The politics of Diaspora dissidence

By Dayan Jayatilleka

“Rajani… would have found the recent war completely abhorrent.”
- UTHR (J), 18th Sept, 2009

(October 11, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) I did not expect the Rajani commemoration to be a posthumous Nuremburg Trial for Velupillai Prabhakaran, as Dayapala Thiranagama seems to suggest (Sunday Island Oct 4, 2009, p 15). I did expect a single mention– a moral indictment strong and clear — of Prabhakaran, for Rajani’s murder, but obviously I expected too much. I thought it especially necessary as an antidote to ambiguity and ambivalence because the evening’s mentions of the LTTE were scattered among a welter of references to the violence of the State, Sinhala chauvinism and (perhaps mostly) the Indian army. Crucially admitting, albeit in a gross understatement, that “there was no Tiger bashing at the event” and thereby proving the validity of my basic observation, Dayapala says it was all in the context, “the preparation prior to the event and the aftermath”. That’s irrelevant: I attended and reviewed the event itself. He accuses me of a “damning” lack of “understanding” of “language …and politics”. I trust he doesn’t mean the English language. As for politics, that is amusing, coming as it does from an autodidact in that subject, to another whose product in political theory has been critically bracketed with those of Zizek and Badiou (in the International Journal of Zizek Studies) and positively reviewed by a Professor Emeritus at the LSE, and whose successful recent political practice in the international arena registered wryly in The Economist (London).

Though Dayapala now says, in his response to me, that he “supports the historic victory over the Tigers and their neo-fascistic project”, he did not say so in his BMICH speech on Sept 25, surely the appropriate occasion. Nor did any other speaker, from first to last. He had also failed to say so in the Sept 16 article he wrote as part of the all-important ‘preparation’ for the Rajani commemoration. Instead, in a remark utterly revelatory of its attitude, the UTHR-J statement (Sept 18) for the Rajani anniversary which Dayapala approvingly adverts to, said this: “If the Government believes that the war was a great military achievement, let the Sinhalese people know the truth and understand the consequences”.

Dayapala explains his politics: “If there was no Tiger bashing at the event … [it was because of] the political urgency at the current moment and the strategy that would be most suitable and effective in fighting the twin problem: achieving democratic rights and challenging Sinhala triumphalism. The democratic rights in all three communities…are being eroded under the cover of patriotism and it is being used to frustrate and postpone the devolution of power to the Tamil community”. Curiously Dayapala thinks it necessary not to “bash the Tigers” at an event commemorating his wife who was murdered by them, in order to achieve democratic rights, challenge Sinhala triumphalism and expedite devolution. While it is true that Sinhala triumphalism is imprudent, he does not draw a necessary distinction and recognize that the Sinhalese have a legitimate right and reason to feel triumphant. The victorious Final War against the Tigers approximated a people’s war of national liberation in which the vanguard was the Sri Lankan (overwhelmingly Sinhala) armed forces and the main motive force the Sinhala people/nation, with the Tamil resistance (TMVP, EPDP) playing a significant catalytic and auxiliary role. It is a spirited and historic achievement of this generation which those to come can take pride in and inspiration from. While patriotism is “being used to postpone devolution”, the remedy resides in the re-opened electoral space in the Tamil areas and the reactivation of the Tamil polity and political process, none of which would have been possible except for the Sri Lankan armed forces and President Rajapakse. Dayapala assumes that one can successfully expedite devolution while scorning legitimate Sinhala sentiment, abandoning patriotism, making no recourse to it, regarding it as if it were wholly negative and illegitimate—and all this from London! Such is his superior understanding of politics!

According to Dayapala’s politics “if you want to talk about the titanic struggles for decades against the Tigers, you also need to talk about the historical injustices meted out against the Tamil community with equal passion and conviction…In order to fight fascism it is necessary to resolve the genuine grievances of the Tamils” (My emphases- DJ). Wrong. It was perfectly possible to talk of the titanic struggles against Hitler fascism or Japanese militarism without talking “with equal passion and conviction” about the injustices done to Germany under the Treaty of Versailles or to pre-war Japan by the USA. It was perfectly possible (unless one was a Trotskyite) to speak of the titanic struggle against Hitler while not talking “with equal passion and conviction” about the wrongs committed in the colonies by British and French imperialism– suffice to recall the line of the Popular Front. Though “the resolution of genuine grievances of the Tamils” is a desirable and urgent objective (the public advocacy and pursuit of which is reportedly a factor that cost me my last job), the actual movement of history was that Dayapala’s “necessity” proved unnecessary as a precondition (“in order to fight”) and Tiger fascism was fought and defeated in its main dimension and expression, the military dimension, without resolving the genuine grievances of the Tamils. Historical reality has stood the Dayapala dogma it on its head. It is the military crushing of the Tigers that was the necessary though insufficient condition for the political resolution of genuine grievances of the Tamils. That necessary condition was achieved without and before the required resolution of Tamil grievances, which reality has turned into a task of a second stage we are in transition to or have already transitioned to.

Dayapala implicitly posits a homology between the situation that prevailed under the barbaric rule of the Tigers and that which prevails in the South today. He writes that “The right to dissent is taken away with speed in the South and the methods applied here at times are reminiscent of what the Tamil Tigers inflicted on their political adversaries in the suppression of the right to dissent in the areas of their control”. This is wrong in its conceptual fundaments. In his reminiscences Dayapala might recall that the methods applied by the State in the late 1980s could not be placed on a continuum with what the Pol Potist JVP inflicted on their political adversaries. I have publicly criticized the Lasantha killing, the Tissainayagam verdict and the IDP situation, but these require denunciation independently, devoid of absurd analogies with Tiger totalitarianism. If Tiger rule and rule in the South can be placed on the same plane in the matter of the right of dissent, the Rajani commemoration could not have been held at the BMICH. It is the Tigers’ recidivist aggression that was chiefly responsible for the backlash of hard-line Sinhala militarism and its ascendancy. Whatever its distortions and brutalities the Sri Lankan state is one in which there are multiparty democratic elections and a minimum of democratic space. When this article appears, a multiparty election would have just been held in the Southern province, and I can’t recall one in Prabhakaran’s proto-state. Dayapala and the Diaspora dissidents implicitly conflate the authoritarian yet quintessentially democratic –and therefore redeemable — Sri Lankan state (albeit with an increasingly Caesarist/Bonapartist regime), with irredeemable totalitarian, fascist movements and barbaric systems of rule necessitating military destruction. Far from a similarity or parallel with totalitarian Tiger rule, negative trends of political closure in the South can be reversed if the Opposition were simply to switch to a nationally more mainstream leadership, thereby rendering itself more competitive and restoring a basic equilibrium to the polity. The most critical variable of the Sri Lankan crisis today is the crisis of Opposition leadership.

Dayapala accusatorily says that in late ’89 I told him I had information that Rajani was killed by the EPRLF. On Sept 21st this year, DBS Jeyaraj writing on the Rajani anniversary confirms that “When Rajini was killed there was some confusion initially about who her killers were. Some university students staged a protest demonstration blaming Tamil armed groups functioning as lackeys of the Indian army. This was so because Rajini had very often clashed with the Indian officials on issues of human rights violations. Subsequently it became clear that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was responsible…” Within days of her murder I had made a beeline to Sri Lankan Military Intelligence HQ at Flower Road and requested information. My interlocutor, who may have been Gen (at the time Brig or Col.) Chula Seneviratne, now retired, told me that according to reports they had at that moment, which were hazy due to the fog of low intensity war with multiple players, it was an EPRLF hit because Rajani’s polemical guns at the time had been trained on the IPKF. It is this that I shared in good faith with Dayapala.

In the matter of Premadasa, the LTTE and the EPRLF, Dayapala distorts facts, saying that I “had joined the UNP government”, which I had not. In a few months I quit the North East Provincial Council of which I was a Minister, and supported Premadasa, socially the most progressive reformist leader this country has seen, against a kaleidoscope of foes—the xenophobic ultra-left JVP, the old Establishment elite (bipartisan, as seen in the impeachment conspiracy), the putschist NEPC and the terrorist LTTE. Dayapala, the UTHR-J and the Diaspora dissidents did not support or sympathize with him even critically, and to date the UTHR-J slanders him, depicting his tenure as a dark age. So much for Dayapala’s concern for “our social and economic development for generations”, set back far more by Prabhakaran’s assassination of Premadasa than by any delay in or dilution of devolution. By contrast, Devananda and the EPDP stood by Premadasa.

Premadasa commenced his election campaign and his early presidency with the support of, and supporting, the EPRLF led North East Provincial Council. That changed, because of the latter. The main challenge at that time was from the JVP which was shutting down Colombo and exploding IEDs (in which they had been trained, not by the LTTE but by the PLOTE, with Sivaram’s facilitation) in Narahenpita and Thimbirigasyaya. The JVP insurgency drew legitimacy from the claim of a patriotic war against the IPKF presence which was becoming counter-productively protracted. State power in the South was hanging by a thread and it was Premadasa’s primary duty to prevent its fall at all costs. He requested an IPKF withdrawal, while the NEPC leadership strove to entrench and leverage it. The EPRLF led conscript Tamil National Army attacked Sri Lankan police stations with Carl Gustav recoilless rifles. Faced with the prospect of re-deploying the Sri Lankan armed forces which would have risked a firefight with the IPKF and a two front war – precisely the trap that the NEPC leadership and its handlers were laying — Premadasa and Ranjan Wijeratne tactically played the LTTE card, a proxy move that states all over the world have made when faced with similar “prisoners’ dilemma” crises. Though I had absolutely no knowledge of the material form of this “tilt” and was certainly not privy to the policy itself, it clearly belonged to the tradition of ‘balance of power’ Realpolitik and was no reason to alter my support for Premadasa’s project of rapid growth with social equity, a precursor of current experiments in Latin America.

Rajani’s political life was defined by the relationship with the Tigers and by extension, Prabhakaran. Rajani joined the Tigers. Rajani broke with the Tigers. Rajani critiqued the Tigers. Rajani was killed by the Tigers. Rajani joining the Tigers is not as much of an indictment as it may seem today, because this was before the Tigers killed innocent Sinhala civilians, and she left when or by the time they did. The LTTE had not yet degenerated into a fascist militia. Yet, this “New Revolutionary” had a choice, and there were explicitly revolutionary Marxist or Marxist oriented ones like the EPRLF, PLOTE and EROS. She chose not to join any of them and opted instead to obtain membership of the LTTE, which even if it did parade a trace of ideological rouge in its makeup at the time (Nithyanandan, Balasingham), was the least revolutionary or leftwing of all these organizations. Rajani chose to join the Tigers even after the Tigers had murdered, in 1982, the political ideologue of the PLOT, Sundaram, arguably the most politically promising and progressive ideological mind of the Eelam movement!
Out of courtesy I will not dispute Dayapala’s dismissal of my recollection that Rajani wrongly assumed Mahattaya’s presence would deter an assassination attempt on her by the Tigers (or disclose my source). Rather like Camus, Rajani strove to transcend the political and take a moral stand, stemming from her deep feelings for people, especially those suffering. Personally testifying that [in 1984] “Rajani had become a seemingly unwavering member of the Tamil Tigers’ military project” (The Island Sept 16th, ’09), Dayapala goes on to liken her to Che Guevara! (The Island, Oct 4, 09). Having my essay on Che’s 40th death anniversary featured in the Cuban CP Central Committee’s Granma and praised for “having seen deeply into the mind of Che” by two who knew him up close (Prof Emeritus Miguel Alfonso Martinez who was at Che’s side during his historic New York trip and interviewed by Benecio de Toro for the Soderbergh movie, and Prof Jean Ziegler, Che’s designated companion during his 12 day Geneva visit to address UNCTAD), I find this an unconvincing canonization. “In relation to the choice between life and death”, any Sri Lankan Commando storming a bunker or Special Forces officer on long range patrol in Tigerland was as close, if not closer, a fit in spirit. Can anyone imagine Ernesto Che Guevara as “a seemingly unwavering member” (however episodically) of a “military project” under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran?

-Sri Lanka Guardian