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

The Indian and Tamil Nadu politicians are responsible for transforming a rebellious “lower caste” Tamil youth who was once a challenge to the Central Committee of the Federal Party (a.k.a:Tamil state party) into a ruthless murderer. Indian plans boomeranged. The Sinhala soldiers’ sacrifices to protect the motherland kept LTTE at bay until the rest of the world had time to realize the truth about the LTTE. All this reminds me the answer my friend received from his father when they recently discussed the present predicament of Sri Lanka. “Son, whatever happens Sri Lanka’s horoscope is good”, the father answered. As stated in the Mahawansa, God Vishnu must be protecting this island. It is a miracle that “the Break-up of Sri Lanka” did not happen yet as predicted by the late Mr. Chelvanayagam’s son-in-law, Dr. A. J. Wilson. Otherwise, how can it be possible for the rebels to have a well-developed navy, while the Sri Lankan president admits, after 15 years of war, that “we have failed or neglected to develop our navy”.

The war continued without another Vadamarachchi (in which Prabhakaran’s life was saved from Sri Lankan army by Rajiv Gandhi’s war planes), solely because the LTTE have had a steady pipeline of arms supply from Tamil Nadu by sea. The Indian navy refused to cooperate in cutting this supply route, and Sri Lanka’s “Yankie Dickie”, the late Mr. Jayewardene, could not get the American Navy Seals to help him. How can our leaders not know that the sea is a barrier as well as a highway, and that as an island we must be prepared to convert, if necessary, every fishing boat we have on this island into a low-cost weapon directed against the enemy sea power. The fisheries Department, Fisheries Corporation, Coast Conservation Department and the Tourist Ministry, for example, must pool their resources to destroy LTTE sea power, before they become an air power too.

To face subversive activities originating directly or indirectly from the Tamil Nadu we must go to NCP, and we cannot in modern day do what the Sinhalese kings did then by fleeing from Anuradhapura. We need to understand, that the counter attacks against the South Indian invaders were organized by military strategists, Valagambahu, Dutugamunu, Vijayabahu and Parakramabahu the Great, utilizing the manpower in the Ruhunu, Maya and Pihiti regions. These “Moshe Dayans” of ancient Sri Lanka did not go to foreign universities in Taxila or Nalanda to learn Sri Lankan geography. This manpower in the South is still our most valuable resource, and we must take it to the new frontier and meet the Tamil Nadu-based enemy there. We must have a forward capital. This manpower potential in the South must not be divided into seven or eight pieces in the name of symmetrical empowerment. The 1997 version of FP-TULF proposals of 1971 and 1985 will kill two birds with one stone for the separatists: it will take them one step closer to the next UDI, a temptation difficult to resist, more importantly, it will break the ability of the south to act as a counter force against Tamil Nadu sponsored terrorist attacks, border disputes, sabotage and bomb attacks.

As late as 1450, Prince Sapumal, the son of Parakramabahu VI, invaded and ruled the Jaffna Kingdom for seventeen years with the manpower from the south. Peace will not come by breaking the majority race into pieces. Not only do the Sinhala people have no legal homeland, but the 1997 Constitution will prevent any hope of getting one. We must strengthen our contacts with Pakistan, China and the Superpower, the United States, knowing that each country is interested in what it can get from a friendship or a partnership. We need to develop a separate force of Coast Guards, like our civilian police force with one eye toward the sea. Foreign embassies, the Marga Institute with its Group of 25, and the NGOs, good and bad, must be in the NCP and not in Colombo. This will not happen until the official capital and the national parliament is located near Anuradhapura. If political leaders want to live near Colombo, Kotte, or Nawala, they cannot expect the people or the government departments to move to the dry zone. Who wants to live in areas with malaria or no good schools for their children?

Thus, if doctors or SSPs refused to go out of Colombo or the Trinco Kachcheri is empty without officers, one needs to blame the Colombo paradigm for that. Therefore, if a palace is indispensable, then build it closer to the Kala Wewa or Tissa Wewa. If ministers or ministry secretaries must send their children to a school in Anuradhapura, they will see to it that the schools in the vicinity get the best improvements possible. In this regard, our leaders need to learn what sacrifices leaders of Eritrea are making to build a nation in the desert, after 30 years of war, and from practically nothing (The National Geographic, June 1996).

Moving the seat of government to the NCP will give Tamil farmers and Tamil workers from Jaffna an opportunity to meet with Sinhala farmers and Sinhala workers from the south by reducing the geographic distance now exists between the two groups. Let Tamil farmers in Vavunia and Kilinochchi meet directly with farmers in Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, without Tamils from Colombo or Wellawatta acting as intermediaries. I once saw how this happened at the cement factory in Puttalam. Constitutions cannot teach what people can learn by intermingling with each other. Until the Sinhala and Tamil politicians from Colombo poisoned their minds, Tamils and Sinhalese lived in harmony both before and after the political independence. English was removed not to help the Sinhalese but to help the poor Sinhalese as well as the poor Tamil. The sharing of the Mahaweli water by these people will bring them closer, if the seed for division is not planted by a constitution prophesying “symmetry”.

On the other hand, Mahaweli water can be a source of water wars between regions, because the river runs over several sovereign regions. Economic interests and scarcity of resources put even the best neighbours like the Canadians and the Americans at each other’s throat! They often clash over sharing fisheries resources in the oceans. Thus, real estate owners of Ruhuna and Sabaragamuwa could fight with each other, despite whatever precautionary measures taken by the constitution book. What keeps members in a union under control is not the law in the book but economic forces and other realities of life.

This is what one can learn from the history of devolution in the United States or in India. Devolution based on the division of land as a solution to an ethnic problem is a slippery path with no end. It is a dream of curing cancer by feeding it. Just think of what is in store for the Canadian Province of Quebec, if it leaves Canada. An independent state of Quebec will have to do “something” about the people living on the Island of Montreal, the Eastern Townships along the Vermont border and Western Quebec who do not want to be part of it. Also, the Cree, Inuit, Mohawk and Montagnais aboriginal groups with homelands covering two-thirds of the Province of Quebec are not willing to give up their ancestral lands without a fight (National Geographic, November 1997). In Sri Lanka this will one day end up as a mass-scale ethnic cleansing, and we will not find a Sinhala or Tamil lawyer from Colombo who can stop it.

Global and national economy

The rise and fall of nations, great and small, depend ultimately on the availability and wise use of resources. For the past 50 years we have been talking about developing the peripheral regions, diversifying the economy and improving the standards of living of farmers and workers. The new economic devolution is expected to empower people and reduce the gap between the center and the periphery. The concept of forward capital, not symmetrical devolution, is the proper mechanism to help the periphery. There must be a physical and psychological break-away from the Colombo mentality. Changing the names of Bombay onion and Mysore dhal to big onion and red dhal will not help to get rid of this mentality. We cannot develop Wellassa, Panduwasnuwara or Thamankaduwa from air-conditioned offices in Colombo. Sacrifice for the benefit of the country should go beyond the poor soldiers’ level to other government officers. We cannot expect farmers in remote areas to come to the Agricultural Research and Training Institute in Colombo 7 for advice. The foreign-trained expert must go and live with the farmer next to his paddy field. This is how real empowerment, and real devolution can take place.

Sri Lanka cannot escape from the Pacific Century or becoming part of the global village. The world stage is shifting from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. just like the way the Pacific (Chinese/Japanese) coast of the United States, is gaining more importance than its Atlantic (European) coast, Sri Lanka must move from the Colombo coast to Trincomalee. This natural harbour is facing China, Japan, Malaysia and the Four Asian Tigers (Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea), Just like Colombo was closer to the Suez Canal. While Colombo plays the role of primate commercial city, Trinco will be the new port with the administrative, national capital near Anuradhapura. With a modern international airport located some distance north of Anuradhapura (at Vavunia?) to serve as a hub for SAARC countries, Sri Lanka will be ready for the 21st century. If the World Bank thinks that the proposed Hambantota port will be a good cargo hub for South Asia, it is even better for Trinco’s role.

India once had a proposal to dig a shipping canal between Sri Lanka and India (the Sethu Samuduram Project), and if this ever becomes a reality, then Sri Lankan ports in Mannar, KKS and Trinco can benefit from it. When the low country was under the rule of the Dutch, Sri Lanka had a viable coastal canal system, which is now in ruins, which can be resurrected to link Sri Lankan ports and harbours, big and small. In the past, Sri Lanka was a meeting p lace for Greek-Roman and Muslim traders from the west and the Chinese traders from the east and Indian traders from the north. This history will be repeated now within a new global village.

Free trade, free enterprise and liberalization of the economy from government control are catch words used today to raise the living standards of the masses. The question is not whether we need to promote international trade, but how we do that. There was a time when Sri Lanka imported pencils and rubber erasers, while exporting shiploads of crape rubber and raw graphite. Is this free trade? Or is it importing frozen chicken from Holland for the Colombo crowd? Is this the purpose behind creating a powerful World Trade Organization (WTO) by the rich countries of the world? Do we want a globalization where two ships, one carrying wood blocks from Minnesota to Japan and the other taking toothpicks and chopsticks from Japan to California, past each other in the Pacific Ocean? Sri Lankan Scholar the late Munidasa Kumaratunga, once said that “a nation that does not look for new things and innovative ways cannot progress”, but does it mean that we destroy our culture, our resources and our natural environment for an international trade, which simply means meeting the consumers’ hunger in the West?

No country in the world solved its economic problems by allowing foreign investors to locate their textile and other processing factories on its soil. The economic freedom for a country like Sri Lanka can come in the long run by developing an economy in which agriculture and industry are considered as its two legs. Investors come to take advantage of tax breaks, cheap labour, weak labour laws and ineffective environmental protection laws, and they are not interested in developing a base for agro-industrial growth. Employment provided by them will be temporary until they find better deals somewhere else in other countries. This is the history of capitalism. While accepting this necessary evil for the time being and leaving it to take place in the Colombo area, we must plan for our future under a new Rajarata paradigm. Governments are talking about rural development, rural employment, congestion in Colombo and protection of the environment. “Corporate Globalization” is the latest wave of economic colonialism armed with NGOs and aided and abetted by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the new WTO. These agencies and the UN system now have a class of “experts” hired from the Third World countries to serve their masters, “Third World in color but Western in thinking”. The Sri Lankan geographer, Lakshman Yapa, has written extensively about how the western concept of development sponsored by the World Bank for over forty years has become the problem rather than the solution to poverty in the Third World.

Instead of erecting several smaller reservoirs upland, in the 1940s we made the mistake of building one huge dam across the river valley of Gal Oya. This mistake was repeated in the 1980s with the Victoria Dam and an “acceleration” that helped the contractors and the commission “hawks”. With the Mahaweli water, we are still able to concentrate on developmental strategies based on concepts such as “Small Is Beautiful”, “Buddhist Economics,” and “Appropriate-Intermediate Technology.” The Sarvodaya philosophy of community development based on the model of “Village-Wewa (water reservoir)-Temple,” fits ideally with a periphery-oriented Rajarata paradigm. While Colombo and other coastal areas continue to work on export processing industries, the rural base of the country could develop industries which are in harmony with an agricultural way of life. Instead of one CISIR, one Industrial Development Board and one AR & TI in the Colombo area, each province, each district or each electorate can have mini CISIRs, IDBs and AR&TIs manned by local people with local talent. These can have a link with local schools so that a student who studies chemistry biology and physics at grade 12 do not necessarily end up as a bank clerk. Thus, students do not have to wait for another 30 years before our leaders decide to really overhaul the colonial educational system.

Environment and Development can coexist happily under a Rajarata paradigm, and as Mahatma Gandhi said there will be plenty to meet the country’s needs. We have books produced by the Sarvodaya Movement laying out field-tested plans on how we can achieve such goals. Do we need expensive foreign experts to advise us on such matters? The dry zone has its own rewards of solar and wind energy, and this energy could help in pumping ground water with tube wells. Total reliance on the Mahaweli alone could be an economic disaster as it is only a massive rainwater transfer scheme. Hopefully, in future, marginal tea plantations in the headwater areas of the Mahaweli would gradually come under a reforestation plan as recommended in the Tea Commission Report in 1968 or as advocated by the JVP in 1971, in one of its five orientation lessons. They should not be sold to Tata Tea Company. Globalization, through trade liberalization under the watchful eye of WTO, has increased the gap between the rich and poor countries and the rich and poor classes within countries. This center-periphery division within Sri Lanka can only be minimized by a non-Colombo paradigm.

Basic geography and history lessons

Any Sri Lankan who had an opportunity to read Horace Perera’s History of Ceylon or S. F. de Silva’s Geography of Ceylon at grade 10-12 levels would understand that the division of Sri Lanka into nine or ten regional governments is a recipe for disaster. Or one can get a quick lesson in this regard by an overlay of Sri Lanka’s physical geography map on a map of provinces and districts. Rivers on the island radiate from a central mountain mass and any division, if necessary, must be based on river basin systems, if the individual units are given power over land and water resources. Take the Kalu or Kelani Ganga as an example. These run through at least three regions. What if the Western region thinks that the water supply in the Kalu Ganga is reduced because there was lot of forest clearing in the Sabaragamuwa Region? Can the constitution solve this conflict? What if a lower region thinks that the upper region is not taking action to prevent river pollution? The history of water use conflicts in the world tells us that these are not hypothetical questions. What is considered as a normal practice now will become objectionable behaviour in separate regions.

We were taught that the Mahaweli is not a river but a river system. Water use conflicts that can arise between regions through which this river runs will be constitutional lawyers’ nightmare. Water-related clashes now common among the users of irrigation canals are mini scale versions of what could be expected among those sharing large river basins. Regions can be equal in constitutional law but not in the type or the quantity of resources available. While human geography justifies some special treatment given to areas with heavy concentrations of Tamil minority population, the division of southern provinces into several regions goes against it. To bring geography and politics closer, the British devised a system of electorates based on a formula of population and area. By simply adjusting the area part of this two-part formula, the Colombo group could have delivered a ton of devolution, decades ago, if there was a genuine concern to help the periphery.

It is amazing how the former Ceylon Civil Service members, UNO-World Bank system experts and the Colombo lawyers so easily forgot how the Crown Lands Ordinances were used by the British to rob lands from the Kandyan peasantry. They also forgot how the Kandyan king allowed the Catholic refugees coming from the Dutch-controlled coastal areas to settle down in his kingdom without forcing them to become Buddhists. These are just two reminders from history to the Colombo group. After the 1956, and to a lesser extent, the 1960 and 1970 General Elections, the Colombo paradigm was shaken but not buried. What Sir John did to M. S. Themis on the steps of the Parliament building was exactly what the Colombo group wished to do to the 1956 MEP government. The late Mr. Martin Wickremasinghe was gravely mistaken when he wrote at that time about “The Donwfall of the Brahamin Caste.” This class never lost its grip over the affairs of the country, only the chameleon-like methods of control adopted changed. When the 1956 election brought new members to Colombo, who did not speak English, the civil servants formed internal advisory committees to teach these raw” members how the government machinery and the parliamentary system operate. Much later when a President openly ridiculed them stating “I want a Bass (self-skilled carpenters/masons) not an engineer,” and “I can write the Budget on a bus ticket”, some of these civil servants managed to become his top-level advisors.

The resilience of the Colombo group was such that no amount of reform, including the abolition of the CCS system or the opening of administrative service jobs to Swabasha medium graduates after 1965, could break its grip over the country. The officer groups, the police and the university teachers are divided on partisan lines and not based on truth, justice and facts. Unlike those who left the country in disgust, they play a game of survival, fooling the politician. Today, when a Carlo challenges two Dasas to explain “Who are ‘black whites’?” we are dealing with a phenomenon easy to see but difficult to define. We talk about a group that in 1835, Thomas Macaulay was planning to create in India, “…a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

This is the intellectual group that we have in Sri Lanka today who wants to convince Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekera that this idea of a “National Conscience” is a myth. It is amazing how Macaulay was able to help invent a group of people and a system of thinking, which, like a blackhole sucks in new batches and new waves of officers politicians, merchants or anybody who can buy a small plot of land in the vicinity of Colombo, and then ready to do anything to stay in Colombo and to retain fruits of freedom in their hands, while preaching power sharing and regional development.

Attending a Colombo school, simply because one’s parents could afford it, does not necessarily make one a great-grandson of Macaulay. Some officers simply become prisoners of Colombo, who had no choice but to live in Colombo and had to become part of the establishment due to various reasons, such as children’s education. However, anyone who used English as a “sword of oppression”, (Kaduwa) (Youth Commission Report, page xvii) is a member of the Colombo group or a “black-white”. English has been a ladder for those who had an opportunity to learn it, like other languages of commerce, such as the computer language. Therefore, to use the benefits of that opportunity, directly or indirectly, to oppress others who did not have that opportunity for no fault of theirs, is to pay homage to Macaulay.

It is immoral, if that opportunity came at the expense of the less fortunate, such as the transfer of hard currency pumped into the economy by people working as janitors and house maids in the Middle East, which is used by the Colombo rich to send their children to foreign universities. The Fundamental Right Number 46 in the 1997 draft Constitution, “…A person shall be entitled to be educated through the medium of either Sinhala or Tamil and if facilities are available, through the medium of English,” illustrates how the Colombo paradigm perpetuates through the Colombo group with the full backing of the law. The fairness of this right is not different from the fairness the French people enjoyed under the French law which stated that “both the rich and the poor are allowed to sleep under the bridges of Paris.”

The most important history lesson then is the lesson we can learn from the behaviours of the Colombo group. The biggest obstacle to the Rajarata paradigm will be the mind set of the Colombo group, which is small in numbers but widespread in control. From time to time the Colombo group behaves like the farmer who comes home from his morning trip to his paddy field to whack the dear skin on his armchair on the veranda.  For the political parties in power the problem has been the Constitution. With a few modifications, the Westminster Constitution of 1947 could have delivered everything that the thick book of 1997 draft Constitution now promises to achieve, if politicians and the establishment of the Colombo group did not spoil it for their benefit. If this spoiling process continues, a constitutional instrument, even if it is one hundred pounds in weight and has a quota system of 25% women and 15% below 30 years will not bring this or that devolution.

Western scholars have shown that some key concepts found in western jurisprudence and in western democracy were not alien to Buddhism or to the Buddhist way of life. Only an Archbishop with a Sinhala name could disclose his ignorance by laughing at Buddhist civilization in a Christmas message. In modern times, the principle of separation of powers was first implemented in the British colony of Ceylon during the time of the Governor North, when the Chief Justice issued summons to the Military Commander to appear before his court to show-cause why the latter should not be punished for contempt. The Colombo group systematically removed these safeguards from the 1947 Constitution and cranked out new constitutional instruments paying lip service to such checks and balances.

And today we have such a mess where the bribery commissioner is to be questioned by her subordinates, and a citizen group wanting to do something about the behaviour of the members of the parliament! Those who support dividing the island into nine or ten regions and those who suspect whether they are really in the Colombo group need to consider the following questions. They will help in trying to find answers to the two questions so often asked about the devolution package; (1) For Whose benefit and (2) on what criteria are the divisions of this Island into nine or ten regions contemplated?

1. Legislature

Why was the Senate abolished? What was the purpose of a second chamber? Who packed the Senate with defeated candidates and party loyalists? Who made MPs slaves of the party leadership? Who took away MPs freedom to vote and MPs right to secret ballot in the parliament? Who enacted an election law that will encourage only thugs and crooks to come forward to contest? Who stopped the role of an independent local MP? Which party killed the local government system of town and village councils? Who introduced a Political Authority at district level and killed the local government system?

2. Public Service

Who politicalized the public service? Who started the practice of job applicants submitting a letter from the local MP? Which party ruined the state industrial corporation system, CTB, CWE etc. by appointing its set of party loyalists as directors and top officers? Which party did not find a genius within the cabinet who can handle so many portfolios at the same time?

3. Judiciary

Who ruined the independence of the Judiciary? Who appointed active politicians as Supreme Court Judges? Who asked the S. C. judges to give a signed letter before the re-appointment? Who was behind the demonstrations before the judges’ residence? Why cannot a Chief Justice criticize the nation’s education policy?

4. Others

Which party killed the highest number of Sinhala youths for taking up arms against the Colombo paradigm? Which party uses traditional symbols as an eyewash? Which party built a capital on a marshy land and which party wants to add a palace to it? And which party did not use the Tamil ethnic issue for political mileage?

If the devolution package is the answer to stop such behaviour, then go for it! If you think that the Colombo group is taking you for another ride, consider whether the time is not ripe for a third political party to get rid of the “black-whites” and their NGOs.

The End of the Colombo Paradigm (1948-98): Sri Lanka’s Need for a “Forward Capital” Under an Anuradhapura Paradigm

For the Tamils and Sinhalese who could not speak English, February 4th, 1948, was a celebration held in the City of Colombo, by the people of Colombo, for the people of Colombo. From their perspective, the first significant colonial constitutional reform, the universal suffrage, took place in 1931, and the next real political change reached them with the 1956 General Elections. Since the mid-1980s, a panacea called “devolution” has been thrown at the non-Colombo people by the ruling elites in Colombo, promising to empower the periphery, politically and economically. Symmetrical or asymmetrical, the devolution plans exhibit an end of the central role hitherto played by Colombo. Recent changes in regional and local geopolitics and new developments in global and local economics, including the Mahaweli system, on the other hand, point to a need for a new capital under a new Rajarata paradigm, sustained by the country’s National consciousness (Jatika Chintanaya).

In 1948, the British, handed over the reins of power to Ceylon’s “Macaulay’s children.” This new class of rulers successfully thwarted whatever fruits of freedom reaching the rural-urban farmers and workers who did not know ‘how to use English.’ The 1956 people’s government as well as all other governments after 1960 were under the effective control of this ruling elite. This group, under the Colombo paradigm, implemented “regional development,” “poverty alleviation,” and “diversification of the economy,” programs for fifty years with the results aptly summarized by the Youth Commission Report as “Kolambata Kiri Apita Kekiri” (milk to Colombo, forage to us). And the Guinness book of world records gave them a report card recently on (youth) suicidal rates.

In a constitution tossing game, the ruling elites have systematically removed from the 1947 Westminster (model) constitution, the spirit and purpose of the rule of law, the principle of separation of powers, politically neutral civil service, independence of the judiciary, the village council system and even the freedom of a member of parliament to use his free and secret ballot in the parliament. As a result, corruption is rampant at every level of public life, irrespective of which political party is in power. In frustration, the Sinhalese youths, and the Tamil youths in Jaffna, before the Indian politicians misled them, took extra-constitutional measures, and the Colombo elites, both Tamil and Sinhalese, have now prescribed a devolution medicine for Sri Lanka’s ills.

From the viewpoints of the island’s geography and history (history is past geography), this medicine is worse than the disease. This paper examines how the concept of forward capital in political geography (example: Brazil and Pakistan) can be utilized to provide solutions to Sri Lanka’s present political and economic predicament. For leaders with foresight, wisdom and statesmanship, a forward capital will help conquer several Sri Lankan frontiers; to get rid of the vestiges of the Colombo paradigm, physically and psychologically; to achieve real devolution and real empowerment without dividing the island into nine regions; to provide equality of opportunity to all rural workers of all ethnic groups by providing such opportunities away from Colombo; to avoid ethnic homelands by locating the capital near the conflict zone, closer to Tamil Nadu; to be able to nip in the bud in the source region itself, any attempts of sabotage and infiltration by those against a unitary state of Sri Lanka; to become part of the global village with minimum adverse effects on our people, economy, culture and the natural environment; and most importantly to allay the fears of the majority Sinhalese that the granting of local autonomy to Tamils in the North and East to enjoy their own culture (i.e. they may not want Vesak or Poson as public holidays) will not be a passport to break-up Sri Lanka into two countries at war with each other.

Concluded