'Sole Representative', Who?

by N. Sathiyamoorthy

(August 04, Chennai, Sri Lankan Guardian) Reports quoting Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse, on stopping the "war only when (LTTE leader) Prabhakaran is made to kneel at my feet", if not just a pep-talk to an injured soldier, should leave a bad taste in the mouth. Conversely, the soldier's anxious query against an imminent ceasefire,should be a reflection on the mood of the masses, whose trust in the LTTE had never been great.In a situation in which there are persistent demands also for ending a militarist approach and reviving the path of negotiations, it raises more questions than answers.

For his part, Minister Tissa Vitharana has reiterated the Government's position on the peace process. According to Vitharana, the LTTE-sympathetic Tamil National Alliance (TNA) could be involved in the negotiations process only after evolving a 'southern consensus'. Significantly, Minister Vitharana referred to the United National Party (UNP), the main Opposition, whose presence and participation was required for evolving a sustainable consensus over the longer term. By contrast, the Government has never really made any reference of the kind to the Left-leaning Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Yet, at every turn, Government leaders have implied that a JVP attestation was a pre-condition for any political package on power-devolution.

The dichotomy is striking, considering that the JVP, all along, had been opposed to any meaningful power-devolution model that would be acceptable to the Tamil community, even independent of the LTTE. Whatever 'mechanism' that the JVP would want to put in place for implementing such programmes it could well be an antithesis to what the party has been preaching all along on the devolution front. Not only would the party had to address the unmet aspirations of the masses, but in doing so it should also evolve grassroots-level 'mechanisms' that the "status quo parties" sharing power between them had not put in place all these years.

Across the ethnic divide on the Tamil side, the dichotomy is even more striking. The Government might even be justified in concluding that the TNA's presence and participation would only disrupt the APRC proceedings,It goes without saying that the presence of the non-TNA Tamil groups, including the fledgling TMVP from the East, would imply their attestation of any consensus emerging out of the APRC process. Yet, with the Government hazy about talking to the LTTE, any consensus proposal emanating from the APRC could be 'negotiated' only with the TNA, if the latter is ready to play the part. It is one thing for the Government to negotiate a power-devolution package with the Tamils, the TNA and the rest in this case, and another to hand down even the very same package, unilaterally. While the Sinhala-majority Government might still be the hound, the Tamil polity and society need to acknowledge that theirs is not a hare either for them to run with.

It is in this context that on issues such as re-merger, the Government may need to take a more pragmatic view that also reflects the larger sentiments in the East. After all, if the Supreme Court in Sri Lanka could annul the merger,, citing reasons that are technical, and with that annulling the merger clause in the bilateral agreement between two sovereign Governments, the counterpart in India could well review the 'Kachchativu Accords', likewise. That is what the sum and substance of the recent statement of J Jayalalithaa, the former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu is all about, when she says that her AIADMK party would consider seeking a judicial annulment of the 'Kachchativu Accords'. Going beyond the legality of the domestic laws involved, it could all reopen an unmanageable discourse on international relations and agreements – and could cut either way, or both ways, and going far beyond the two South Asian neighbours.

( The writer is the Director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation New Delhi)
- Sri Lanka Guardian