by Rajpal Abeynayake
In Sri Lanka, many would predict that the Rajapaksas would still be in power by the time it is 2020, even though many will not say with any sense of certainty exactly which Rajapaksa would in fact be controlling the vital levers of power. Yet these are the easy ones in terms of future-gazing, to a great extent.
In more difficult areas, most would like to know the contours of race relations in this country one decade hence.
Thoreau said succinctly - simplify, simplify simplify.
So, let us simplify: will the Sinhalese and Tamils be at each other’s throats in the year 2011? An altogether interesting question, despite the fact that the outcome or rather the answer to that question, will be no laughing matter.
Today, there seems to be no question that the Tamil diaspora comprises of the druid- masters and alchemists chiefly responsible for concocting the witches brew of racial hatred vis-a-vis Sri Lanka. The longer the problems between the 10-1people of the Tamil and Sinhala ethnicities last, the greater the chances of those Tamils who have not yet acquired residency or citizenship status in the Western capitals to remain there, for economic reasons.
Those who remain in the country can be delineated roughly into essentially two germane categories when considering questions of future mobility and accommodation of Tamils within the Sri Lankan polity — the elite and educated essentially Colombo centric urban Tamils, and the vast swathes of essentially poverty stricken Tamil peasantry and labour classes who were simply not wealthy enough to emigrate during more than two decades of war whose brunt they bore with such stoicism worthy of a corpus of textbook studies and research.
In the first category are the Sumanthirans, who are determined to carve out a substantial niche for themselves as members of the elite community irrespective of race delineations. The second are the Karuppiahs and the Letchumis whose lot it has always been to either survive or perish depending on what the elites of the Tamil community had in mind for them at the given time.
Value judgement
I’m not counting the Karunas and the Douglases in this equation, who have incorporated themselves or being co-opted, depending on the way you look at it, into the state machinery as stakeholders of the ruling dispensation. I’m counting out not because of any value judgement about what they have chosen to do with themselves, but because they form a very negligible, miniscule part of the Tamil community that it wouldn’t help to include them in the Tamil demographic in any attempt to determine the future contours of interaction between Tamil and Sinhala ethnicities in this country.
A surface reading of the mood or the temperament if you will of the collective Tamil community, post-war, seems to indicate that there is a state of confusion among the Tamils of the decision making elite. The Sumanthirans do not appear to be sure whether they are to adapt to the line of the diaspora and essentially take a belligerent and uncompromising stand vis-a-vis the Sinhala community and its elite, or to extend a hand towards these Sinhala elites, and attempt to cautiously collaborate in the new effort at post-war economic resurgence, so that Tamil elites in particular would not miss out on the probable pot of gold at the end of this post-war rainbow.
In effect, the post-independence project of Tamil hegemony over Sri Lanka, of creating a supra ruling albeit minority-comprised ruling class ruling over the majority, is over. So is the corollary separate project that went in tandem with it.
Some may say that the Tamil elites would have no choice in this decade and the ones to follow except to merge into larger mosaic of Sri Lankan life, make a contribution to the nation even though from a co-equal position, and not from a dominant position as was envisaged by the Tamil elite classes post-independence, and subsequently via separatism.
In other words, there is the expectation that the Tamils would be like the Muslims in Sri Lanka —- content to carve out their own niche in the larger mosaic of national life, but not seeking to do battle with the majority Sinhalese. If the Muslims can amicably co-exist, logicians say that the Tamils can, but the small problem with this line of argument is that the Tamils are not Muslims.
The one thing that is stopping the Tamils and the Sinhalese elite in collaborating in the same way that the Sinhalese and the Muslims have quietly done for centuries is that there is an obvious measure of reticence and mistrust, mutually held, between the Tamil and Sinhala communities for obvious reasons given that particularly after independence the relationship between these two ethnicities has been one defined by antagonism borne out of the contest to determine the dominant power in post-independence life — particularly in the area of the utilisation of resources etc.
The Sumanthirans will be naturally diffident, if not hesitant to embrace the younger Rajapaksas, for instance, coming along nicely with their smiling accomplices the Karunas and the Douglases and vice versa.
Peace loving leaders
As long as this ice is not broken it is difficult to decide which way Sinhala Tamil relations would proceed in the coming decade — in the way it is decided in the diaspora back alleys of London and in Geneva, or in a way that peace loving and hopeful lower and middle-class Tamils would like their leaders to take them, so that they could make something good out of collaborative coexistence with the rest of this country’s communities.
To me, all bets are off on the outcome of race relations in this country, until two leaders emerge from both the Sinhala and Tamil communities who can envision reshaping the almost primeval condition of mistrust between these two communities and their ruling, rule-making elite.
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