forces etc., – attacked its entrenched position the more the Vellahlas resorted to communalism as the only means of keeping the fragmenting peninsula politics, under increasing pressures of caste infighting, within their fold. (Bryan Ffafenberger). When, for instance, the Marxist, liberal forces joined with the low-castes to bring down the Vellahla barriers at the Maviddipuram Temple the Tamil State Party went into a hibernating silence on this issue, fearing that it would upset the majority Vellahlas. Their response was to intensify the attacks on the Sinhalese to divert attention from the internal divisions. Blaming the Sinhalese for all their problems was the only excuse they had to cover-up their sins against their own people.
The pro-peninsula ideologues fell hook, line and sinker for this blame-the-Sinhalese-for-everything platform concocted by the Jaffna elite. One of the remarkable characteristics of the ideologues and their punditry is the uncritical acceptance of this one-sided account of the modern history without balancing it with the forces that came down from the north and collided head-on with the south. The NGOs, the left-wing academics, and pro-Tamil theoreticians followed the political agenda written by the Tamil State Party in the late forties and early fifties. Though these ideologues came from different angles they never failed to merge at the central point of the political agenda of the Tamil State Party which blamed only the majority Sinhalese. They began to write new histories based on the fundamentals laid down by the Tamil State Party. The left-wing historian, Erik Hobsbawm, referred to the political manifesto of the Tamil State Party written in the forties-fifities and scoffed at it as a crude manifestation of “nationalism”. The essence of this re-written history was summarized in the Vaddukoddai Resolution. The upshot of both – the Tamil State Party manifesto and the Vaddukoddai Resolution – was to produce a whole new gang of ideologues who depended solely on this to for their doctoral theses, newspaper columns, seminars, lectures etc. They were basically carbon copies of the Vadukoddai Resolution and the Tamil State Party manifesto dressed up as the latest “research”.
Backed by escalating Jaffna-centric violence the politics adumbrated in the Vadukoddai Resolution attained the status of the gospel truth. The writing of history was taken away from the independent scholars in the pre-politicized era and ethnicized by the new privatized schools mushrooming in NGOs. Even the incontrovertible monograph written by the foremost Sri Lankan historian, Prof. K. M. de Silva, debunking the myths of a separate homeland, was overshadowed by the overwhelming outpourings from the pro-Jaffna Tamil lobbies. The traditional school of history, which derived its force from the culture of ancient and medieval achievements of the Sinhala-Buddhists, written mainly as anti-colonial politics, and later the Marxist class interpretations (in very rudimentary from) of history, gave way to the manufactured history of the northern Tamil State Party that was encapsulated in the Vadukoddai Resolution. Despite the intermingling, the inter-penetration of both cultures cross-pollinating each other, to co-exist in relative harmony down the passage of time the politicized/ethnicized history was written into the the Vadukoddai Resolution to fit the new separatist agenda of the Tamil State Party. It began by announcing the fiction that from “the dawn of time” the land was divided into two separate entities by the two communities. Ethnicity and not the class war, or the orthodox interpretations of the pre-politicized phase, became the over-riding theme of the social scientists. After “1983” they were looking for theoretical explanations and they were alarmed that there were no theoretical tools to explain the new phenomenon of ethnicity, or the Jaffna Tamil politics that had leapt from the periphery to dominate the centre stage. (Radhika Coomaraswamy)
So the re-writing of history began as a new industry in the privatized schools of NGOs and the American school led by S. J. Tambiah. This new industry not only helped to propagate the political agenda outlined in the Vadukoddai Resolution but also helped to advance the careers of academics like de Votta, H.L.Seneviratne, C. R. De Silva, who were recycling Tambiah’s anti-Sinhala Buddhist propaganda dished out as scholarly “research”. They were joined by the academic mafia in the Colombo University like Kumari Jayawardena and the lumpen Marxist, Jayadeva Uyangoda (alias Marthelis, alias “OOOO-mahathya”). Kumari Jayawardene even provided the raw material for Tambiah’s blinkered view of Sinhala-Buddhists. All this was politicized research. And as any respectable academic would concede all research is political. The uniformity with which all of them ganged up against Sinhala-Buddhists amounted to ideological fanaticism. They never explained how a crisis of the magnitude seen in Sri Lanka could explode only with the sound of one hand. They were not only blind in one eye but also without the vital hand that could provide the missing sound that could project a comprehensive and rounded meaning to the events which are still exploding around us.
To be continued.
( H.L.D.Mahindapala: Editor, Sunday and Daily Observer (1990 - 1994). President, Sri Lanka Working Journalists' Association (1991 -1993). Secretary-General, South Asia Media Association (1993 -1994). He has been featured as a political commentator in Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Special Broadcasting Services and other mainstream TV and radio stations in Australia.)
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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