Why Tamils Need a Pragmatic Political Leadership

If there is one thing that may stand out at the end of the parliamentary polls of 8 April, it’s the possible emergence of an identifiable Tamil political leadership for the people in the post-LTTE era. It is only a hope but the chances are that such a leadership could continue to be a ‘divided’ and a further fragmented group but identified by a wholly democratic process, unlike when the LTTE was around. Whether they could be expected to sit around a table and transact serious business in the larger interest of the community/communities that they all represent, they cannot blame external factors like the ethnic war or the continued existence of the LTTE with its over-reach and over-kill on everything ethnic.

The exit of the LTTE is only one of the realities that the Tamil polity has been handed down. The larger question remains. Whether that leadership(s) would be pragmatic enough to acknowledge the ground realities and work towards a political solution in the company of the Sri Lankan Government and the majority Sinhala polity – not to leave out Tamil-speaking people of other denominations like the Malayaha Tamils and Muslims – is the question that should be upper-most in the minds of the community voters across the country.

It is one thing for the Tamil community to vote the way they did in the presidential polls. The very fact that they had the opportunity to register their preference was a right that they had not enjoyed for decades. Of course, such an election might not have even been as free and fair as the community and the polity had wanted.

Yet, they were definitely an improvement on the previous round of parliamentary polls, when the LTTE ‘fixed’ it all – and later denied them even that much participation a year later in the Presidential elections of 2005.

Whichever way they looked at it, it would have been an electoral battle within the ‘Sinhala polity’, particularly if one were to take the narrowest of constructs that has been imposed on the electoral scheme in the country for long. This made the contribution of the Tamil-speaking people to the final result decisive or far-reaching. It may not be any different this time, too, if one went by the mood and methods of the Presidential polls of 26 January. The hang-over seems to remain in the air.

The importance of the ‘Tamil vote’ became pronounced in the January polls, not because of the contest and contestants, per se. It owed to perceptions about a possible repeat of vote-share distribution from the presidential polls of 2005, when incumbent Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakasa won by a wafer-thin margin.

Extending the vote-share arithmetic without providing for any alterations in the historic interregnum of war and victory, it became too simplistic an argument to pronounce that the common Opposition candidate, Gen Sarath Fonseka (retd), would be elected President if the Tamils voted for him, overwhelmingly.

The results proved otherwise. The Tamils, who were denied voting rights by the LTTE the last time round, did show a marked preference for Fonseka than the incumbent President Rajapaksa. This cut across denominational and regional distribution.

Yet, the Tamils also need to acknowledge that a substantial fall in their voting percentage owed not only to official lethargy, or conspiracy, or whatever, but also to a steep fall in the Tamil-speaking population in the country, thanks as much to wanton migration in search of greener pastures as to war, violence and the consequent need for secure environs.

It is true that the Sri Lankan Tamil community is rooted in the land, and their love for land, language and culture would match the best in the world. It is truer that the community is also education-driven and enterprising when it comes to adventurism of a kind unknown to many others in Sri Lanka. It is as if their uni-focussed ambition to improving their educational standards, job prospects, and thus attaining social status through the process of gainful employment, is ingrained in their genes – and with a positive fallout.

The days of ‘kozhi-pidikkara velaya-irunthalum, government velayaha irukkonam’ may be gone. Translated from Tamil, it means, “Even if the job is that of a helper in a hatchery, it should be in the government sector.” It is thus that the ‘ethnic issue’, war and violence had their beginnings not necessarily in perceived cultural differences with the majority Sinhala community, which sections of the Tamil community still mention while arguing for a ‘separate State’. They were based on the tools and opportunities for securing Government jobs for as many members of the Sri Lankan community as possible – and as individuals wished. In a way, the Tamils’ protest against the ‘Sinhala Only’ law of the Fifties was not necessarily against purported blessings of the Ceylonese State, as it was then known, to marginalise an ancient language that was theirs. It was not even about the inequities involved in the process. Cruel and crude as the ‘Sinhala Only’ law was, the inequities were about the overnight introduction of a legal mechanism to deny Government jobs to the Tamil-speaking people.

It was not as if the Tamils were opposed to learning Sinhala at the time. If anything every Government employee migrating to other parts of the country from the Tamil areas had picked up a functional proficiency of Sinhala in his time – just as a Sinhala baker or banker would have done in the Tamil environs.

What the ‘Sinhala Only’ law did was to tell the Tamils that they should have already acquired a proven proficiency in the majority language for them to be able to obtain Government jobs.

Even this may have worked if only the motive and methods of the legislation was to ensure the spread of Sinhala – whatever the reason – over time. Overnight imposition of Sinhala on a population that had already completed their graduation without a proven knowledge of the language meant that this particular generation would have to do without Government jobs, for which not just those students but entire families had toiled and hoped for. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Tamils protested such inequities in reality – and their natural love for their language and culture was a tool in the process. Today, if the Government is keen on introducing a ‘compulsory three-language’ formula as President Mahinda Rajapaksa does not tire of repeating, it should set five-year and ten-year deadlines to effect such a scheme. Mandatory examinations in all three languages – namely, English, Sinhala and Tamil – and an additional exposure to IT and computer education – first at the National Scholarship Examination and then at the O-Level could be meaningful methods for the purpose. It would also give the authorities time to create physical and human infrastructure, particularly in the war-ravaged Tamil areas, where everything is lacking in every walk of life.

In a way, the ‘Sinhala Only’ law was different and more distasteful than the ‘Standardisation Scheme’, when introduced in 1971.

It is sad that the northern Tamils would not acknowledge the fact that the Scheme would have helped the Tamil-speaking people in the East as much as it might have assisted the Sinhala population across the country, in whichever districts the educational standards were considered low. It would have helped the Malayaha Tamil community even more.

‘Affirmative action’ of the kind has been known to the rest of the world, and has worked well. It is more so in the Third World, but the First World has also been known to be super-sensitive to issues of the kind. Sadly, for the lot of the Tamil-speaking people in the North, where most of these protests originated, decades of war and violence has now caused a situation in which they are the ones who may be badly in need of ‘affirmative actions’ of the kind.

Considering that the Tamils continue to confer great value on education, governmental efforts at rehabilitation and restoration should focus as much as the education sector as any other. Better still, it would have been a battle for the minds that the Government could still win, without having to fight a war or draw blood on either side. It is not a coincidence that the Sri Lankans of all hues today are linking their future to the West rather than to Government jobs – which too are not exactly in short supply, whatever be the political/electoral agenda of the party in power.

It is more about those who were caught in the cross-fire of war. Even their higher education needs can be delayed, not denied. The generation is badly in need of infrastructure for promoting primary education, starting with school buildings, classrooms and teachers.

They all have vanished with the war just as their families, homes and houses. It is this that their political leadership should be asking for and obtaining from the Government in Colombo, if the ‘residual Tamils’ that the war and migration have left behind, have to make some sense out of their lives ahead.

It is no different in the case of the farming community – hence the call for demilitarizing the High Security Zones (HSZ) that has covered large tracts of agriculture lands as much as Tamil homes in vast numbers.

Their restoration and the restoration of lost life that the younger generation has missed again is a priority in which event the best of Governments alone cannot do much about in such trying conditions. It is here that the emerging Tamil political leadership – again of all hues – have a lot to do, and can do a lot.

It is sad that at a time when the parties of the Tamil-speaking people should be united as never before, they are divided even more than at the time of war, violence and terrorism. Not that the Tamil-speaking denominations in Sri Lanka were ever known to have been united in their cause, approach or choice of leadership. Suffice it to point out that at the turn of Independence, the rest of the Tamil-speaking polity looked the other way when Statelessness and disenfranchisement were imposed on the hapless Malayaha Tamil community. When ‘Sinhala Only’ became law, it hurt.