C. Wijeyawickrema, LL.B., Ph.D.

Eelam deal?

After reading Mr. P. K. Balachandran’s (PKB) essay, Roots of ethnic contestation in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province,” (Daily Mirror on October 10th, 2023), I tried to understand why he wrote it and what was his purpose. Did he find any new roots of his own helping people to understand it better?  Against a vast body of research on the topic of a mythical Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka, PKB takes the readers along his confused and delusional Eelam path. After his essay, the outbursts of the TNA boy Rasamanikkam in the parliament, culminating in a secret removal in the night of a Buddha statute at an old Sinhala village, Divulapathaana (Batticaloa), creates a suspicion that PKB was engaged in most probably, a contract job to please the Eelam lobby, local and foreign.

An ethnic group based on language or religion is supposed to have only one organic homeland and not two or three.  But PKB supplies 3 homelands for his Tamil masters: the real one in Tamilnad, another in Jaffna and a third in the Eastern Province (EP). He forgets that the EP is an artificial demarcation. When Tamils in the Fiji Islands tried to claim a homeland there, they were chased out. Same happened in Malaysia and in Singapore.

Three Britishers debunk Tamil homeland myth | Sunday Observer    (December 11, 2022)

A senior reporter like him ought to take a holistic approach in understanding phenomena we see around us, on land and sea. One must see the trees as well as the forest. Justice cannot be done to the geography of (and history is past geography) the issue of adding the Eastern Province to the Eelam Northern Province by words and sentences written in an arbitrary, biased, and unreasonable manner.  Whether PKB is a Hindu or a Christian, it is a sin to mislead his readership with falsehood and half-truths. As the then Sunday Leader newspaper editor Fredericka Janz, now exiled in the USA once said, a newspaper printing such delusional verbiage is good only for wrapping fish at the market.

Malaria mosquito and PKB

The best way to handle his confusing hidden agenda is to expose him to facts so that he cannot try to play a game of ‘taking fire under water.’ Decades ago, historian K. M.de Silva and geographer G. H. Peiris explained with data why Chelvanayagam’s artificial homeland theory and his complaint of Sinhalization of the dry zone with irrigation projects had no roots at all. Since the days of the Dutch rule, white masters tried to populate the Wanni region with Tamils from South India, but the malaria mosquito prevented it. On the other hand, reports of the English administrative officers confirm that Sinhala villagers lived in these regions continuously.  No Tamil was displaced by the peasant colonization schemes started in the 1940s. With the confiscation of their lands by the white rulers for tea plantations, Kandyan peasants became prisoners in their own ancestral lands, and after 1931 an attempt was made to give them land where land was available, in the dry zone.

*1.  The Tamil ethnic formula is not as simple as PKB thinks. There are Vellala Tamils, low caste Tamils and Batticaloa Tamils. At the beginning, Muslim leaders stood behind Prabakaran, until the Muslims in the North were chased out by him. There was no dominance issue between Tamils and Muslims.

The package deals of Mrs. CBK (and Neelan-GL) during 1995-2000 recognized a Muslim region in the Eastern Province, while allowing room for Neelan Thiruchevam’s dream for a mono Tamil region in NP+EP with provisions for a merger.

Nobody speaks about the Sinhala residents displaced by Prabakaran. There is also a story that the low caste Tamils happened to be the original Sinhala people subjugated by the Vellalas who came from Tamilnad during colonial times. Surnames of these Tamils and Tamilized village names support this thinking.

Until 1911, Ceylon had Malabar inhabitants, not Tamils. It was Ponnambalam Arunachalam who got the designation changed as Ceylon Tamils.

*2. PKB ignores the fact that the separatist politics by TNA, Wigneswaran and Ponnambalam etc. are facing a crisis with a rapidly diminishing voter base. Tamil people are not in support of a Tamil Eelam or a 13-A plus or minus. The low caste Tamils have realized that in an Eelam they will be suppressed by the Vellala ruling class. They found the Sinhala army as their friend while the Indian RAW is promoting Hindi language in Jaffna.

*3. PKB is silent about the Tamil Che Guvera, Arun Siddharth in Jaffna, who has developed political links with the southern Sinhala Buddhist leaders. Both Jaffna and Colombo-living Tamil separatist politicians consider Arun as a survival threat for them. They and the Indian government office in Jaffna hate Arun’s request for help in teaching Sinhala to low caste Tamils and Tamil to Sinhala officers etc. The former governor of the Eastern Province Anuradha Yahampath started programs to teach Tamil and Sinhala in schools and offices in that province.

*4. Another geographical factor that PKB hides is that there was no Hindu Tamil – Sinhala Buddhist clash in Sri Lanka. 15-20% of the sacred space of a Buddhist temple is devoted to Hindu gods and goddesses, and some Hindu Kovils are maintained by village temples.  In fact, protest marches against ancient Buddhist temples in Jaffna, Trinco or Mulathive are led by Christian Tamil pastors and not by the Hindu priests!  The new reality in Jaffna is that Non-Vellala Tamils are supporting the ancient Buddhist temples in Jaffna and the Eastern Province.

*5. The Eastern province is an arbitrary demarcation by the British. It was/is an organic, natural part of the Kandyan kingdom per Robert Knox’s book. Before that when the Portuguese began killing Muslims in the western coastal areas, the Sinhala king allowed them to migrate and settle down in the Eastern province (and the Muslim politicians demand an Oluvil country today thanks to this world’s first refugee settlement project!).  Catholic villages in the Kandyan regions today are also a relict of the second refugee project when the Dutch Reformist church started killing Catholics in coastal areas.

*6. PKB’s superficial and bias HISTORICITY

PKB does not demonstrate he has any deep or critical knowledge of Sri Lankan or the Eastern Province history. He relies on one Fr. Rajan Rohaan of the Church Commission for Peace and Justice and Nirmala Chandrahassan respectively, for his Eelam pilgrimage. Nirmala is the daughter of EMV Naganathan and daughter-in-law of SJV Chelvanayagam, the two Christians who were behind the establishment of the Federal STATE Party disguised as Federal Party.

Who in the world disputed the existence of Buddhist ruins in India or in South India? Do we need PKB to tell this to the world. The question is that there is not a single Buddhist temple with an unbroken history of existence in South India today. Piggybacking on Sunil Ariyaratna’s book on ‘Tamil Buddhists,’ Wigneswaran tried to fool people saying that Tamil Buddhists in Jaffna were converted to Buddhism by Sinhala occupants and later these Tamil Buddhists became Shiva Hindus! He thought by this theory he could pump oxygen to Chellanayagam’s Tamil homeland myth.

During the Babri Masjid controversy in Ayodhya, when the mosque site was subjected to new excavation as ordered by the Indian supreme court, under the Hindu shrine (Rama’s temple), they found the ruins of a Buddhist temple! Similarly, in Polonnaruwa underneath the two Shiva kovils built by the Chola rulers, they found the ruins of Buddhist temples! Based on Buddhist religious literature, some scholars speculate that the famous stone at Mecca (Makkama-Makulolaramaya) Saudi Arabia, was part of a Buddhist temple. A simple excavation could reveal whether this is true or false.

*8. PKB is crazy to think that ancient Buddhist ruins in the Eastern Province were discovered after 2019 with the appointment of a committee by the president Gotabhaya. For example, Kurundi vihara was identified first by the British officers, and Ven. Ellawala Medhananda spent more than 35 years recording information about such archaeological sites.

*9. PKB needs to list the names of temples newly opened at locations without people. It is people who invites a temple and a monk not the other way around. He must be confused about the situation when ancient temple ruins were discovered a monk deciding to reside there to protect it from the enemies of archaeology!

*10. PKB is silent about the two types of invasions Sinhala Buddhists and Hindu Tamils face: Unethical religious conversions by the Christian evangelical/fundamentalist world movement and the Sharia-Wahabi Islam expansion into the cities and town all over the island. It has a weapon called war of wombs, promoted by Yasar Arfat and Gaddafi, baby making factories with a dozen or so women and one or two men in Arab-funded buildings!

*11. With clear evidence that it is Mr. Ranil Wickremasinghe (RW) as president of the country who is creating problems between religious and ethnic groups by his unnecessary comments etc., PKB is feeding RW & Co. with false data. The anti-Sinhala Buddhist agitations by the Christian boy Rasamaikkam gets an automatic boost when RW downgrades ancient coastal temples as light houses built for the benefit of ships sailing around Sinhala Deepa!

PKB is deaf and blind when RW orders officers to stop private donations to restore and repair ancient temples while mesmerizing some monks about establishing a new international Buddhist university at Mahavihara. The truth is already there is one such university (Nalanda) in the Gampaha area. Instead of a duplicate new university RW could help this Nalanda International Buddhist university.

PKB cannot be ignorant of the fact that Buddhism is different from other God-based (Abrahamic) religions. There were no wars against other religions or forced religious conversions. It invites people to come and examine, not come and believe.  Buddhism accommodates minor Hindu gods and goddesses, but Buddhists cannot accept the new western intrusion coming as the Interfaith Movement which promotes an idea that all religions preach the same message, because for Buddhists, each individual must find his/her salvation by his/her own actions, and no God can do this for him. This is what the likes of Rasamannikam cannot fathom. Both RW and PKB may be playing double games, but Rasamanikkam is determined to get what his grandfather and Chelvanayagam wanted in 1949, an Eelam of the Kosovo model.