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Elections and ethnic conflict

Today, as the nation prepares to vote for a new Government, the intense politics and violence of the ethnic conflict has inexorably reared its head.

The nation-wide election-based system of democracy introduced here by the British colonial rulers helped exacerbate the tussle between ethnic communities over the control of modern, post-colonial, Sri Lankan nationhood. Given the majoritarian nature of the electoral system, the tussle was won by the Sinhala majority community which, in successive stages of constitution-making, imposed its exclusive religio-linguistic identity and political hegemony on the nation-state of Sri Lanka.

The forcible suppression of the dissenting ethnic minorities has prompted the devastating secessionist war that rages today. The war itself has spawned additional problems all of which are contributing to an immensely complex national crisis.

But the two political formations that have alternated in Government in our post-colonial period are yet locked in battle over governmental power, blithely disregarding the larger crisis. This is partly due to the fact that the majority ethnic community, which largely constitutes these two formations possesses the State and, given the compulsions of poverty and social degradation, must indulge in internecine fisticuffs over its spoils.

As always in national electoral contest, the ethnic rivalries are exploited to the fullest and the serious needs of conflict resolution are bandied about in the most frivolous manner. Typically, the most grandiose promises are being made about instant 'solutions' presumably with the calculation that the ethnic minorities, now battered and traumatised by decades of war, will swallow the bait once again and vote favourably.

Whether these extravagant promises, by those who just recently refused to support even the most pragmatic efforts to devolve power and negotiate peace, will win the votes remains to be seen. Perhaps bitter experience will, at last, enable the besieged ethnic minorities to discern the leadership most consistent and most pragmatic in peace-making and ethnic justice, however staid and pragmatic such peace-making might be.

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