Whither Lanka, they ask in Delhi and Bangkok

By Rajpal Abeynayake in India and Thailand
Courtesy: Lakbimanews

(June 23, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) While most Indians seem to think that Sri Lanka should grab the opportunity and sue for peace, others are not so sure. Professor of South Asian Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Professor Partha Ghosh seems to be so animatedly anti-devolution when it comes to Sri Lanka, that he may make S L Gunasekera want to blush.

Says professor Ghosh that if the unit of devolution that is in operation in Sri Lanka — the province — is kept intact, and Sri Lanka’s devolution arrangement is transposed to India, India would count a full four hundred provinces within its borders. He says in less opaque translation: “This is nonsense’’, and calls our problem “Sri Lanka’s OBC problem.’’ He thinks that the OBC (other backward classes) in India, —— mainly the underprivileged castes —— who never had political power under India’s upper caste dominated political hierarchy, have suddenly discovered that their sheer numbers have cast them in the role of predominant determining factor in contemporary Indian electoral politics. Ditto he says, when it comes to the previously politically marginalized Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.

“It’s the same in Sri Lanka,” he says. “The Sinhalese never enjoyed any political power under the British, and it’s the Tamils who ran the bureaucracy. Now, after the British left, the Sinhalese find themselves dominating due to numbers.’’

There are others who seem to be sorry that this is indeed the prevalent reality.

A reputed scholar attached to the Indian Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, says that the Tamils dominated the bureaucracy during British times, prompting an audience member to ask “If you want the Tamils to dominate the bureaucracy today, why don’t you say so?”

His real take is that the Tamils who dominated the bureaucracy during British colonial times, now find that they are under-represented in the Sri Lankan judiciary, the army and the public service.

Reality different

This position is heavily contested, but the perception on Sri Lanka among Indian academics, laymen and journalists can sometimes indeed be seen as being remarkably ignorant.

Says one young journalist referring to president Rajapaksa’s speech soon after the defeat of the LTTE, “President Rajapaksa said Sri Lankan armies defeated the Tamil invaders in history. How can there be reconciliation in Sri Lanka, when you people cannot even agree on your history?’’

He is told that there may be some rhetorical contestations on matters related to the past, but that the reality is entirely and sanguinely different.

He seems to accept the fact that there are more Tamils living among the Sinhalese than in the north and the east, and that Tamils are increasingly entering the political mainstream, one Tamil finding himself being the vice president of the governing Sinhala political entity, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party founded by the nationalist Bandaranaike himself.

However, Indian skepticism concerning Sri Lanka seems to die hard. Indian Foreign Secretary Shivashankar Menon speaking to Sri Lankan editors, says that Sri Lanka should solve her own problems, but when he is told that Indians seem to be less inclined to believe these days that Sri Lankans discriminated against Tamils, he offers “now is the time you should think about that issue.”
ie: He appears to believe, though he never says that this is India’s regulation policy on Sri Lanka, that now is time that Sri Lankans should alter political circumstances to give the Tamils a fair political deal, something the majority of Indians including academics and policymakers still seem to largely agree on. Exceptions to this general reality such as Professor Ghosh are characterized as “unrealistic utopians’’ by the rest of the Indian elite.

Therefore, anybody who thinks Sri Lanka should not substantially change the status quo regarding Tamils, should think again, and should perhaps embark on a determined drive to change collective Indian and international perceptions about Sri Lanka, and ethnic relations in particular in this country.

MORE PERSPECTIVE: In Thailand, where the LTTE operated using the country as a gun running and smuggling base, and where its current leader KP is said to be holed-out in some unknown rabbit warren, the perception is even more different.

Paul Risley, a World Food Program spokesman based in Bangkok who had just returned from the Swat valley area in Pakistan, starts off at a Sri Lankan seminar in Thailand last week talking of “barbed wire ringed refugee camps’’, and ends up conceding that if the vast number of refugees can be resettled, there can be no allegation of excluding the Tamils from the Sri Lankan polity, at least on the score of burgeoning numbers of IDPs.

To resettle refugees

At the same seminar titled “Aftermath of War: Picking up the pieces in Sri Lanka’’ Neville de Silva, Sri Lanka’s minister counselor in Bangkok, says that there is a definite deadline of 600 days to resettle all these refugees. But IPS correspondent Marawaan Markan Markar, another panelist, says the problem in Sri Lanka is the atmosphere of fear. He says the Tamils should be free to speak against the single narrative that obtains in Sri Lanka today — the lone narrative that he says, is generated by the propagandists of the Sri Lankan government.

When as the other participant on the panel, myself, reminded the audience that the greatest fear the Tamil people faced came from the LTTE, Markan Markar says that he concedes the LTTE was a fascist group, adding that he is happy that this fascist and violent cult has been eliminated.

Risley who has just returned from Pakistan however mentions in passing that refugees to the tune of millions are now languishing as a result of the Swat valley violence there, but notes that there is no problem of food etc., in the refugee camps in Sri Lanka, though there is a problem of access. He says also that Sri Lanka is a member nation of the UN, and therefore “owns the UN’’, ie: the UN carries out to that extent, the mandate of the member country, Sri Lanka.

The general consensus resulting from the seminar however seems to be that the post war phase and the prospects for Tamil Sinhala reconciliation and coexistence in the country cannot be determined in the context of the refugee camps, which are after all mere temporary transitional facilities. Risley concedes that as long as the refugees would be resettled as promised by the Sri Lankan president, there would not be a problem.

However, it’s Markan Markar’s contention that the Lankan populace in general has been cowed, and he says that there is suppression of free expression that goes counter to the views of the government. I say in reply that this is a backhanded compliment to the Sri Lankan media, which did not blindly follow one overarching narrative as the British media or the American media did justifying the Iraqi invasion on grounds of spurious “weapons of mass destruction.”

To that extent, the media is not manipulated and co-opted, I say, compared to the West, even though Sri Lankan journalists as in any other parts of the world “do not to have the freedom of the wild ass.” Essentially, there seems to be a willingness on the part of all panelists to concede that if the residual hangover of war-related media suppression and war-driven authoritarianism subsides, there would be a chance for Sri Lanka to turn the corner and metamorphose into a regional economic powerhouse: as somebody says, to be India’s Hong Kong.

(The writer, Editor of the Lakbimanews, weekly news paper based in Colombo)

-Sri Lanka Guardian