H. L. D. Mahindapala

 Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka (DJ) and Prof. Kumar David (KD) are two leading Marxists who wage Left-wing ideological wars in their provocative analyses and polemics published mainly in the English media. Right now they are engaged publicly in interpreting the same facts of the post-Prabhakaran politics from two different perspectives. The difference is that DJ has begun to plant his two feet on the ground realities, particularly on the hard realities facing the Tamils, while KD is attempting desperately to take off theoretically into a Leninist stratosphere with broken legs and wings left behind by Prabhakaran. As a Marxist it is the intellectual duty of KD to argue with empirical analytical skills in dissecting the current political situation, faced mainly by the Jaffna Tamils. Like all other analysts, he should know that it is the Jaffna Tamils who got hammered from all sides – i.e., the Indians, the Security Forces and, worst of all, from their self-proclaimed liberators, the Tamil Tigers. The task before any Tamil intellectual is not to doggedly take the Tamil people down the failed path again but to point the way to an alternative non-violent route that would take them away from their doomed ideological fantasies – all of which sank in the waters of Nandikadal.

 Despite the glorification of the history of Jaffna by the English-educated Vellahla Vadukoddians the mass of the Tamil outcasts “led lives of quiet desperation” (Thoreau) because their leaders misled them. Their self-created political misery stems from their concocted, romanticized past which never existed except in the febrile imagination of the Vellahlas chasing mirages of power at any cost. The fundamentals of their politics is based essentially on victimology, always blaming “the Sinhala governments”. Deluded by their own propaganda they became tragic victims of an ill-fated ethnic drama scripted, directed and acted by them – and them alone. KD, if he has any historical sense, should have directed his people away from this Greek tragedy. Instead he plunged headlong to be its Ideological Assistant Director. He thinks he is doing a great service to the Tamils when he re-enacts the tragic lines in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

 After the Vadukoddai Resolution legitimized violence and handed the gun to the militant Tamil youth Jaffna ran into the darkest period of its history. The post-Vadukoddian history of Jaffna was written in the blood of the Tamil masses. When power shifted from the Vellahla elite into the hands of Velupillai Prabhakaran, a school drop-out whose hobby was to pin live insects on to the pages of his books, Jaffna paid heavily for the folly of their leaders. Historically, their suffering dates back to feudal and colonial times when the fascist Vellahla casteists oppressed and kicked the dispossessed, low-caste Jaffna Tamils around as pariahs unfit for human society except to serve them as slaves. The conditions of the Jaffna worsened under the prot©g© of the Vellahla fascists – Velupillai Prabhakaran. If under the Vellahlas the fascist oppression of the Jaffna Tamils was confined only to the low-castes under Prabhakaran violence escalated to blanket the entire peninsula and beyond. All Tamil castes became the victims of his fascist political violence.

 The leadership that directed peninsular politics came exclusively from the hegemonic Vellahla caste/class. According to Prof. Karthigesu. Sivatamby, the Vellahlas, in the later stages, were transiting from a caste into a class. Any panoramic view panning over peninsular politics will reveal that no community in Sri Lanka has suffered from the misguided politics of their leaders as the Jaffna Tamils. C. V. Wigneswaran, the new hope of Jaffna Tamils, is now claiming that there is a need for a new history of Jaffna. Perhaps, he means a new version of the same old stuff which will further justify the failed Vellahla politics. Wigneswaran-Sampanthan-Sumanthiram leadership know quite categorically – mainly because of international and Indian pressures — that they cannot get anywhere if they stick to the politics of the Vadukoddai Resolution. Besides, they and KD should also know that from the time of G. G. Ponnambalam’s time the North-South relations came a cropper not because “the Sinhala Governments” were unwilling to give them their reasonable demands but because the Tamil leadership refused to budge from their arrogant extremist demands that were unworkable.

 For instance, when Ponnambalam was crying for 50-50 he was offered 46-54 which he rejected outright. It was the biggest mistake of the Tamils. When Prabhakaran was offered the rule of the north and the east without elections for ten years his reply was to send a suicide bomber to kill President Chandrika Kumaratunga. When the Indians offered him the Chief Ministership in an autonomous North-East his response to send a suicide bomber to kill Rajiv Gandhi. When the international community headed by Norway gave him the North and the East on a platter he violated, according to Scandinavian Peace Monitors, 95% of the terms and conditions of the Peace Agreement. In the middle of peace talks with the Tamil Tigers Prabhakaran sent his Babu to assassinate another peace-maker, President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The blood-thirsty Tamil leadership rejected the best offers they got from “the Sinhala governments” and whom do the noodle-heads in academia and NGOs blame : “the Sinhala Governments”.

 The Tamil leadership has played this blame game long enough. It has not moved them forward nor is it going to. At least at this late stage they must face the realities and accept responsibility for letting down their people by insisting on extremist demands. They always overestimated their power and underestimated the power of “the Sinhala governments”. Their failure to estimate and understand the limits of their power is what drove them mad – all the way to Nandikadal. Right now they are banking on the power of the West and India. But when India abstained in the last vote in Geneva it taught them a good lesson in political realities. They were shocked by the unexpected blow. It was as bad as losing their great big hope in Nandikadal.

 What is needed now is a sober reappraisal of what happened in the history of Jaffna, particularly after S. J. V. Chelvanayakam’s speech delivered on December 18, 1949 at the Government Clerical Service Union (GCSU) hall calling for federalism – a loose term which was interchangeable with self-determination/separatism in the Tamil political vocabulary. The period starting from the 20’s when the Ceylon National Congress broke up on early communal politics, with the Tamil leadership launching their racist claim for communal seats in the Legislative Council, encroaching into Sinhala-populated Western electorates, has been documented definitively by Sri Lanka’s foremost historian Prof. K.M. de Silva (See The Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies, Vol III, January – June 1973). Later Jane Russell’s classic, Communal Politics under the Donoughmore Constitution – 1931 – 1947, captured the overarching communal politics in the 30’s which revealed, in the main, the quantum of Tamil racism that exacerbated the north-south relations.

 Then in the forties came the GCSU speech of Chelvanayakam, made in Maradana, Colombo, in which he outlined his federal formula based primarily on linguistic politics. This speech marks the sharp dividing line in North-South politics. This was the penultimate stage to the Vadukoddai Resolution of May 14, 1976 calling bluntly for separatism. The incremental escalation of the Tamil extremist demands, starting from one extra seat in the West in the 20’s, then the 50-50 in the 30’s, then federalism in the 40’s and separatism in the 50’s – mark you, long before S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike came into power in 1956, long before the Sinhala Only Act, and long before anti-Tamil riots – establish that the routine excuse for blaming Tamil extremism on the lapses of “the Sinhala governments” does not hold water. If anything, it proves that the mono-ethnic extremism of Jaffna politics was propelled by internal peninsular forces and not the external “Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism” blamed for everything that was wrong in Jaffna Jingoism. The racist Vellahla leadership was willing to destroy communal harmony if it helped them to grab, retain and expand political power, both inside and outside Jaffna, irrespective of the consequences to their own people, as seen on the violent road they took to Nandikadal.

 The first extremist move for “federalism” in Colombo in 1948 and the second extremist move for “separatism” in Vadukoddai in 1976 were led by Chelvanayakam. In fact, the Vadukoddai Resolution was merely an extension of the GSCU speech which spelled out explicitly the decision of Chelvanayakam, the bogus Gandhian, to take up arms against the rest of the nation in pursuit of Eelam. A. J. Wilson, the son-in-law of Chelvanayakam, wrote in his biography that his father-in-law went through the phrasing of the Vadukoddai Resolution with a fine comb and approved it. No one disputes that the road from Vadukoddai to Nandikadal was initially mapped out by Chelvanayakam – the man who claimed to be the father of Tamils because he had no father of his own, says A. J. Wilson. Chelvanayakam’s father who dropped his son, born in Ipoh, at Tellipalai, never saw his son again until he was lying on his death bed in Malaysia. That was the only time Chelvanayakam went all the from Ceylon to visit his father. It is the Tamils of Jaffna who had to pay dearly for the guilt of Chelvanyakam not having a father at home. It was a high price for any community to pay for the loss of one man’s father.

 Anyway, the role Chelvanayakam played subsequently as “the Father of the Tamils” was more disastrous than tragic. The first born son of Chelvanayakam’s GCSU-Vadukoddai politics was Prabhakaran. Historians have yet to review this “father-son” relationship and its overall impact on the lives of the Tamils. His secret ambition was to be a Jinnah or a Mujubur Rahman to the Tamils. His separatism was based on hate politics that targeted the Sinhalese. He refused to buy a house in the Sinhala south fearing that the cosmopolitan culture of the liberal South would pollute the purity of his Tamil children. He had no special love for the Tamils either. He campaigned vigorously against the Sinhala south. But he did not put his full weight behind the Left-wing moves to eliminate the oppressive caste system. In the Maviddipuram temple entry case, where the low-castes were refused to step even to the outermost court, he “tip-toed out of it” (Prof. Bryan Pfaffenberger) without confronting the issue head-on. His focus was on the non- casteist language issue that could unite all sections of the Tamil-speaking communities, including the estate Tamils and the Tamil-speaking Muslims. But his movement to bring all Tamil-speaking collapsed because the Muslims and the estate Tamils saw through his manoeuver to increase the Tamil-speaking vote bank to beat the Sinhalese. Besides, the economic and political interests of the Muslims and the estate Tamils did not coincide with that of the English-educated Jaffna Tamils. Language issue was specific only to the English-educated Jaffna professionals and government servants who feared that their hip pockets will be affected by the introduction of the Sinhala Only Act. He exploited the language issue to boost his separatist politics and, more importantly, his chances against his arch rival, G. G. Ponnambalam. It was also the only issue that could bind the caste-driven Jaffna community together.

 He was a political opportunist who cashed in on the language issue to prevent the casteist fissures cracking up the Vellahla ground in Jaffna. The fears he raised about the coming death of Tamil language proved to be a false cry. The bare fact is that even today, nearly sixty years after the Sinhala Only Act, English still remains as the dominant language of the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary. In fact, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, the man whom the Tamils have never ceased to vilify, is the first Sri Lankan leader to enshrine the Tamil language in the statute books. Besides, the Sinhala Only Act was never introduced to displace Tamil. To begin with Tamil was never in the statute book to be delegitimized. Sinhala Only Act was introduced to overthrow English as the language of the state. In a democratic state it was the right of the people to communicate with their elected government in the language of the people. Bandaranaike gave this right to both Sinhala and Tamil people. It was this right that was twisted and projected as an anti-Tamil act.

 Fortunately for him he did not live to see the mayhem he unleashed. He did not live to see his loyal deputy, Appapillai Amirthalingam, being gunned down by the children of his Vadukoddai Resolution. It is the people of Jaffna who had paid with their lives for the folly of a bogus Gandhian who dragged his people all the way to Nandikadal.