“Arunachalam was earlier elected by the predominantly Sinhala-educated electorate to the Western Province seat. However, Arunachalam withdrew from politics after this controversy and his radical brother, Ramanathan, took over the leadership of Jaffna. Ramanathan set the tone, the colour and the main thrust of peninsular politics which never deviated from mono-ethnic extremism."
Link to Part One
(September 28, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) In the forties and fifties there were two main ideologies competing for supremacy: 1. Marxism and communalism. As it turned out Marxism lost out to communalism. As shown earlier the year 1921 marks the turning point in communalism. A whole cluster of factors came together in 1921 in the north to consolidate communal politics. One of the key issues was the break-up of the Ceylon National Congress where all communities worked collectively against the British. Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the leading Tamil representative of the north, left the Ceylon National Congress on the issue of obtaining a special seat for the Tamils in Western District. This demand for a special seat in the Western district was in addition to the seats allotted to them in Jaffna.
It was also the year when the near parity held by the Tamils with the Sinhalese in the colonial Legislative Council was overturned in the first elections based on territorial representation. This new electoral system returned 13 Sinhalese as against 3 Tamils. “Soon after the new Legislative Council met,” wrote Prof. K.M. de Silva, Sri Lanka’s foremost historian, “influential Tamils began to campaign for the restoration of the proportion of Tamil to Sinhalese representation that existed prior to 1920.” (P.106 – The Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies, Vol II, July-December, 1972 No.2).
This was also the time, according to Prof. De Silva, when the Tamils considered themselves to be a majority and not a minority. To make matters worse, Arunachalam was replaced by his brother Ramanathan, a protégé of Arumuka Navalar, the father Vellahla casteism. The departure of the more liberal Arunachalam and the rise of “rigidly communal” (Prof. de Silva – Ibid) Ramanathan defined the new direction of Jaffna politics that rolled down the decades until it flowed into the Vaddukoddai Resolution and through it to Velupillai Prabhakaran.
In 1921 Jaffna turned away from multi-ethnic co-existence, cooperating with other communities, into a communalist enclave raising demands based on primarily on Tamil exceptionalism. Primarily, it was a notion that expressed the superiority of the Tamils over other communities, including Tamils residing outside Jaffna. It was also linked to the unrealistic claim that they were not a minority community but a majority. “The Tamils had for a decade or more laid claims to the status of a majority community….” wrote Prof. de Silva. (Ibid – p.117). This may seem bizarre now but at the time even Gov. Sir William Manning accepted the political myth that the Jaffna Tamils constituted a majority.
This notion of Tamil exceptionalism was promoted by the Vellahla supremacists, who were in a majority in Jaffna. They were obsessed with the notion of being superior to all others, including the “coolies” in the Indian estates and the Batticoloa Tamils who were considered to be a lesser breed of “outsiders”. But this claim of being superior was under serious threat by the advancing forces of modernity, mainly the democratization of the political process with legislators elected by universal franchise – a radical experiment which was not tried even in England. Vellahla superiority could have been maintained only by retaining their grip on power by force if necessary.
But the Vellahla supremacists were losing their power, prestige and positions to the lower-castes. The only way open to them to maintain their grip on power and also prevent political dissent weakening their power base in Jaffna was to divert attention to an external enemy. The Jaffna Tamil political agenda was based exclusively on the claim that their problems could be solved only if they could defeat the external enemy (namely, the Sinhalese) and establish their own state. So demonizing the Sinhalese became a huge industry. They were followed faithfully by the academics who wrote volumes blaming the Sinhalese for everything that went wrong. The primary objective was to justify their excessive demands that ran in the direction of grabbing power from the Sinhalese, with force if necessary as seen in the Vaddukoddai Resolution.
The Vellahlas, raising the banner of Tamil exceptionalism, pushed for disproportionate share of power from 1921. A common feature of Tamil exceptionalism was to make excessive demands that went against plain commonsense. Apart from a minority pretending to be a majority they opposed the process of democratization evolving in the last decades of the British raj aimed at devolving power to the people incrementally.
Jaffna-centric communalism began in 1921 as an additional seat for them in the Western province in addition to the seats they held in their heartland in Jaffna. Eventually, it rolled down the decades, gathering political moss, under G. G. Ponnambalam in the late thirties demanding 50% of power to 12% of the Jaffna Tamil population. Of course, they claimed that 50% included other minorities like the Muslims and the Indian Tamils. Numerically, this was not true. The combined total of all the minorities did not exceed 25%. Besides, the Muslim and the Indian communities did not want to join the Jaffna Tamils in this demand of 50-50. Soulbury Commission rejected this demand. Then in 1949 the one-seat demand turned into a separate sate which was to run along two-thirds of the coastline and its hinterland. They claimed the boundaries of the northern and the eastern provinces drawn by the British for their administrative convenience as their new homeland.
In 1921 when the Tamils claimed a special seat in the Western Province the Tamil legislators argued their case on the basis of Tesawalamai law which, they said, applied to Tamils wherever they resided. Since there was a large concentration of Jaffna Tamils who were governed by Tesawalamai law in the Western province they argued that they were entitled to a special seat. It is noteworthy that this seat was not based on the history manufactured later to claim a “homeland”. The “homeland” theory was constructed in 1976 with the passing of the Vaddukoddai Resolution.
In 1921, however, the first communal division erupted on a national scale with the Sinhala and Tamil political elites fighting over the occupancy of a special seat for the Tamils in the Western Province. It began as a dispute between James Peiris and Ponnambalam Arunachalam. It was argued that in a private agreement the seat was earmarked for Ponnambalam Arunachalam. But when the dispute arose there was no agreement as to who said what to whom in allocating a special seat for the Tamils in the Western province. Prof. de Silva who researched the issue comprehensively points out that the Sinhala leadership bent over backwards to appease Arunachalam who refused to accept the offer. (See Ibid). In the end Arunachalam signed the papers endorsing Peiris as the candidate.
Arunachalam was earlier elected by the predominantly Sinhala-educated electorate to the Western Province seat. However, Arunachalam withdrew from politics after this controversy and his radical brother, Ramanathan, took over the leadership of Jaffna. Ramanathan set the tone, the colour and the main thrust of peninsular politics which never deviated from mono-ethnic extremism.
It was during this time that Jaffna laid claim to equal communal representation. The claim of “50-50” surfaced in a seminal form in 1921. In a letter to Gov. Manning this idea was expressed by Arunachalam thus: “Their (minority) safeguards under the existing system were communal representation and equal proportion of members.” (Ibid – p.115). The main thrust of northern politics since 1921 contained this primary objective of preserving communal representation to maintain a balance of power with the Sinhala majority. This ambition to maintain a balance of power with the majority – i.e.12 % claiming 50% of political power with 75 % of the Sinhalese – was doomed to fail.
But carving out a disproportionate share of power to the Jaffna Tamils became the central focus of peninsular politics. They already held a disproportionate share in the British administration. This minority was also given equal representation with the majority Sinhalese in the Legislative Councils before 1921. They feared that territorial representation would diminish their power in the Legislative Council – the political centre for passing legislation.
This was also the time when India and Ceylon, as it was known then, were demanding great devolution of power. The British governors were recommending the devolution of various degrees of power to the Ceylonese. Each time constitutional changes were in the offing the Tamils agitated for a greater share of political power quite out of proportion to their numerical strength. In effect, it amounted to, in the words of the Soulbury Commission, an “attempt by artificial means to convert a majority into a minority.” The Commission argued that it “is not only inequitable, but doomed to failure".
Reducing a majority into a minority is not an easy task. It is undemocratic, inequitable and totally impractical. Besides, which majority would tolerate any attempts to convert it to a minority? It was a mission impossible because it went against all known norms of fairness and justice. Besides, a minority claiming to be a majority, as pointed out by Prof. de Silva, or a minority aspiring to grab 50% of power from a 75% majority could not have been familiar with simple arithmetic. The numbers don’t add up. It was also a clear declaration of their refusal to accept peaceful co-existence in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society. It was the excessive demands (Bandaranaike called it “outrageous demands”) of this nature that set the north and the south on a collision course. It is the resistance to this disproportionate and unfair grab for power that is labeled as “Sinhala chauvinism.” It was this extremist demand that made the clash inevitable.
In the seventies ITAK had dropped all Gandhian postures and was actively encouraging violence. Chelvanayakam even garlanded political criminals coming out of jail. Besides, ITAK had sold the idea of a separate state to the youth as an attainable goal and they were restless to get it through violence. ITAK had even distributed wooden pistols at Gandhian sit-ins. Though secondary complaints like language and discrimination – all of which are disputed – came up from time to time, at the bottom of Jaffna-centric politics was this claim for a disproportionate share of power by one community, claiming two-thirds of a coastline and its hinterland, leaving hardly any space for nearly 90% of the population. Predictably, it worsened the north-south inter-ethnic relations almost beyond repair. It was a powder keg waiting to explode at the touch of the wings of even a firefly.
All the other claims of the Jaffna Tamils, presented as “grievances of the Tamils in their political agenda, were settled in due course except the claim of a separate homeland – a fiction that was blown to smithereens by Prof. K. M. de Silva in his monograph titled, Separatist Ideology in Sri Lanka – A Historical Appraisal (ICES – 1994). Of course, when ITAK leaders who drafted every word in the Vaddukioddai Resolution and urged the youth to sacrifice their lives for their separate state they did not bargain for Prabhakaran – “a pathological killer” (James Jupp, Australian National University academic).
Prabhakaran was the child that came out of the violence endorsed in the Vaddukoddai Resolution. It was too late for the ITAK leaders who produced Prabhakaran to turn the clock back and save the fathers of the Vaddukoddai Resolution. The ITAK leadership was silently proud when Prabhakaran got his first Tamil scalp in 1975 – Alfred Duraiyappah, the mild-mannered SLFP organizer in Jaffna. It took some time for them to realize that they would be lined up as the next victims of his killing machine. He picked them one by one and liquidated the Tamil rivals who posed a threat to his supremacy. It was his method of paving the way to be crowned as “the sole representative of the Tamils”.
The irony of the Vaddukoddai Resolution is that the Tamil youth were urged to wage a war against the Sinhalese. But the war they launched turned inward and Prabhakaran, the monster that came out of the womb of Jaffna, slaughtered more Tamils than all the other forces put together. Unable to bear the shame and shock of their politics the Tamil leadership then accused the Sinhalese of creating Prabhakaran. This is not surprising. It is the common theme of northern politics. They are never to be blamed. They are always the poor victims of Sinhala chauvinists.
-Concluded
(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
Link to Part One
(September 28, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) In the forties and fifties there were two main ideologies competing for supremacy: 1. Marxism and communalism. As it turned out Marxism lost out to communalism. As shown earlier the year 1921 marks the turning point in communalism. A whole cluster of factors came together in 1921 in the north to consolidate communal politics. One of the key issues was the break-up of the Ceylon National Congress where all communities worked collectively against the British. Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the leading Tamil representative of the north, left the Ceylon National Congress on the issue of obtaining a special seat for the Tamils in Western District. This demand for a special seat in the Western district was in addition to the seats allotted to them in Jaffna.
It was also the year when the near parity held by the Tamils with the Sinhalese in the colonial Legislative Council was overturned in the first elections based on territorial representation. This new electoral system returned 13 Sinhalese as against 3 Tamils. “Soon after the new Legislative Council met,” wrote Prof. K.M. de Silva, Sri Lanka’s foremost historian, “influential Tamils began to campaign for the restoration of the proportion of Tamil to Sinhalese representation that existed prior to 1920.” (P.106 – The Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies, Vol II, July-December, 1972 No.2).
This was also the time, according to Prof. De Silva, when the Tamils considered themselves to be a majority and not a minority. To make matters worse, Arunachalam was replaced by his brother Ramanathan, a protégé of Arumuka Navalar, the father Vellahla casteism. The departure of the more liberal Arunachalam and the rise of “rigidly communal” (Prof. de Silva – Ibid) Ramanathan defined the new direction of Jaffna politics that rolled down the decades until it flowed into the Vaddukoddai Resolution and through it to Velupillai Prabhakaran.
In 1921 Jaffna turned away from multi-ethnic co-existence, cooperating with other communities, into a communalist enclave raising demands based on primarily on Tamil exceptionalism. Primarily, it was a notion that expressed the superiority of the Tamils over other communities, including Tamils residing outside Jaffna. It was also linked to the unrealistic claim that they were not a minority community but a majority. “The Tamils had for a decade or more laid claims to the status of a majority community….” wrote Prof. de Silva. (Ibid – p.117). This may seem bizarre now but at the time even Gov. Sir William Manning accepted the political myth that the Jaffna Tamils constituted a majority.
This notion of Tamil exceptionalism was promoted by the Vellahla supremacists, who were in a majority in Jaffna. They were obsessed with the notion of being superior to all others, including the “coolies” in the Indian estates and the Batticoloa Tamils who were considered to be a lesser breed of “outsiders”. But this claim of being superior was under serious threat by the advancing forces of modernity, mainly the democratization of the political process with legislators elected by universal franchise – a radical experiment which was not tried even in England. Vellahla superiority could have been maintained only by retaining their grip on power by force if necessary.
But the Vellahla supremacists were losing their power, prestige and positions to the lower-castes. The only way open to them to maintain their grip on power and also prevent political dissent weakening their power base in Jaffna was to divert attention to an external enemy. The Jaffna Tamil political agenda was based exclusively on the claim that their problems could be solved only if they could defeat the external enemy (namely, the Sinhalese) and establish their own state. So demonizing the Sinhalese became a huge industry. They were followed faithfully by the academics who wrote volumes blaming the Sinhalese for everything that went wrong. The primary objective was to justify their excessive demands that ran in the direction of grabbing power from the Sinhalese, with force if necessary as seen in the Vaddukoddai Resolution.
The Vellahlas, raising the banner of Tamil exceptionalism, pushed for disproportionate share of power from 1921. A common feature of Tamil exceptionalism was to make excessive demands that went against plain commonsense. Apart from a minority pretending to be a majority they opposed the process of democratization evolving in the last decades of the British raj aimed at devolving power to the people incrementally.
Jaffna-centric communalism began in 1921 as an additional seat for them in the Western province in addition to the seats they held in their heartland in Jaffna. Eventually, it rolled down the decades, gathering political moss, under G. G. Ponnambalam in the late thirties demanding 50% of power to 12% of the Jaffna Tamil population. Of course, they claimed that 50% included other minorities like the Muslims and the Indian Tamils. Numerically, this was not true. The combined total of all the minorities did not exceed 25%. Besides, the Muslim and the Indian communities did not want to join the Jaffna Tamils in this demand of 50-50. Soulbury Commission rejected this demand. Then in 1949 the one-seat demand turned into a separate sate which was to run along two-thirds of the coastline and its hinterland. They claimed the boundaries of the northern and the eastern provinces drawn by the British for their administrative convenience as their new homeland.
In 1921 when the Tamils claimed a special seat in the Western Province the Tamil legislators argued their case on the basis of Tesawalamai law which, they said, applied to Tamils wherever they resided. Since there was a large concentration of Jaffna Tamils who were governed by Tesawalamai law in the Western province they argued that they were entitled to a special seat. It is noteworthy that this seat was not based on the history manufactured later to claim a “homeland”. The “homeland” theory was constructed in 1976 with the passing of the Vaddukoddai Resolution.
In 1921, however, the first communal division erupted on a national scale with the Sinhala and Tamil political elites fighting over the occupancy of a special seat for the Tamils in the Western Province. It began as a dispute between James Peiris and Ponnambalam Arunachalam. It was argued that in a private agreement the seat was earmarked for Ponnambalam Arunachalam. But when the dispute arose there was no agreement as to who said what to whom in allocating a special seat for the Tamils in the Western province. Prof. de Silva who researched the issue comprehensively points out that the Sinhala leadership bent over backwards to appease Arunachalam who refused to accept the offer. (See Ibid). In the end Arunachalam signed the papers endorsing Peiris as the candidate.
Arunachalam was earlier elected by the predominantly Sinhala-educated electorate to the Western Province seat. However, Arunachalam withdrew from politics after this controversy and his radical brother, Ramanathan, took over the leadership of Jaffna. Ramanathan set the tone, the colour and the main thrust of peninsular politics which never deviated from mono-ethnic extremism.
It was during this time that Jaffna laid claim to equal communal representation. The claim of “50-50” surfaced in a seminal form in 1921. In a letter to Gov. Manning this idea was expressed by Arunachalam thus: “Their (minority) safeguards under the existing system were communal representation and equal proportion of members.” (Ibid – p.115). The main thrust of northern politics since 1921 contained this primary objective of preserving communal representation to maintain a balance of power with the Sinhala majority. This ambition to maintain a balance of power with the majority – i.e.12 % claiming 50% of political power with 75 % of the Sinhalese – was doomed to fail.
But carving out a disproportionate share of power to the Jaffna Tamils became the central focus of peninsular politics. They already held a disproportionate share in the British administration. This minority was also given equal representation with the majority Sinhalese in the Legislative Councils before 1921. They feared that territorial representation would diminish their power in the Legislative Council – the political centre for passing legislation.
This was also the time when India and Ceylon, as it was known then, were demanding great devolution of power. The British governors were recommending the devolution of various degrees of power to the Ceylonese. Each time constitutional changes were in the offing the Tamils agitated for a greater share of political power quite out of proportion to their numerical strength. In effect, it amounted to, in the words of the Soulbury Commission, an “attempt by artificial means to convert a majority into a minority.” The Commission argued that it “is not only inequitable, but doomed to failure".
Reducing a majority into a minority is not an easy task. It is undemocratic, inequitable and totally impractical. Besides, which majority would tolerate any attempts to convert it to a minority? It was a mission impossible because it went against all known norms of fairness and justice. Besides, a minority claiming to be a majority, as pointed out by Prof. de Silva, or a minority aspiring to grab 50% of power from a 75% majority could not have been familiar with simple arithmetic. The numbers don’t add up. It was also a clear declaration of their refusal to accept peaceful co-existence in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society. It was the excessive demands (Bandaranaike called it “outrageous demands”) of this nature that set the north and the south on a collision course. It is the resistance to this disproportionate and unfair grab for power that is labeled as “Sinhala chauvinism.” It was this extremist demand that made the clash inevitable.
In the seventies ITAK had dropped all Gandhian postures and was actively encouraging violence. Chelvanayakam even garlanded political criminals coming out of jail. Besides, ITAK had sold the idea of a separate state to the youth as an attainable goal and they were restless to get it through violence. ITAK had even distributed wooden pistols at Gandhian sit-ins. Though secondary complaints like language and discrimination – all of which are disputed – came up from time to time, at the bottom of Jaffna-centric politics was this claim for a disproportionate share of power by one community, claiming two-thirds of a coastline and its hinterland, leaving hardly any space for nearly 90% of the population. Predictably, it worsened the north-south inter-ethnic relations almost beyond repair. It was a powder keg waiting to explode at the touch of the wings of even a firefly.
All the other claims of the Jaffna Tamils, presented as “grievances of the Tamils in their political agenda, were settled in due course except the claim of a separate homeland – a fiction that was blown to smithereens by Prof. K. M. de Silva in his monograph titled, Separatist Ideology in Sri Lanka – A Historical Appraisal (ICES – 1994). Of course, when ITAK leaders who drafted every word in the Vaddukioddai Resolution and urged the youth to sacrifice their lives for their separate state they did not bargain for Prabhakaran – “a pathological killer” (James Jupp, Australian National University academic).
Prabhakaran was the child that came out of the violence endorsed in the Vaddukoddai Resolution. It was too late for the ITAK leaders who produced Prabhakaran to turn the clock back and save the fathers of the Vaddukoddai Resolution. The ITAK leadership was silently proud when Prabhakaran got his first Tamil scalp in 1975 – Alfred Duraiyappah, the mild-mannered SLFP organizer in Jaffna. It took some time for them to realize that they would be lined up as the next victims of his killing machine. He picked them one by one and liquidated the Tamil rivals who posed a threat to his supremacy. It was his method of paving the way to be crowned as “the sole representative of the Tamils”.
The irony of the Vaddukoddai Resolution is that the Tamil youth were urged to wage a war against the Sinhalese. But the war they launched turned inward and Prabhakaran, the monster that came out of the womb of Jaffna, slaughtered more Tamils than all the other forces put together. Unable to bear the shame and shock of their politics the Tamil leadership then accused the Sinhalese of creating Prabhakaran. This is not surprising. It is the common theme of northern politics. They are never to be blamed. They are always the poor victims of Sinhala chauvinists.
-Concluded
(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.)
Post a Comment