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The Tamil National Question was thrust irrevocably into the national politics of Sri Lanka when the Tamil United Liberation Front contesting on the basis of obtaining a mandate for a separate Tamil state became the main opposition party and its leader Mr. Appapillai Amirthalingam the Leader of the Opposition at the watershed parliamentary elections of July 1977.

This election is described as a watershed because it is as a result of these polls that the present Constitution which has since become a bugbear in Sri Lanka's politics was formulated.

In that sense it can be said that 24 years later Tamil politics itself has come full circle with the TULF and its symbol, the rising sun, providing the canopy for a conglomeration of parties which also includes the All Ceylon Tamil Congress, the EPRLF and the TELO and which is contesting as a Tamil National Alliance to impress on the country the need to recognise the LTTE as the primary factor in the settlement of the Tamil problem.

This is a curiously passive role for an alliance of parties (which with the exception of the ACTC) played an active role in the Thimpu talks held under the aegis of the Indian Government. Today, however, these parties are quite satisfied to allow the LTTE to do all the talking at any future conference and indeed insist on any future Sri Lanka Government accepting the Thimpu principles as the point of departure for any talks. The Alliance therefore is in the fray to enter Parliament as the votaries of the LTTE although there are unkind people who will insist on saying that there are actual Tigers on its list.

At the opposite pole to the Tamil National Alliance is the EPDP which was as committed as any other party to Tamil self-determination in the heyday of the Tamil armed struggle.

However under the leadership of Douglas Devananda it is one Tamil party which has accommodated itself to the realities generated in the aftermath of the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement while unlike the other Tamil parties taking up an uncompromising attitude towards the LTTE. In this it has been greatly helped by the personality of Devananda who is a fighter in the classical mould who has survived several attacks. Its present position is akin to a federal model and it favours a Tamil state on the lines of the Tamilnadu state government. However somewhat like the LTTE the EPDP has not been able to get out of a hegemonistic mind-set.

Somewhere in-between is the PLOTE led by Dharmalingam Siddharthan whose father the TULF MP V. Dharmalingam was killed by the LTTE. Originally founded by Uma Mahaswaran, in a sense the father of the Tamil armed movement, PLOTE was the party which was the first to stand for the unity of the North and the South in the struggle for socialism. The party does not believe in idolising the LTTE and is going it alone at the present elections.

But, of course, above and beyond and all round these Tamil parties is the man in the Wanni brooding and biding his time before playing the next hand. Now that he has officially called for the deproscription of the LTTE and the recognition of the LTTE as the only legitimate representatives of the Tamil people the Thimpu principles have come full circle. But in another sense everything has moved back to square one after 18 wasteful years.

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Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
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