13th Amendment, Dayan & Malinda

By Carlo Fonseka

(July 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Dayan Jayatilleka and Malinda Seneviratne are two extremely bright young men I have known for many years. I am very fond of both of them. I have watched them grow up with a sort of avuncular interest. I have argued with both of them in private and occasionally in public. I think they believe – as bright young people should – that in argument they vanquished me, increasingly regarded nowadays by some as something of a sacred old cow. So be it. Political science and journalism are not my fields of specialization. It is enough for me that I can still walk a fire-bed scientifically, without any divine aid and with less self damage than they probably can manage to do.

Dayan Jayatilleka

DJ is the older of the two. When he graduated in political science from the University of Peradeniya with a first class of unsurpassed excellence, I wrote him a congratulatory message. I told him that my future vision of him was as Sri Lanka’s equivalent of Prof. Harold J. Laski, the phenomenal academic of the London School of Economics who was the head, heart and soul of socialist political theory and practice in his country in his time. "Be like Laski" was my message to Dayan. He, however, had other ideas. His father Mervyn de Silva – "the tragic hero of the press", as I posthumously called him – was his role model, mentor and hero. So DJ embarked on a romantic, adventurous and non-academic mad pursuit and spent some years doing his own thing. At last force of circumstances put him back on (university) track. Then he blossomed. Today he is something of a world authority on the science and philosophy of Fidel Castro’s politics. In the field of international politics he has recently done more for our country than any academic I can think of.

Malinda Seneviratne

Amiable, Harvard educated Malinda Seneviratne has cultivated an engaging English style that I admire. I have told him to his face that I read the things he writes more for their style than for their content. The political stuff he writes is so tribal in spirit and so insular in outlook that I find it hard to believe that he had been to Harvard University, even as a tourist, as I have (I went to Harvard by appointment to see my favorite economist John Kenneth Galbraith). A village school education would have amply sufficed to generate MS’s political thoughts.

The Problem

According to the 1981 census, of the people in the Northern Province 92% were Tamils and of the people in Eastern Province 41% were Tamils. There is evidence that they had inhabited the northern parts of the country for many centuries. They have preserved a language, religion and culture of which they are proud. This has induced in them a sense of special unity that distinguishes them from the rest of the people in the land of their birth. This sense of unity has generated in them a feeling of kinship and oneness. From time to time since 1956 – in 1958, 1977, 1979, 1981 and 1983 when many of them were beaten up, looted, killed and some even burnt alive – it is to their northern haven that those who survived fled for dear life. (I know from personal experience what it feels like to flee from death threats). Therefore, to me, the aspiration of Tamils for a measure of self-governance in the areas where their ancestral homes are safely located is understandable and justifiable. Because the 13th amendment appeared to fulfill this aspiration to some degree, I have always supported it. Recently, however, I felt impelled to add the caveat that it should not be implemented during the life time of the self-appointed sole representative of the Tamil people.

Reductio ad absurdum

To MS the Tamil people inhabiting the northern parts of Sri Lanka are somehow reducible to the person of the self-appointed, blood-thirsty psychopathic sole representative (who ruthlessly decimated the finest representatives of the Tamil people). To him, therefore, the Tamil problem which has plagued our country for several decades boils down to a do-or-die confrontation between the sole self-appointed representative of the Tamil people and the Sinhalese. In internecine person-to-person confrontations killing one’s opponent is the ultimate act of conflict resolution. That decisive act happened in May 2009. MS seems to regard that Hitlerite "final solution" applied to the sole representative of the Tamil people as marking the end of the history of Sinhala-Tamil conflicts. To me such an attitude is an exemplification of nothing less than "rural idiocy".

Evolutionary Explanation

It is true that for 99% of our million or so years on earth, Homo sapiens, the species of animal to which we all belong, lived in small tribes. At that primitive stage tribal loyalty had a high survival value when nomadic tribes fought for hunting grounds. The tribes with a strong herd instinct regularly won such fights and acquired territories. So natural selection favoured the perpetuation of genes promoting tribal loyalty. Such loyalty – like family loyalty – often tends to operate independently of what appears to be true and just to others. Respect for human rights is the modern antidote to tribalism. The core human rights have to do with liberty, equality, material welfare and self-determination or self-governance. I believe that observance of human rights is the way to a genuine peace (as opposed to "the quiet" resulting from the absence of the reverberating sound of gun-fire and bomb-blasts.) The implementation of the 13th amendment I regard as a manifestation of our respect for human rights. MS seems pathetically incapable of subscribing to that modern view. The poor chap seems to have inherited such a whopping dose of selfish tribal genes that their influence prevents him from allowing our Tamil brethren a measure of self-governance, as the price of a genuine peace and the fulfillment of a basic human group right.

Debate

In their friendly exchange of views on the 13th amendment, I find myself very much on Dr. DJ’s side — the incredibly erudite political scientist. But even as Prof. Harold J. Laski was in his time, DJ will surely be understood and appreciated only by a minority even among the political authority. Mr. Clement Attlee, a Labor Prime Minister of the UK, was one of whom Sir Winston Churchill said that "he is a modest little man with much to be modest about". Attlee was often exasperated by Harold Laski’s theories and recommendations. I remember Alistair Cooke saying on the BBC in one of his Letters from America that Atlee, once cried: "Harold! He hasn’t got the hang of politics". Perhaps DJ has an inkling that ignorance will not prevent some people in authority from saying that sort of thing even about him. That must be why he invariably declares at the end of each article he has written recently that the views expressed are strictly his personal views. Let me assure Dayan, for what it is worth, that his views on the 13th amendment are my views too, though for the life of me, I cannot express them with his erudition, clarity of thought and felicity of phrase.

-Sri Lanka Guardian