Tamils and the Left: Fact and fiction

By Kumar David

(July 28, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The great Palestinian theorist Edward Said reminded intellectuals that their duty was to "Speak truth to power". A necessary corollary is that when the masses believe in false gods it is the duty of intellectuals to exorcise these demons, to speak truth to the masses. A heavy burden today is to exorcise Sinhala racism and chauvinist triumphalism. However, another burden is to disabuse the Tamil mind of myths it has taken refuge in. It is time for a harsh and truthful review of a popular but mythical exposition of the post independence relationship between the Tamils and the left movement. No comforting dark corners should remain unexposed for either side to hide in.

I will begin by debunking a great half-truth, viz: ‘The Tamil people were put off and shied away from the left because of the betrayals of the left leaders commencing circa mid-1960s’. Nothing could be half-further from this half-truth! Yes, there was betrayal, especially the sickening masalavaddai campaign of 1965 to sabotage the Dudly-Chelva agreement; but no this is not the original root and whole cause underlying the perpetually strained relationship. Tamil nationalists celebrate this kind of hypothesis to deflect challenges to their grip, and in the case of the more reactionary ones, to resist social change. Intellectually lazy left sectarians in the South mouth it like rote learned catechism, oblivious to facts.

The silly half-truth

Tamil nationalists and left sectarians will both pounce on this article alleging a cover up of the opportunism of the left leaders of yore; I couldn’t care less for either. I learnt something from old Abraham Kovoor of Rationalist Society fame; in ghost-busting though an odd medley of folks will rise against you, don’t back down. So too in political myth-busting, speaking unpopular truth to the people (in this case the Tamils), will in time bring its rewards. So let’s move on.

There was no sterner critic of the pseudo-democratic, semi-racist DS Senanayake government than the left – this was when the great Tamil leader GG Ponnambalam was comfortably ensconced in cabinet selling Tamil plantation ‘coolies’ down the river. GG could not speak up for Upcountry Tamils because DS was cutting with a double-edged blade – depriving workers who voted left in marginal electorates of their franchise, and depriving Tamils who supported their community of both franchise and birthright. GG was all in favour of the former. Throughout the early 1950s it was the left movement, not the Federal Party that was identified with the political struggle on the streets of Colombo for Tamil language rights. I will mention just two events, the famous Town Hall meeting, attacked by racists and monks and at which Reggie Mendis lost his hand deflecting a bomb. And the local government elections just after the 1956 general elections, I was in my early teens then but never have I seen a more foul-mouthed SLFP led racist, masala-vaddai, ulundu-vaddai, election campaign on polling day. I can vouch personally for the costal strip all the way south of Colombo. The FP was non-existent here; it was all about excoriating the left. Even Tamils per se were not yet targets in these pre Emergency-58 days; educated and uneducated pro-SLFP racists had the left in their gun-sights.

Tamil nationalists are in a great hurry to forget all this and the constitutional amendment that NM moved in October 1955 seeking to make both Sinhala and Tamil official languages and his address to parliament, more prophetic than Colvin’s better remembered "one language, two countries, or two languages and one country" epigram of the next year. Tamil nationalists, if at all they mention this heroic period, do so solely to contrast it with the backsliding and betrayals of the next decade; their sole purpose is damning by faint praises. Recognise the left’s contributions! Oh horror, perish the thought, that would compromise their communal purposes!

What I am leading up to is that despite this history the left movement failed to win a substantial following in the Tamil community. It acquired a Tamil base in some trade unions, notably the GCSU (names like P. Rajanayagam stand out), a few joined the LSSP and CP, in sixty years just one parliamentary seats was ever won by a Tamil leftist (‘Pokey’ Kandiah), and Sanmugathasan made some headway among less privileged castes in Jaffna in the late 1950s and 1960s. But truly, in comparison with the titanic scale of the conflict – it was the principal political axis of the time, Althusser would have called it the ‘overdetermining’ moment – this headway was just peanuts. Anyway, a goodly part of the then Tamil recruits to the left were intellectuals who would have found their way in, even otherwise.

My point is this; the Tamils, broadly speaking, kept away from the left movement long before there was a whiff of betrayal. This goes for both phases – the disenfranchisement phase and the Sinhala Only phase. The pre independence period is of similar shape, notwithstanding that left politics first came to Lanka through the Jaffna Youth Congress in the 1920s, and that the LSSP did have two Tamils who could have grown to take leadership positions; but Tharmakulasingham died young and Anthonypillai stayed on in India after the war as an important trade union leader.

The social roots of ideological outgrowths

Sivaguru Ganesan and I were classmates in university (1959-1963) and undergraduate party members, a rarity in those days. We have been unrepentant Marxists ever since and buddies for fifty years. Prof. SG is capable of flashes of profundity but half-developed he brings matters to a sudden halt, seeking rest and refuge behind a bottle of single malt. For the last year or more he has been growing a thesis, mostly in private correspondence, about how the political backwardness of Tamil nationalism is rooted in the socio-economic underdevelopment and the ‘cultural backwardness’ of Jaffna society. Cultural backwardness here means casteism, reactionary social and gender customs, cultural intolerance, neglect of modern Western democratic concepts, introspectiveness born of the money-order economy, and so on. While infuriated by the intolerable pain inflicted on the community by the Sinhala State, and cognisant that the LTTE was an organic reaction to this pain, nevertheless he asks: "How could a community, so educated, numerate, literate and much internationalised, have put up with this degree of brutality and lack of vision in its leading representative? How to reconcile the coexistence of national liberation with political backwardness?" I will not attempt to summarise his answers, but the core concepts are socio-economic underdevelopment and cultural peculiarities.

My complaint about his half-way house interruptus habit is that it stops here. This line of reasoning must be taken one step further to explain the 60 year non-relationship between the Tamil people and left politics. The reason why a left ideology could not put down deep roots and either link up with the southern left or grow its own indigenous left tradition was the same; the social soil was not fertile. The deleterious effects of caste and the hidebound social ethos were supplemented by the absence of a modern working class. The backwardness of capitalist production denied Jaffna a proletariat, and more generally, a modern ethos.

Those who attribute the non- or anti-left heritage of Tamil politics to the betrayals of the 1960s and 1970s are up against another hurdle. Their theory, as a corollary, requires that the Tamils be classified as congenital idiots who can’t distinguish between an aged and compromised older left, and new left traditions which have sprung up in the generations since. It’s like someone, who even in this day and age, explains away the mess in this country, sixty years after independence, as a hangover of British rule! If we are murdering each other, and consorting with politicians who rob and misgovern with impunity, all because of the long gone British, why we must be the most monumental asses of all time! All these pass-the-buck theses are rubbish, balderdash!

Now what?

Apart from theoretical interest what’s the point of all this analytical stuff. A modern proletariat is not going to spring out at a moment’s notice like the Ganga from Brahma’s forelock, so can this reassessment serve any practical purpose? Yes, that’s why I got started in the first place. The Tamil community both at home and abroad has suffered an immense shock; it has entered a period of rethinking, there is a narrow window that will last no more than a year or two, when it will be receptive to new ideas and a reappraisal of old ones. It is a golden opportunity for those who want to rebuild Tamil politics to work though the Tamil-Left relationship – among other things – free from facile theories and half-baked myths.

The diaspora lives in a society different from the blinkered backwardness of the old country. There is a second and third generation which has lived in another world and gone through a whole new universe of experiences. To have made the critique in this article in the midst of war would have been seen by Tamils as divisive and debilitating, conversely, now clarity and understanding are imperative. The radical youth in the diaspora must not allow themselves to be trapped within old categories, and I am not referring to the follies of the Prabaharan era alone. The new generation will have to, and I think will be ready to, rethink a whole gamut of state, class and nationality issues from square-one up. Inevitably, Tamil politics at home will have to lie low for a while, but a useful cross-fertilisation with the diaspora will be the first step. Obviously the predicament of the IDPs will have to be priority number one for now, then, thinking long-term will have to be the next priority. New and younger leaders will have to ‘Speak Truth to People’; there is no place for half-truths and myths.

-Sri Lanka Guardian