Palitha Senanayake

Mr. C V Vigneshwaran, the MP for Jaffna and the former Chief Minister for the Northern Province, deserve Kudos from the Government for his statement at the opening day of the Parliament where he made totally unwarranted claims about his race and its ancestry in this country.  This is because he made those flagrant statements in the context where the new Government, having withdrawn from resolution 30 A at the UNHCR, will now have to convince the international community that the problem in Sri Lanka is not the violation of HR by the county’s forces but the racialist claims and the misplaced nationalism of the leaders of its principal minority, the Tamils. Mr Vigneshwaran has now provided material to help the government substantiate its case citing his statement as evidence that the Tamil leaders are bent in creating racial tension by making outlandish and unfounded claims at important and sensitive national events to provoke the people and create trouble in the country, as they have been doing all this while.

Mr. Vigneshwaran was given time at the inaugural ceremony of the new Parliament to address the new parliamentarians as a new Member of Parliament for Jaffna but he abused that gesture of goodwill and bonhomie to unload his divisive thinking and racial prejudices signifying that all what the Tamil leaders wish is the assertion of their race’s superiority and its fabricated ‘grandiloquent’ history.   The irony however is that this uncalled pomposity appears to be an attempt to prevent the Sri Lanka nation from treating that intransigent and destructive past period of the nation as a part of its history.

As an avowed supporter of that fascist LTTE leader, Piriphakaran, Mr Vigneshwaran is also following the advocacy of that fascist propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, who declared that ‘ you could make a lie appear as true by repeating and asserting it over a period of time’.  Joseph Goebbels also maintained that ‘every German Soldier should carry the glorified German history in his backpack to motivate him in his quest.’ Accordingly, Mr. Vigneshwaran is propagating lies at crucial national events with the hope that those will earn a semblance of veracity someday while at the same time glorifying those falsehoods to propel innocent young men to combat, just as Appapillai Amirthalingam did with his Vadukkodai resolution back in 1976. However, it is doubtful whether the present generation of young men could be as foolish as those in the 1970’s as they have been witnesses to how the egoism of Amirthalingam destroyed him and pushed their community back by a few decades, in the end.

Recent Sri Lankan history will prove that ‘provocating the majority’ is the popular tactic the leaders of the country’s Tamil minority resorted to in order to manufacture and propagate their ‘causes’ to earn the sympathy and support of the ’international community’.  Chelvanayagam tarred the vehicle registration numbers and Sinhala street names in 1958, Amirthalingam called the Tamil youth to arms in 1976 and both those instances were followed by communal riots in the country.  Now Vigneshwaran, after all that, is blithely staking fabricated claims to the country’s anthropology inventing a new brand of Sri Lankan history!  The Sri Lankan nation has to be on the lookout, for there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of ‘cast conscious’ and ‘egoist’ Tamil leaders on the country’s highways inebriated with Tamil racialism and nationalism.

However, the previous instances of communal riots in the country have not been without their dividends to the Tamil leaders. Thanks to the 1958 riots Chelvanayaganm was able to establish the Tamil Diaspora in the west in 1960 and thanks to Piribhakaran and Amirhalingam ,the riots of July 83 strengthened the Sri Lanka Tamil Diaspora to well above 800,000 in numbers. Accordingly, the big question now is, is Mr Vigneshwaran trying to rejuvenate the migratory opportunities of Tamils by prompting another riot, since there is some paucity in those opportunities since 2009? After all, it is the Diaspora income that financed the war for 35 years.

In making these quant historical claims, what these claimants ( Tamil leaders such as Vigee. ) do not realize is, that a particular community or civilization could only have only one native land and therefore it is anthropologically and practically, on all counts, impossible to have two native set- ups for a single civilization.  Narayan Swami is an Indian author who authored 4 books on the LTTE and on Piribhakaran, having researched a whole lot of information about the movement from the 1970’s. He had, parenthetically, mentioned in his books that he never felt that he was living out of India when he stayed in North of Sri Lanka because, the way of living, food, customs and everything else remains as they were in Tamil Nadu. Therefore in a situation where even a civilization with limited numbers like the Sinhalese have evolved  slight differences in their language, customs and dance forms, depending on their distances and habitations, it would be preposterous for the Tamils to claim that their civilization evolved identically from two different origins. This is as unthinkable as a single child being born to two mothers!    

Therefore, just as India and Tamil Nadu provide strength for  Ceylon Tamils when it comes to waging war and bargaining internationally, the same India is proving to be their weakness when they try to make ‘historical claims’ in other countries.  On the other hand, Sinhalese are a unique civilization of which no traces are found anywhere in the world. Although there are historical stories of an advent of an Indian Prince in to Sri Lanka, the island was inhabited long before that and it is only that the island’s history was only recorded after this event.

Listening to Mr. V’s speech, I often wondered whether he spoke something different to what he meant to say, because it is always possible that he meant to say ‘the earliest invaders of the island’ when he said ‘the earliest settlers of the island’. If that is what he meant, then no history scholar would have qualms about his assertion because Kalinga Magga, the first invaders of ‘Sinhaley’, as the island was known then, were said to be Andra- Tamils.

There is yet another inherently foreboding aspect of this ‘historical claim of ownership’ made by these intransigent Tamil leaders that the other inhabitants of the country should wisely take note of; Sinhala and the Muslim communities. This is particularly relevant to the devolution of power that the Tamil leaders have been clamoring for and these claims of anthropological ownership signifies that the intention of these leaders is not of just obtaining a legal framework  for the exercise of power for the country’s good and co-existence, but of consolidating their ownership claims for an eventual separate state. This undeclared intention will eventually lead to a demographic and geographical disaster for all the people inhibiting the Island and may, in all probability, end up with a protracted sectarian/ big power war in the island

Further it may not sound fair to conclude this write up without taking up the queer interpretation Mr. V has adduced to the word ‘nation’ in his speech. He maintains that Tamils in Sri Lanka is a nation and not a community. Well, we have the United Nations that comprises 196 Nations of the world and if we are to bestow nationhood to every community in every country the UN may well end up having about three or four thousand nations.  In that context, India alone may have a ‘United Nations’ of its own because they alone have about 200 different communities with a myriad of languages. The meaning of a word should be taken in the context of its popular use and just because Mr V. desires to be the Head of a nation state he cannot make the SL Tamil community in to a nation, in the acceptable context.  

Every word Mr. V spews out in his speech denotes his separatist virus and it is for this reason that they demand separatism of powers in the guise of devolution. What the Sri Lankan rulers should realize is that all the countries in this world with devolved power structures (Federal), have been populations that have been brought together, in their own interest.  Their unitary character is a strength and a welcome feature and is also a necessity for all of them.  Often it is because they desire nationhood in a country as they had not been a recognized as a country before. On the other hand the Tamil leaders in Sri Lanka are demanding a Federal structure because their desire is to be separated and not united. In other words they are not ‘staying together inclined’ but separatist inclined. Also this would be the first time in the world governance that a country that has been single from the time immemorial is being separated in to federal states. Federalism therefore could be in danger with Tamil nationalist and racialist such as Mr V. Thus, Mr V., by standing as a Tamil Parliamentarian in the inaugural parliament and expressing his, divisive, nation within a nation concept, and fallacious ownership claims, has depicted to the world that the Tamil issue in Sri Lanka is not just about violation of human rights but a case of the country’s inability to grant ‘extraordinary ownership rights’ to the Tamils.