KP and the new Tamil politics

by Nalin de Silva

(August 18, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The politics of English educated and Anglicised Tamil elite is over for good and with it the formulations and solutions of westerners who sponsored, abetted and encouraged Tamil elite politics are to be discarded. In fact, it was the English who cultivated this elite class of Tamils and used them against first the Sinhala Christian elite and then in general against all the Sinhalas, and especially the Sinhala Buddhists. Though the Tamil politicians and the western "experts", media personnel and others attempt to show that the Tamils have been discriminated against since 1956, we have shown that Tamil politics against the Sinhalas began long before that in the nineteenth century around 1875, after the English realised that the Burghers could not be made the leaders of the so called Ceylonese nation.

The so-called problem as presented by the Tamils and the English was non-existent and could be termed the inverse of the problem though the inverse did not exist. In the parlance of mathematics, it is similar to talking of the inverse of a matrix whose determinant is zero. The problem was depriving the Sinhala nation and the Sinhala Buddhist culture the due place in the country while giving privileges to the Tamil elite when they were a minority in population and were recent immigrants in history. The English overlooked all these and gave the Tamil elite a special treatment and trained them to be the leaders of the country after they had failed with the Burghers. The English from their point of view made a very grave error when they gave franchise to the adult "Ceylonese" as it enabled the Sinhala leaders to obtain a majority in the legislature in spite of opposition by the Tamil elite. The latter had been trying to dominate the legislature from the nineteenth century but all these attempts came to nought due to the universal franchise given with the general elections in 1931. Since then the "inverse problem" has been presented as the problem and the solutions that were formulated by various parties with vested interests were to this non existent "inverse problem".

Naturally, no solutions were found to a non-existent inverse problem and finally in 1949 Chelvanaykam had to introduce the idea of a separate state in the northern and eastern provinces, interestingly enough demarcated by the English as late as in 1889. It was a case of Tamil elite having realised at last that they could not become the leaders of the "Ceylonese" nation opting to be the leaders of the two provinces. The only "solution to the inverse problem that did not exist" was a separate state. This so-called discrimination by the Sinhalas and the Sinhala government as the Tamil elite presented it, was nothing but removal of the privileges enjoyed by the Tamil elite one by one. The Tamil elite was cunning enough to introduce their loss of privileges as discrimination against the Tamil community in general.

The making of Sinhala the official language that has been presented as the main cause for all troubles is a case in point. English had been the official language of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) under the English and the only people who could work in English were the English educated Ceylonese among whom the English educated Tamils were prominent. Neither Sinhala nor Tamil nor any other language had been the official language of Sinhale before the English became the colonial rulers. In the maritime provinces, the Dutch and Portuguese had been official languages while Sinhala continued to be the official language of the rest of Sinhale. Tamil had never been an official language in any part of the country and, as late Mr. Gamini Iriyagolle has shown,the pact between the Portuguese and the Arya Chakravarthi King in Jaffna had been drafted in Sinhala and Portuguese and not in Tamil! The Sinhala should have been made the official language as soon as we got independence in 1948, but those ‘nobodies’ who became ‘somebodies’ making use of the Sinhala nationalist movement did not attend to it. It has to be emphasised that though the concept of official language had not been formulated by western political scientists in the pre-fifteenth century era, there was an understanding as to what is meant by the language of the official documents.

It has to be remembered that when Sinhala was made the official language, it was given its due status and prior to that English had forcefully become the "official language" using colonial powers. Sinhala did not replace English as the official language as English had no status whatsoever except as the language of colonialists and by making Sinhala the official language again the ordinary Tamils did not lose anything. It was the English speaking Tamils (and their Sinhala counterparts) and the Burghers who lost anything, if at all, as their privileged status was lost. Many Burghers and some English speaking Tamils (and Sinhalas) went abroad to become second class citizens in their new adopted countries as they thought life was much better in those countries than in a Ceylon with Sinhala as the official language. However, some of the English speaking Tamils who remained in the country for some reason or other pretended that the Tamils had been subjected to injustice by making Sinhala the official language and attempted to mislead the ordinary Tamils. As far as the ordinary Tamils were concerned they had lost nothing as English and not Tamil had been the official language under the English and the Senanayakes. The anti Sri campaign illustrated this point more clearly. If the symbols EN in the number plate were replaced by Shri what did the ordinary Tamils lose due to that? The English educated Tamils would have preferred English alphabet to the Sinhala alphabet and its combinations but as far as the ordinary Tamils were concerned the Sinhala alphabet was closer to them than the English alphabet!

The above examples show how the English educated Tamils attempted to transfer their problem to the ordinary Tamils and gradually the former were able to mislead the latter so much so that the ordinary Tamils led by Prabhakaran fought the "war" of the English speaking Tamils without realising that they were fighting somebody else’s "war". The western forces naturally supported the terrorists and they knew of nothing but peace talks to carve out the so-called Northeastern province as a separate state. The term Northeastern or northeast is conceptually wrong but even today there are some English speaking Tamils who prefer this terminology. As the inverse problem did not exist so was the so-called solution to the problem. There was no possibility of a separate state and it was only a matter of time before the LTTE was defeated as we had realise long time ago.

The change of Tamil leadership from Chelvanayakam to Prabhakaran has also brought the end of politics of the English speaking Tamil elite. Though the LTTE terrorists were called ‘our boys’ by the English speaking Tamils, the latter did not have much faith in the former. The elite may have been thinking of regaining the leadership of the Tamils with the assistance of the English and the other westerners in the event of a separate state being carved out in Sri Lanka. The LTTE in the eyes of the Tamil elite and the west was fighting a "war" that they themselves could not fight. After the defeat of Prabhakaran the west and the English speaking elite have lost all bearings. They wanted the so-called diaspora to carry forward the struggle but what they did not realise was that the "diaspora" was not a homogeneous body. Most of the diaspora are ordinary Tamils and not elite though some of them may be speaking English. Dissension has already occurred between Karuna Amman aka Muralithraran and Pillayan. There are many others with George Master and Daya Master being the most well known leaders. The latest is KP and with him at least a section of the diaspora will move over to the governmental ranks. The crossover of various Tamil politicians in the recent past augurs well for Tamil politics and it may be that the ordinary Tamils are finally realising that they had been fighting somebody else’s "war". One could always claim that KP changed sides in order to save his life but that will not explain the dissension of many other Tamil leaders who have emerged from the ordinary people. The ordinary Tamils will ignore the English speaking Tamils though the latter still have a political muscle with the support of the western forces. It is up to the government to handle the new situation carefully and work towards a new Sri Lanka where all communities live in harmony respecting all cultures and recognising the significance of the Sinhala Buddhist culture and giving its due place. The threat to Tamils and the Muslims is not from the Sinhalas but from the west that does not respect any culture other than their own while paying lip service to all the other cultures.