C. Wijeyawickrema, LL.B., Ph.D.
Tamil-speaking people, after the defeat of the LTTE, see the Provincial Councils as an adequate sharing of power, given some minor modifications that were acceptable to them at the APRC, within a single unitary state.” LSSP communique issued by Tissa Vitharana, Island January 3, 2021
I delivered Sri Lankan Tamils more rights than what Tamils in Tamilnad enjoy; That Island is now like Bhutan.” Rajiv Gandhi, boasting at the Chennai airport, returning from Colombo.
We need King Pandukabhaya (437 BC-367 BC) in 2021 AD!
After, the retired geography professor Dr. G.
H. Peiris penned an essay, discrediting the use of province as the spatial unit
under the 13-A, three other essays appeared, not about the size of a PC unit,
but about why the PC death-trap should be exhumed. Austin Fernando, Nirmala
Chandrahassan and to some extent Rajan Philips, all wanted the new Romesh de
Silva committee to take the path proposed by Chandrika-GL-Neelan-Jayampathy
Package Deals in 1995-2000, reinforced by the APRC majority report and further refined
(strengthened) by the Orumittanadu one of Ranil-Sumanthiran-Jayampathy, during
2015-19. Encouraged by an unexpected boost, ex-APRC boss, Tissa Vitharana,
issued a press release, under the title, PC polls should be held ASAP.
The lady and the three gentlemen know, this
is the last chance to achieve what Prabhakaran could not deliver by the bomb.
They are taking the balkanization path. For those who elected a non-politician
as President and gave him a two-thirds majority demolishing the myth of king-making
role of the minority parties under the JRJ-R.Premadasa PR system, the Romesh de
Silva Committee is the last chance to correct the mistake made on May 19, 2009
by MahindaR, in failing to abolish 13-A by a war proclamation, implementing the
recommendations of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Local Government Reforms, 1999 (the Abhayawardhana Report).
Yes, Tamil hostages freed by MahindaR called
him, Our King,” weeping in front of video cameras. But, as PM he is still
holding the tiger’s tail, despite the sacrifices of those like the Hasalaka
Hero, and Gotabhaya’s destiny now as the President is to slain the tiger for a
second time, because, last time, according to the tiger agent Erick Solheim, he
(Gota) was the only high-level official in government who said, that this war
IS winnable.” The country and its people, Tamils, Muslims, Sinhalayas and all
others, could be saved if he plays the role of Arjuna, in the Bhagwat Geetha,
overcoming the buttering attempts by a so-called list of Tamil Moderates. After
all, it was the Sri Lankan-born Michael Roberts, the owner of the Thuppahi’s
blog in Australia, who uncovered, after prodding by Jane Russell in London,
that a moderate Tamil can also be a Tamil Eelamist [when the time is right and
ripe]!
Mismanagement and the Tragedy of the Commons
Jack London, the research author of the detective
book, The people of the Abyss,” (1903, 14 years before the Russian
Revolution), was puzzled when he saw slums amidst the mansions in the East End
of London, the center of the British Empire that the sun never sat. His
diagnosis was it was due to sheer mismanagement, same disease that Ceylon/SL
had been afflicted since the 1930s. It is double-jeopardy, when the black-white
politicians treated the island as a common pasture to exploit for personal gain
today, leading to the inevitable public ruin tomorrow. Everything and anything
they touched, abuse and destruction of physical resources, to central bank
robbery, to selling harbours, to bribes and commissions from projects, ended
up, thus, as more burden on the shoulders of the people. The whole island has become a huge nine
pieces of pasture for exploitation after the nefarious 13-A.
Mythical Tamil Homeland
With the Bhoomi Puthra Movement growing,
Chelvanayagam had to leave Malaya (like those who had to leave East Africa in
the 1960s), and, according to his son-in-law, A. J. Wison created a myth of a homeland
in the Eastern Province, because NP was not big enough to be a Kosovo-type
Tamil Country. Despite, that the true Tamil Homeland is Tamilnad, Ceylon has
become the easy target, a prime real estate for a Tamil country with a UN seat
and an Eelam flag, due to the favorable climate of Sinhala black-whites’
partisan politics. From the minutes of a confused Hugh Cleghorn (June 1, 1799),
to Vigneswaran’s claim recently, that the Island had been blessed with five
SHIVA LINGAMs brought during pre-historic times (Colombo Telegraph, October 1,
2020), the homeland myth has grown now to an Eelam Lebensraum, engulfing the
entire Sinhale nation.
This kind of lunacy is different from the
delusional behavior that SWRD attributed to SJVC in a Parliamentary debate
(Hansard vol 31, June 3, 1958 cols. 244-5). Finally, SJVC passed it on to the
boy Prabhakaran, by garlanding a statute of Sivakumaran in 1975, who committed
suicide after a failed assassination attempt on a superintendent of police.
Vignesh is now lecturing to clueless MPs that the Ides of March is around the
corner, his hope for a reverse Nandikadal in Geneva in March (Colombo
Telegraph, December 9, 2020). American administration (not American people)
facing humiliation from Gotabhaya for a second time with the rejection of the
MCC- trap (first humiliation was when American agents, British and French
foreign ministers, made an attempt in April 2019, to rescue Prabhakaran to an
American ship waiting outside Trinco harbour), must be lurking in the dark for
an incident like a Sharia-based Muslim uprising so that the UN forces have an
excuse to land in the island with the newly designed R2P weapon. Silence so far
on what has happened to the cellphones (digital data) of the April 21 Easter Sunday
bombers, that the FBI agents took with them worries everybody.
The Sinhale nation is facing two threats, the
Thesawalamai-homeland-Orumittanadu- Eelam threat, and the Sharia Muslim
villages located all over the country in systematic fashion, using Arab dollars
and the womb as a weapon. Purposely isolated these villages also have one or
more mosques, equipped perhaps with swords to cut grass on the adjoining
cemetery ground. For example, Kattankudy town has mind-boggling number of
mosques.
Rajiv Gandhi was able to get constitutional
recognition to the homeland myth, and 13-A was the legal manifestation of it.
Therefore, as long as, 13-A remains as the law of the land, and with the
Supreme Court deciding that 13-A has converted
Sri Lanka into a federal state, Sinhalayas are living with the danger of the
country succumb to balkanization sooner or later. Hence, the black-white
Sinhala politicians are like the proverbial crabs playing inside pot of water
warming slowly on low flame. While teaching children Sinhala and Tamil, so that
Tamil separatist politicians cannot fool Tamil masses with genocide tales, the
homeland myth must be eliminated by removing the opportunity to talk about it
as a propaganda base. This was what the APRC minority report said, and it was
what Prof. Tissa Vitharana himself said then in 2006 to news reporters: that
political divisions should not be based on language or religion.
What is then the rational, reasonable,
scientific, equitable, just and the Buddhist solution? Just like the eye cannot
see the eye (unless before a mirror?), all kinds of stories about 13-A, miss a
basic solution available, a kind of panacea for all ethnic ailments.
Apparently, the King Pandukabhaya, knew this according to the great chronicle,
Mahavamsa. Like the Baseline Rd., the straight line used by the British to
survey the entire island, King P, surveyed the island (populated areas?) and
marked the boundaries of all villages and local chiefdoms to bring them under
one unifying flag. The Gamsabhava became the vehicle of governance, with the
socio-economic-political Trinity, the village-water reservoir- and the temple.
Solution:
Re demarcate the 14,000+ GSN units, the
lowest civil administration agency, using natural boundaries. Like in New
Zealand, where the use of river basins as boundaries for its lowest
administrative units is constitutionally mandated, we have 103 river basins as
a base for this exercise. In USA and
Canada, river basin and groundwater management districts cover the entire
landscape, with strict sets of regulations.
Province or District?
R. Premadasa increased the number of 4,000
GSNs to 14,000, and a natural boundary demarcation will reduce this arbitrary number
significantly. Once this is done, they could be combined to decide what should
be the spatial extent (size) of political unit desirable, and acceptable to
all.
Empowerment of people at the village level
13-A PCs failed to empower people. It only
created a new tier of resource-robbing local political crooks. Therefore, to
decentralize governmental power, meaningfully, to people, new GSNs with Natural
Boundaries should be used as the third- level or second-level political unit
(If the existing 340+ local government units (pradesheeya sabha, p.s.) are
rearranged combining new natural GSN units, each such GSN unit could function
as a ward of a p.s.)
Tamil Aspirations
The private needs and wants of Tamil, Muslim
and all other communities could be realized at ward level (or as Jana sabha) or
at p.s. level. But a public aspiration for an Eelam balkanizing the Sinhale is
out of the question. See the map printed in 1986 by the International Alert
above, to understand the ultimate dream of the Eelamists (note that the map did
not even care to name the Sinhala portion allowed). Wigneswaran’s dream
published in 2020, has a target of covering the entire island with his lunatic
theory based on the five Siva lingams.
But by creating language-blind and
religion-blind GSN units, the mindset of a Tamil homeland in the island is
blocked, and the Sinhale fear of a larger Tamil spatial unit trying hide and
seek games with them is erased. For example, if a crazy p.s. decides that it
does not want a new Buddha statue within its jurisdiction as part of promoting
its Arumuga Navalar type of Hindu culture, it is not like an aspiration to stop
southern fishermen migrating seasonally to the east coast or Wigneswaran’s
slogan, we do not want coconut toddy in Jaffna” (the latter issues will come
under the national economic policy). The balancing act will happen when a
southern p.s. decides to ‘retaliate’ with request to build new Hindu kovils. In
a truly democratic climate, the conflict will
end when anti-Buddhist elements realize that
15-20% of the sacred space of a Temple is devoted to Hindu gods and goddesses
(do you remember the Gurukanda Vihara case?)
How can you unite by dividing?
The title of this essay comes from an actual incident.
A friend of mine had to explain his white American friend the Tamil problem in
Sri Lanka. Due to mismanagement of the foreign service system in Sri Lanka,
people outside think that Tamils are discriminatorily treated by a Sinhala
government. While listening to my friend’s long explanation, when the 13-A
arrangement was disclosed, his American friend stopped him and asked point
blank, the question above.
Federalism is a political marriage. If
husband or wife has a paramour, and to save the marriage one with the lover
wants to leave the bedroom and move to the annex which has separate entrance
etc. would that marriage survive? This
is exactly what the federal option means in the Sri Lankan context. Federalism
is a friend if it is based on friendly circumstances and a friendly
environment. The past since 1921/4, recent past from the 1980s to 2009, and the
present from the Wignesvaran days beginning 2013 had been a sore tale of
misery, betrayal, and distrust. Any attempt to take the 13-A federal path is
just a vain effort like feeding a cancer to cure it. This why I say SLPP
ministers and MPs badmouthing about the virtues of 13-A are idiots.
Because of the statement by Tissa Vitharana
promoting his APRC majority formula, another essay is needed to set the record
straight.
