Power-sharing, yes! Devolution, no!
There are two terms that are used frequently as though they mean the
same thing by those who are determined to confuse the people for the
vile purpose of pushing agenda that have no legitimacy and do not
correspond to any on-the-ground reality: ‘power sharing’ and
‘devolution’.
There are two kinds of arguments pertaining to ‘power-sharing’.
First, there are those who believe that the current configuration of the
political space is centralized and centralizing and therefore robs
decision-making power from the peripheries.
It is essentially a regionalist argument. The impetus for proposing a
re-configuration is the mistaken or deliberately misleading notion that
the current set up is anti-Tamil, the assumption being touted as fact
being that two provinces of the above ‘periphery’ are ‘Tamil’, i.e. they
(the North and East) are exclusive historical and traditional homelands
of that community.
Kandyan Kingdom
First let’s take history. On February 14, 1766, Kirthi Sri Rajasinha,
the King of the Kandyan Kingdom ceded a stretch of land in the Eastern
part of the island, 10 miles in width from the coast to the Dutch East
India Company. The relevant maps are contained in Fr. S.G. Perera’s ‘The
History of Ceylon’. Prof. James Crawford refers to this treaty in his
book ‘The creation of states in international law’ as one of the
earliest such agreements recorded. Prof. S Arasaratnam’s work on the
Dutch Period refers to the details of this treaty and points to the
issues pertaining to sovereignty.
The implication is that the Kandyan Kingdom had the right to cede
that portion of land and that it continued to have sovereignty over the
rest of the territory until the British obtained full control of the
island in 1815.
In 1766 therefore there was no question of sovereignty of any other
polity and when the relinquished sovereignty was recovered and
reasserted in 1948 by the State of Ceylon it naturally reverted to the
political geography prior to the signing of that treaty.
That treaty, moreover, is the genesis of the demographic realities of
today’s Eastern Province where the bulk of the Tamil population lives on
that 10 mile wide strip of coastal land. Their ancestors were brought
there by the Dutch to grow tobacco. Even today the majority of the Grama
Niladhari divisions contain a Sinhala majority population.
Hindu temples
If the issue of homeland requires a longer throw back into the past,
we can go to the 10th Century, to the golden period of Chola
expansion/invasion and the invasion of the island by Raja Raja Chola in
the year 993. Raja Raja Chola is also known as a builder of Hindu
temples.
The inscriptions at these places, according to the Archaeological
Survey of India, resolve all doubts about traditional homelands and
sovereignty. The inscriptions at the temples in Tanjavur and Ukkal speak
in glorifying vein that Raja Raja Chola conquered many countries,
including one ‘Ila-mandalam’.
The inscription elaborates that this ‘was the country of the warlike
Singalas’. The plunder of wealth, one notes, is not from ‘Singalas’ who
lived in ‘Ila-mandalam’ (which is a corruption of ‘Sihala’ or ‘Hela’)
but the land of the ‘Singalas’, whether they were warlike or not being
irrelevant to the issue.
Demographical pattern
The archeological evidence shows that what is today called the
Northern and Eastern Provinces were at one time the heartland of
Buddhist civilization in the island. Although there have been claims
that these were the work of Tamil Buddhists, the thesis is not supported
outside the rhetoric.
Then there is demography. More than half the Tamil people in Sri
Lanka live outside the North and East. Some argue that this is due to
the conflict. There is some truth in this claim, but there is absolutely
nothing to support the thesis that the current demographical pattern
will be reversed in the post-conflict scenario. Indeed, the ‘exodus’ has
benefitted the Tamil community/politicians disproportionately, for it
has not resulted in an appropriate alteration in the number of
Parliamentary members allocated to the Northern Province.
The ‘influx’ into the Western Province has resulted in at least two
extra MPs for Tamil parties from Colombo in addition to the nine from
Jaffna. ‘Exodus’, by the way, include all the Sinhalese and Muslims
evicted from these areas by way of ethnic cleansing carried out by the
LTTE with not even a whimper of protest or murmur of remorse from people
like R Sambandan.
The bottom line is that devolution to the current provincial
demarcations will leave more than half the Tamils in this country ‘high
and dry’ while chauvinistic politicians like Sambandan and Sumanthiran
would benefit.
There is more to ‘geography’. While the Eastern Province is ‘split’
among the Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims, in terms of area, the largest
slice contain Sinhalese, and not Tamils and Muslims, as mentioned above.
There is a second school of thought regarding ‘power-sharing’. The
objection is the same: concentration of power. The difference is that
territory is not the core concern, but the citizen. The 1978
constitution was clearly anti-people. Whatever insulation that the
citizen had vis-a-vis the politician was effectively compromised by J.
R. Jayewardene. The 17th Amendment sought to win back some space for the
citizen, but it was terribly flawed. The 18th threw the baby with the
bath water, in my opinion.
Regional politicians
There is, then, power at the centre that needs to be shared.
‘Devolution’ only puts power in the hands of regional politicians and
although this might appear to be empowering since politicians are after
all representatives, resource anomalies rebel against the idea when the
crucial issue of development is brought into the equation. An
‘empowered’ Uva cannot demand from a devolved ‘Western’ to let it (Uva)
have a slice of the surpluses generated. Only a ‘Centre’ that is subject
to checks and balances as well as held accountable in delivering on
national development prerogatives can obtain such distribution. Only a
re-demarcation of provincial boundaries where resource imbalances are
corrected can buttress the ‘devolutionist’ school of power-sharing. As
things stand, it is communal, anti-intellectual and politically
unfeasible.
‘Power sharing’, therefore is not co-terminous with ‘devolution’.
Moreover in Sri Lanka’s context (taking into account history, geography,
demography and citizens’ grievances, including those of minorities),
power-sharing if it does not address the issue of citizenship anomalies
that cut across the communities, would not only preserve current
imbalances but also exacerbate inter-communal tensions.
If these realities are ignored, it shows intellectual laziness,
political arrogance and ideological poverty. Well, all these plus rabid
communalism. We won’t have ‘unitary’ any more. Neither will we have
‘unity’. We will only have an entrenching of the racism and land-theft
as per the Chelvanayakam Option, ‘A little now, more later’; the
‘little’ being the BIG ‘getting legitimacy for the boundaries of the
Eelam Map’ for Prabhakarans of the mid to late 21st century to shed more
blood over.
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