Tamil nationalism and the Tamil vote

Quite a few pseudo political theorists have been trying to interpret the polling pattern of Tamils in the North and East at the last Presidential election to theorize that, even though Mahinda Rajapaksa defeated Prabhakaran he has not been able to win the hearts and minds of the Tamil population. Yet in reality, what those theorists exhibit in the process is, their crass ignorance of the nature of Tamil politics in this country and their negativity in picking holes in a picture that they cannot draw by themselves.

The incoherence of their theory becomes plain when we observe that, in their haste to be pessimistic and spell doom about the prospect of national integration, they have conveniently glossed over the other phenomenon of the vote i.e. Fonseka, being a belligerent Army Commander, polling more Tamil votes than Rajapaksa, the politician. Hence rather than questioning why didn’t the Tamils vote for Rajapaksa who liberated them from the LTTE, it would be more pertinent to pose the question why did the Tamils vote for Fonseka who had a proven record of belligerence against the minorities?

To answer that question, we may have to study not only how the Tamils have voted during the national elections all these years, but also how the Tamil leadership reacted when Universal franchise was granted to Sri Lanka in 1931. The then Tamil leadership protested vehemently when the Donoughmore

Commission announced its decision to grant universal suffrage to Sri Lanka. “They count people like cattle, 20 to that side and 30 to this side; there is no way that the village headman and the labourer are going to have the same vote!” said Ponnambalam Ramanathan in 1931.

They canvassed the support of the elite, petitioned the British, lobbied them and did everything possible to prevent Sri Lanka becoming a ‘one man one vote’ democracy. The reason for all this opposition was at that time since 70 percent of the country’s administration and commerce were in the hands of the Tamils.

The Tamil leadership therefore knew that democracy would bring the majority Sinhalese to power changing the country’s colonial status quo. They expressed indignation on the prospect of a Sinhalese take over of Ceylon and the likes of Chelvanayagam openly expressed their hubris stating that ‘Sinhalese are too small to govern the Tamils’.

Since the majority of doctors, engineers, accountants, surveyors, lawyers, senior police officers were all Tamil at the time, they found the situation of a Sinhala political leadership superimposing on all that, quite unacceptable. Even the first Lankan Army Commander Anton Mutukumaru and the Defence Secretary at the time were both Tamils. Chelvanayagam canvassed for an exclusive Tamil university in the North and when questioned as to why it had to be exclusively Tamil, he was chauvinist enough to state bluntly that “because the Tamils are more intelligent than the Sinhalese.”

Such was the hubristic nationalism that prevailed in the early 1940s and Tamil nationalism that time was not in anyway second to Hitler’s Nationalist Socialism dubbed Nazism. It was to further this separatist extremism that Chelvanayagam in 1949 founded the ITAK (Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi), or party for a Tamil State.

Tamil nationalism then continued to grow from strength drawing from local and foreign connections they had built up over the years, courtesy British imperialism. To prevent the new nation from introducing legislation to correct colonial injustice, they interpreted all such efforts as ‘anti Tamil’, quite successfully. In that they found their stand well patronized by the English speaking elite among both the Sinahala and Tamil, who too, had much to lose if the colonial status quo is not preserved.

The Tamil leaders brainwashed the ordinary Tamils to believe that unless they rose against the ‘Sinhala State’ soon the ‘proud Tamil nation will be reduced to Dalit status’. Heavily caste structured Tamil society also did not see the treachery of the then Tamil leadership that played ‘capitalists’ when in Colombo and ‘Tamil liberators’ in North.

The Tamil leadership floated a shipping company in 1962 to bring arms to the country, adopted Leon Urise’s Exodus as their ‘Bible’ of their struggle and formed ‘Pulip Pudey’ (Tiger Cubs) with the view of commencing Tamil militancy. They planned to capture power and form a minority managed government as in apartheid South Africa and it was Waniyasingham who was on record suggesting that ‘since the Ceylon Army is a few thousand ceremonials the Tamils can capture power in Ceylon with 5,000 well trained young men’(Inside Illusive Mind - Narayan Swamy). They however could not find able and committed young Tamil men to staff their Army at that time.

Thus Appapillai Amirthalingam was entrusted with the leadership of the TULF in 1972 in order to make the Tamils more militant and he assumed the leadership promising to ‘swim in the blood of the Sinhalese and make slippers out of their hide’. When Prabhakaran the criminal, arrived on the scene, after having killed Alfred Duraiappah, Amirthalingam ushered him in to the movement as if he was an ‘avartar’ sent by God to salvage Tamil national pride. Prabhakaran eventually took a strangle hold on the Tamil community justifying all his criminal activities on a perceived ‘Tamil cause’.

That, succinctly is the history of Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka and Prabhakaran was the final triumph of that separatist nationalism. Even though Prabhakaran who ravaged for 34 years is now no more, it will be too early to expect the Tamils to come out of that separatist mentality that have been institutionalized into the Tamil psyche since 1920s. Just as the UNP loyalist would support Ranil, stomaching all his treachery against the country and national security during the past 15 years, the average Tamil too, will have his loyalty to their leaders of the past.

Therefore it is not surprising that Fonseka, after having promised the Tamils the bifurcation agenda that Ranil could not grant, polled more votes than Mahinda Rajapaksa at the last election. Even Chandrika and Ranil in the past, inveigled the Tamil vote by giving into their separatist mentality.

The positive sign in the last Presidential election result however, is that Mahinda Rajapaksa, after having taken the unitary stand of one nation, garnered a near 25 percent of the Tamil vote for the first time in the history of Tamil politics. Hence we could draw inspiration from the thought that a sizeable part of the Tamils consider separatism to be their past and assimilation to be their future. Things will certainly improve if we continue to keep political opportunist like Ranil and Fonseka out of political power.