The Vision for a United Sri Lanka

Two expats cry for unity from different perspectives
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By Prof. Shelton Gunaratne

(February 11, Washington, Sri Lanka Guardian) Now that the Sri Lanka armed forces has brought the ferocious violence of the Tigers under control, prominent expatriates have already come forth to jolt the nation’s conscience into reaching the high axiological ideals that its multi-ethnic community professes as Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, or Christians.

Two of these expatriates, Neville Jayaweera (“A draft manifesto for a Sri Lankan Obama,” Sunday Island, Feb 1, 2009), and H.L.D. Mahindapala (“Tamils are our brothers and sisters—not enemies,” Sri Lanka Guardian, Feb. 9, 2009) have implicitly asked the nation to foster the Daoist notion of unity (yang) within diversity (yin). However, these two writers have reached their cry for unity through very different pathways.

Jayaweera, the ex-civil servant and scholar-idealist, concedes the injustices that the Tamil community faced and attributes its insurrection to the denial of human rights. Although a converted Christian, he uses his deep knowledge of Buddhist philosophy (based on sutras and Abhidharma) to argue for the restoration of all the human rights to all minorities so each group can live as equals within one nation. Corrupt politicians and extreme Sinhala nationalists, who seem to follow the pruthaggnana (populist) tradition of Buddhism, have to mend their ways to implement Buddhist principles that unequivocally expounds the universality of rights

Mahindapala, the redoubtable journalist and Sinhala nationalist, takes the view that the Vellalas of Jaffna have to bear the responsibility for initiating the long Tamil insurrection by demanding more than their due share in proportion to their numbers vis-a-vis the Sinhalese. He admits no denial of rights to the minority groups by the Buddhist Sinhala majority, which has been more than generous in meeting the Tamil grievances. “Jaffna Tamils took to the violence endorsed in the Vadukoddai Resolution to impose their will on the rest of the nation. That phase is over,” Mahindapala says. Now that the Tigers have lost their arrogant belligerence, it behooves the Sinhalese to welcome the Tamils back to their fold as “our brothers and sisters” within an undivided nation.

Jayaweera delves into history to point out that Tamils are indeed the siblings of the Sinhalese despite the fabricated history that asserts otherwise. When Vijaya and his 500 renegade comrades landed in Sri Lanka, they married Pandyan women (from South India) to found the Sinhala community. Genetically, Jayaweera reminds us, the Tamils “are not an alien people but are of the same flesh and blood as the Sinhala.” Because both communities share each other’s blood, they should strive to discard their putative differences and unite as a single nation.

It’s remarkable that neither of these two expatriate columnists advocates a solution other than a united Sri Lanka. Jayaweera, whose memoirs describe the trials and tribulations during his stint as the Government Agent of Jaffna in the 1960s, follows the pathway of sympathy and empathy to explore the Tamil conundrum through the implicit perspective of the cardinal Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising (paticca samuppada), which resurfaced in the West as systems theory in the middle of the last century. It examines phenomena in terms of the interdependence and interaction (or mutual causality) of factors constituting a whole, which is more than the sum of its parts. Social scientists use the term emergence to identify this extra something.

Jayaweera’s implicit argument is that the nation of Sri Lanka is a system comprising a number of overlapping and interdependent parts—Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, Burghers, and other communities who also role play as Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, Christians, atheists, etc.—whose interactions engender the nation’s unique emergence, which the part by itself cannot produce. Emergence is what gives the whole the extra power to nourish the parts and allow the two complementary forces of unity (yang) and diversity (yin) to maintain a dynamic balance. The system would invariably repair/restore or discard a broken part (Tamil Tigers?). I presume that it’s this logic that Jayaweera uses to call the dissident Tamils to be part of a united Sri Lanka.

Of course, Sri Lanka is a part of the larger world system and accrues the benefits of emergence of the world system, such as the global telecommunication infrastructure, which Sri Lanka alone cannot engender.

Mahindapala, whose spouse is Tamil, is a Sinhala nationalist but not a Tamil hater. He sees in Tamil demands a degree of cunning hypocrisy to generate international sympathy for the benefit of the Vellalas and later the Tigers who ousted the Vellalas. For example, many Tamils claimed refugee status to settle down in affluent counties like Canada, the U.S., Norway, Australia, and the E.U. This Tamil Diaspora funded the Tigers who became an arrogant force of violence within the nation of Sri Lanka to the point of provoking the state to engage in a do or die war. The Tigers were not fighting to redress the original Tamil grievances, which the state had already granted. What they wanted was to dismember the system (Sri Lanka) by arrogating one-third of the system components (Northern and Eastern provinces) to create a merciless, authoritarian enclave using sophisticated propaganda vehicles such as the Tamil Net.

The preceding paragraph outlines the pathway (extracted from a reading of Mahindapala’s previous writings) that Mahindapala has used to dissect the Tamil conundrum and call on the Tamils to accept the negative consequences of their miscalculations and join in the effort “to establish and consolidate a democratic and liberal political society” in Sri Lanka. Although Mahindapala does not mention the part-whole or the environment-system relationship in systems approaches, I am confident that he is acutely aware of the operation of the Buddhist doctrine of paticca samuppada.

In the light of the above, I suggest that the government of Sri Lanka apply the fundamental principles of systems theory in determining the future trajectory of Sri Lanka.

[The writer is a professor of mass communications emeritus, Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA. He was a journalist in Sri Lanka in the early 1960s.]

-Sri Lanka Guardian