{"id":63877,"date":"2017-03-02T23:43:20","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T05:43:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=63877"},"modified":"2017-03-02T16:23:22","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T23:23:22","slug":"the-claims-and-counter-claims-of-intransigence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/03\/02\/the-claims-and-counter-claims-of-intransigence\/","title":{"rendered":"The claims and counter-claims of intransigence"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY MALINDA SENEVIRATNE<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n
\u00a0Leader of the Opposition and the senior citizen of Tamil Nationalism R Sampanthan in an adjournment motion has made some interesting points.<\/div>\n
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\u00a0<\/i><\/div>\n
All people who lived in Sri Lanka, irrespective of their ethnicity, religion, or any other difference, whether Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim or Burgher made their fullest contribution to the achievement of independence. It is almost 70 years since Sri Lanka attained Independence from Colonial Rule. Ethnic strife had plagued the country from shortly after it attained Independence. Pacts entered into between Prime Ministers and the Tamil Political Leadership to help resolve such ethnic strife and enable all citizens to live together in peace and amity, with equality and justice were not fulfilled by the ruling elite. As a result of such ethnic strife and ethnic violence against the Tamil people in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and thereafter, up to 50 per cent of the Sri Lankan Tamil population were compelled to leave their own country largely on grounds of insecurity and take up residence in different countries the world over.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Some of the above is true, some can be contested.\u00a0 Yes, people from all communities contributed to the achievement of independence, but it was the Sinhalese or rather the Sinhala Buddhists who sacrificed lives, over and above \u2018the call\u2019 of demographic slice.\u00a0 The \u2018other contributions\u2019 came much later.\u00a0 They were important, though. \u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Yes, ethnic strife has plagued the country.\u00a0 Pacts between Tamil political leaders and various governments have collapsed, yes.\u00a0 On the other hand it is not the case that what was contained in the pacts died natural deaths.\u00a0 Some of it survived and was even enshrined in constitutions later on.\u00a0 Still, the objective of peace and amity, equality and justice, were not achieved, and not just as far as the Tamils are concerned.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Sampanthan implies that successive governments are to blame, first for not resolving the \u2018problem\u2019 and secondly for being unsuccessful in stopping attacks on Tamils.\u00a0 He is correct.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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On the other hand, it is not that the Tamils have been blameless in all this.\u00a0 When you paint aspiration as grievance, when aspiration includes a desire to take control of one third the land mass and half the coast, when myth is called history and fiction called fact, you are essentially robbing your cause of legitimacy.\u00a0 When you deliberately feed anxiety to the point that it evolves to self-righteous objection to perceived hurt, when you are silent as the demons unleashed by you turn into blood thirsty terrorists who will not stop at abducting your own children and holding your own community hostage, you are not helping your cause. \u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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Things then are not pretty.\u00a0 Maybe this is why Sampanthan says, \u2018Ethnic violence against Tamils is an imminent danger unless and until there is a political resolution of the conflict.\u2019\u00a0 <\/i>In other words, he believes that if there\u2019s no \u2018political resolution\u2019 to \u2018the conflict\u2019, then Tamils would get attacked.\u00a0 This brings up two issues. \u00a0 First \u2018the conflict\u2019 and secondly, the inability of successive governments to resolve it. \u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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Why have government\u2019s failed?\u00a0 The common explanation is that successive governments have \u2018capitulated to pressure from extremist Sinhalese\u2019 (sometimes called \u2018Sinhala Buddhist extremists\u2019 or chauvinists or racists).\u00a0 Sometimes the \u2018extremist\u2019 qualifier is dropped and it\u2019s blamed on the entire community or else the entire community is described as \u2018extremist\u2019.\u00a0 Even the \u2018state\u2019 as well as particular governments have been described as \u2018Sinhala\u2019 or \u2018Sinhala Buddhists\u2019, never mind the fact that neither the state nor governments have exactly been kind to these communities, butchering them on occasion by the thousands.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
One possible reason, however, for \u2018Sinhala intransigence\u2019 is the absurdity of Tamil demands.\u00a0 Just because you want something, it doesn\u2019t mean that others are supposed to desist from assessing the fairness of the demand.\u00a0 You can say they are \u2018racists\u2019 for saying \u2018no\u2019, but then again that\u2019s crass politics, nothing more.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
We can interpret all this as a simple matter of politicians who depend on votes desisting from doing something that might get them thrown out of office.\u00a0 We can also bring in the pertinent reality of political parties playing political cards \u2018right\u2019 to retain or regain political edge.\u00a0 For instance, oppositions have typically opposed the bad as well as the good, clearly for reasons of political expedience.\u00a0 And this kind of choice is not the preserve of Sinhala politicians.\u00a0 Tamil politicians, as Sampanthan knows only too well, have upped the nationalist ante just to secure votes.\u00a0 Exaggeration is a useful tool in anxious times, we should not forget.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
It is prudent to take fixations of communal identity as givens.\u00a0 It is silly to paint one community as villains and others as innocents. Given these realities, we need to understand that anxieties as well as the fact that extremists are best served by falsehood and not the truth with respect to grievances.\u00a0 This is where Tamil politics has failed.\u00a0 Sinhalese cannot be expected to swallow a tall story. \u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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This is also where successive governments have floundered.\u00a0 The homeland myth has not been unpacked.\u00a0 The issue of lines arbitrarily drawn by the British being taken as the boundaries of this mythical homeland has not been challenged.\u00a0 The contradiction between claiming discrimination and the reality of half the Tamil population choosing to live outside the so-called historical homelands has to be taken up.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
It is time for a historical audit.\u00a0 Otherwise, we will continue to have people like R Sampanthan disappointed and claiming that Tamils are running out of patience.\u00a0 The truth is that the Sinhalese have been patiently listening to fabrications tossed out by Tamil extremists for decades.\u00a0 It is time to stop keeping everyone in suspense.\u00a0 It is time that the Government did the hard thing: get the homeland story, shake it, strip it of frills and obtain its true dimensions. \u00a0 Until then we will have Tamil nationalists talking about the intransigence of Sinhalese and Sinhala nationalists returning the favor, charging that their Tamil counterparts are charlatans trying to shove fictions down the throats of Sinhalese to serve a land-grab objective.\u00a0 It will be a \u2018they are the bad guys\u2019 back and forth that takes no one anywhere any time soon. \u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY MALINDA SENEVIRATNE \u00a0Leader of the Opposition and the senior citizen of Tamil Nationalism R Sampanthan in an adjournment motion has made some interesting points. \u00a0 All people who lived in Sri Lanka, irrespective of their ethnicity, religion, or any other difference, whether Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim or Burgher made their fullest contribution to the achievement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-malinda-seneviratne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}