H. L. D. Mahindapala
Any lawyer who has
made it to the peak of his profession carries with him the authoritative air of
having achieved the highest intellectual capacity to build up a case on hard
evidence and presenting it cogently, logically, rationally to persuade his
audience, court, forum, etc., of the unshakeable truth on which the case is
based. But there are, of course, exceptions to this rule. C. V.
Wigneswaran,(CVW) former Supreme Court Judge and later Chief Minister of
Jaffna, is one of them.
After he left the
bench and joined the Northern political class obsessed with Tamil extremism
allied to Prabhakaran he has played a mean and vicious role of denigrating the
Sinhala-Buddhist at every turn. Like most other Tamil politicians he is playing
the anti-Sinhala-Buddhist card to the hilt for survival in Jaffna which has
consistently and unreservedly rejected pluralism, diversity, peaceful
inter-ethnic coexistence with the Sinhala majority, or even the Muslim
minority. They have never considered the construction of an enlightened path
for reconciliation, overriding the narrow and partisan interpretations of
history for separatism. They have never sat down and revisited the failure of
their post-independent politics that led them all the way to Nandikadal. As
seen in the 13-point demands put to the leading presidential candidates they
are going back only to revive the policies that dragged their hapless people
into death, destruction and despair.
The only ideology
that was allowed to reign supreme in Jaffna by the Vellalar ruling class
– they were in the majority– is anti-Sinhala-Buddhism. This ideology has
come down from the early decades of the twentieth century. It was honed,
weaponised and unleashed as a deadly force against the Sinhala-Buddhists by G.
G. Ponnambalam in the 1930s. Ever since then demonising the
Sinhala-Buddhists has been the primary
platform that dominated Jaffna politics. No politician competing
for electoral votes could survive without scapegoating the
Sinhala-Buddhists. Following this line, CVW is now performing to beat
his rivals in this game of demonising the Sinhala-Buddhists. After the
defeat at Nandikadal CVW has stepped into the Northern political stage to
revive and activate the failed bid by his predecessors to perpetuate the anti-nation
building politics of the Jaffna political class.
The latest
exhibition of this campaign surfaced in Colombo Telegraph of
October 14, 2019. Consider, for instance, the following story taken out of a
long list of complaints made against the Sinhala-Buddhist recently.(
See Colombo Telegraph, — 14/10/2019). In it CVW . spins
his stories accusing the Sinhala-Buddhists and the state of victimising the
Tamils and then says: . ”How far this is true I do not know. But
we are told many families…….” have been victimised. (In the last
phrase I am summarising his numerous charges).
Imagine him
presenting this case to a judge in a court of law and then concluding by
saying: ” How far this is true I do not know. But we are told manyfamilies
… etc., etc. Which judge is going to take him seriously? Will not his case be
thrown out of court summarily without any further hearing? He goes to court
without knowing whether there is any truth at all in his stories of Tamil
claims of victimisation but he wants the whole world to believe that the
victimisation of the Tamils is true.
If this is the
best that a Tamil judge of the supreme court can produce how much truth can
there be in most of the wild accusations made by the Tamils against other sources? This penchant for repeating
second and third hand stories has been one of the main reasons that had warped
the public discourse on the ethnic issue. Had they checked their facts and
stuck to the stark realities the ethnic issue would not have gone so far as
Nandikadal. At the core of the ethnic issue is that deep craze to believe
that the Tamils are the victims of the Sinhala-Buddhist state and any story is
good enough to turbo -charge their imagined or rumoured stories of victimhood.
For instance, in the dying days of the Vadukoddai War (aka Eelam war) a Tamil
Christian priest in a church in Melbourne (where I live) was swearing that the
Sinhala-Buddhist soldiers were throwing up Tamil babies up in the air and
pinning them with bayonets as they come down!
Adding fuel to the
fires of anti-Sinhala-Buddhist racism has been the standard practice of the
Tamil leadership. Just last month CVW led another anti-Sinhala-Buddhist rally
in Jaffna, along with Suresh Premachandran and Jaffna University students and
lecturers. The main objective of this Ezhuga Thamil
rally was to turn back the Jaffna clock to the history concocted in the
Batakotte (Tamilised as Vadukoddai) Resolution. That version of Tamil history
ended in Nandikadal. Reports reveal that CVW’s Ezhuga
Thamil rally was a flop. Considering all the failures of the Tamil leadership
since independence the time has come for the Tamil people to seriously question
the misleading and the disastrous role played on their behalf by the so-called
brilliant Tamils. It is time for the Tamil people to rise up and ask CVW
and his gang of University students and lecturers : Are you going to lead us
down the path of Batakotte Resolution to Nandikadal again?
CVW’s swing to
radical Tamilness is reflected, somewhat garishly, in his face which is
plastered with Saivite strips of ritualistic ash in technicolour. These strips
seem to be more symbolic of his anti-Sinhala-Buddhist hatred than any
expression of his spiritual purity. What is objectionable is the aggressive
political statement he makes through his face make-up. It is like the
Sinhala-Buddhist politicians displaying their pirith noolas,
sometimes thick as ropes strong enough to hang them up in the nearest tree.
Which reminds me also of the cynic who told a Christian congregation that if
Jesus was shot with a pistol then Christian devotees would be wearing canons
round their necks now! Not surprisingly, kovils, churches, mosques and temples
have become powerful centres of politics more than religion.
The political
activity of CVW indicate that he is eager to ride on the back of Tamil youth
into power like his predecessors in ITAK (example: S. J. V. Chelvanayakam) who
urged the Tamil youth to take up arms against the nation. CVW has also jumped
into the bandwagon of Tamil extremism with an eye to claim Tamil leadership in
the North. Claiming to be the sole representatives of the Tamils” is an
obsession with Tamil politicians. He is hoping to cash in on the prestige of
his judicial background (thanks to the Sinhala-Buddhist state which he
condemns) to be the only Tamil worthy of being a respected and hero-worshipped
leader, now that Prabhakaran is no longer with them
to be their thalaivar”. As the head of the newly established
Tamil Makkal Kootani (Tamil Peoples’ Congress) he is making a desperate bid to
revive and retain Tamil politics at the same virulent
and intransigent level defined and pursued by his predecessors, starting
from G. G. Ponnambalam in the 1930s’ to Velupillai Prabhakaran.
In one sense he
is, like all other Tamil politicians, a prisoner of the anti-Sinhala-Buddhist
ideology. Jaffna never had a history of embracing any other ideology. The
political fathers of Jaffna and their followers were, from birth to death,
bound by two main ideologies : 1. Saivite casteism as defined by the Vellalar
guru, Arumuka Navalar and 2. anti-Sinhala-Buddhist politics which demonised the
Sinhala-Buddhists in the dying days of the British raj as their main enemy.
They never took to socialism, liberalism, pluralism, humanism or any other ism”
unlike the South which embraced all the ideologies that were sweeping the
world, from Marxism, Maoism, Castroism to neo-liberalism.
However, for a
brief period in the late twenties the Tamil youth embraced Gandhism and
peaceful co-existence with the rest of the nation. But that was snuffed out
swiftly by Ponnambalam’s anti-Sinhala-Buddhist racism which became the ruling
ideology that gripped the North. Ever since then Jaffna has been the permanent
home of virulent Tamil racism, excluding all others as non-Tamil outsiders.
Tamil ideologues tried to give it a shine by labelling Tamil racism as
sub-nationalism, or Tamil nationalism. But historical events prove that it was
a latter-day development that began with Ponnambalam raising Tamil racism in
the thirties to protect and preserve the disproportionate Tamil
power, privileges and perks in the British colonial regime. Tamil
supremacist arrogance closed the minds of the Jaffnaites to any other
alternative. Tamil casteist arrogance went as far as dismissing its own
low-caste people as pariahs who should not
be allowed to walk in God-given sunlight. For instance, the Turumbas, the
lowest of the low-castes, were allowed to walk only in the night to protect the
purity of the eyes of the ruling Vellalars who might
bump into them in day time. In this tight environment, dominated by
Tamil casteism/racism, there was no space for CVW, particularly as a new comer
to the political arena, to compete with any other rival ideology that would
tend to be conciliatory and moving towards peaceful co-existence with the other
communities.
Today he is facing
similar (not identical) forces that confronted the young G. G. Ponnambalam when
he arrived from UK, qualified as a lawyer. To make his name he had to compete
with the established and elderly aristocracy consisting of Ramanathans,
Arunachalams and Mahavdevas. He had no constructive program to beat the
turbaned aristocrats” (Jane Russell) entrenched in the colonial system. The
only card he could play to stand out from the pack was anti-Sinhala-Buddhist
racism. So to cut his teeth in politics and to make a name for himself he
embraced anti-Sinhala-Buddhist racism in the colonial period.
The racism he
unleashed in the 1930s remained as the permanent norm for peninsular politics.
He defined and propagated the aggressive and
the intransigent political culture of Jaffna that ran all the way to Nandikadal
– and beyond to Wigneswaran. He ruptured the inter-ethnic relations that had
lasted for centuries. The most marketable slogan for competing and winning
votes in peninsular politics was based on bashing Sinhala-Buddhists. This Tamil
tactic was not labelled as racism. It was labelled as minority rights. But when
the Sinhala-Buddhist reacted to it and defended their right to preserve and
maintain their historical legacies they were called racists.
Ever since
Ponnambalam unleashed anti-Sinhala-Buddhist racism as the norm for peninsular
politics his successors never deviated from it. It was suicidal for any Tamil
to champion any other brand of politics that moved towards reconciliation, or
peaceful co-existence. Those deviating from this norm were condemned as
collaborationists” or traitors to the Tamils, as seen in the time that
Prabhakaran ruled Jaffna. Tamil extremism blocked all attempts at
nation-building. Even the best deals offered with international guarantees were
rejected by the Tamil leadership. If the Jaffna electorate did not
eliminate them with their votes then the guns of Tamil
militants liquidated them. Examples: Lakshman Kadirgamar, Neelan
Tiruchelvam, Appapillai Amirthalingam etc. Arrogant and relentless Tamil
violence didn’t stop at that. Tamil violence went as far as assassinating Rajiv
Gandhi who attempted to keep Sri Lanka united for his own self-interests, with
powers devolved to the periphery to appease the Tamil separatists.
Clearly, there was
no escape route for any new entrant to deviate from the entrenched political
culture of Jaffna. In varying degrees of antagonism Tamil politicians had to
conform to its anti-Sinhala-Buddhist ideology. The Jaffnaites were prisoners
trapped tightly inside the anti-Sinhala-Buddhist straight jacket. They could
move only within the perennial parameters drawn by the cadjan
curtains of Saivite casteism which morphed into virulent anti-Sinhala-Buddhist
racism. Whether CVW likes it or not he had to fall in line with the racism
initiated by Ponnambalam and finally consolidated by Prabhakaran. For him to
survive in the competitive electoral politics of Jaffa CVW is compelled to
dance to the beat of nagasalam choreographed by Ponnambalam and
Prabhakaran.
His ambition now
is to grab the leadership of the Tamils to be the sole representative of the
Tamils. To achieve this he has to kick out of his way the TNA ladder on which
he climbed to seats of power in Jaffna. Having done that, he is now aiming to
take over the Jaffna leadership by beating the TNA with his aggressive
anti-Sinhala-Buddhist programmes, politics and pronouncements. As Chief
Minister he did his damnedest to denigrate the Sinhala-Buddhists and paint them
as the sworn enemies of the Tamils. He passed the notorious resolution in which
he condemned all Sinhala leaders, from the time of independence, as killers of
the Tamils. He was so obsessed with anti-Sinhala-Buddhist racism that he could
not provide even a toilet at the Jaffna bus stand. Like most of the Tamil
leaders he was obsessed with anti-Sinhala-Buddhist politics and not with the
well-being of the Tamil people.
His latest
gimmickry is to take up the 13-point demands put up by the Tamil University
students in the North and the East universities. As M. Sumanthiram states,
there is nothing new in it. It is the same old, same old – all 13 demands
pointing to separatism. Clearly, we are back to square one. We are back to the
time when S. J. V. Chelvanayakam and his band of fake Gandhians were ganging up
to the draw the belligerent Batakotte (Tamilised as Vadukoddai ) Resolution.
It was a time when
the Tamil leadership had pushed Tamil extremism to the bitter end and had
nowhere to go except to declare war on the rest of the nation. It was time when
the Gandhian Chelvanayakam was delighted with the placing on his forehead a red
pottu, consisting of blood drawn from the vein of a Tamil militant. It was a
time when the ageing Vellalar Tamil leadership was ready to sit back in their
arm chairs and sacrifice the low-caste Tamil youth, hoping that they would win
Eelam for them to take over as their permanent lords and masters of the
feudal days gone by. The educated Vellalars went overseas to enjoy the greener
pastures, with two cars, one to take their children to universities and the
other to take their wives shopping.
The sequence of
events that happened tell the story of the utter failure of Tamil politics. The
precise date was May 14, 1976. The place was Batakotte. The entire Tamil
leadership collectively declared war on the rest of the nation and urged the
Tamil youth to take up arms and never stop until they had achieved Eelam. They,
of course, never expected to land in Nandikadal. That, in short, the failed
history of Tamils.
The 13-point
demands put up by the Northern and Eastern Universities seems to heading the
way of the Batakotte Resolution. History seems to be getting ready to repeat
itself, this time as a greater tragedy than before. The oldies are taking cover
under the 13-points presented by the Tamil youth in the universities. The
oldies are happy that the Tamil youth had taken up their demands, once again.
The oldies, of course, have nothing to worry. If the worst comes to the worse,
the Sampanthans, Sumanthirams, and the Wigneswarans would come rushing down to
the South (which they hate) and take refuge with the Sinhala-Buddhist state
providing police protection..The oldies expect the Tamil youth to fight
for the tall tales told in Tamil fiction. In relating these tales they will
demonise the Sinhala-Buddhists and never mention a word about the miserable
failure of the Tamil leadership to serve or save the Tamil people whom they
oppressed throughout their history.
The more I
look into Tamil politics the more I am convinced of the value of
the words of Prof. Kumar David which described the Tamil leadership as a bunch
of congenital idiots”.
More of Tamil
politics in the next article.
