TNA, PSC and the danger of wrong turnings
DR DAYAN JAYATILLEKA
Even if everything the TNA says is true, it is still making a
mistake, or perhaps two or three, and is on the verge of yet another
wrong turning in the history of error that marks over half a century of
Tamil politics.
If the TNA’s fears of prevarication on the part of the government are
well-founded, it is only furnishing greater opportunities for it by
failing to participate in the proposed Parliamentary Select Committee.
The obvious remedy is to agree upon a reasonably compressed time frame
for the PSC to conclude and issue its report, and state that if this
time line were to be unilaterally transgressed, then and only then,
would the TNA participate no longer. An earlier news report stated that
the government had suggested six months as the time line, and if the TNA
were to make a counter-suggestion then surely a sensible compromise
could be arrived at.
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Dr. Dayan
Jayatilleka |
Prof. Tissa
Vitharana |
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Mangala
Moonesinghe |
S. M. Krishna |
This does not mean that the PSC should replace the bilateral talks
between the government and the TNA, though at some point it might
supersede them. What it means is that a two-track approach is called for
and the PSC is one of those tracks.
Rational approach
The PSC holds dangers of delay but also the prospect of a win-win
outcome. The government would avoid the vulnerabilities inherent in the
unilateral commitment to the results of a bilateral process. The TNA
would have the chance of building a broad bloc of moderates and
constructing an essentially bi-partisan (SLFP-UNP) centrist coalition in
support of reform. This would make passage of a proposal far more
feasible. Of course for any chance of success, the baseline of
discussions would have to be the existing provisions of the Constitution
pertaining to devolution, while a rational approach would not produce
any outcome that would risk a referendum being decreed as imperative by
the Supreme Court.
The TNA’s argument that the government has ignored the APRC report of
Prof Tissa Vitharana, and that therefore the PSC would be a wasted
effort, isn’t strictly true, because the last formal parliamentary
process as distinct from an all-parties roundtable was way back in the
early 1990s under the chairmanship of Mangala Moonesinghe. Though he
made a breakthrough with a bold trade-off (Indian model quasi-federalism
for de-merger), the leaders who comprise the current TNA refused to sign
up. This was part of the rejectionist maximalism that blighted Tamil
nationalist politics, ranging from refusing to accept the 13th amendment
and contest the North Eastern PC elections of ’88, through refusal to
accept President Kumaratunga’s ‘union of regions’ packages of 1995-7 and
draft Constitution of August 2000.
Tamil nationalism
This makes the TNA’s narrative of the obduracy and duplicity of
‘Sinhala’ governments a trifle one-sided. Having spurned the 13th
amendment and proposals that went beyond it for a quarter century,
mainstream Tamil nationalism now faces the prospect of a dead end or a
long freeze unless it re-enters the process of negotiation and
bargaining in Parliament.
LLRC report
The reference by India’s Minister of External Affairs S. M. Krishna
to ‘the rubric of the PSC’ unambiguously indicates that Delhi is in
agreement with a two track process, i.e. bilateral talks between
government of Sri Lanka and the TNA as well as the more inclusive PSC as
safety net and back-stop.
The TNA’s and Western NGOs’ strident calls for an international
accountability mechanism have had no resonance whatsoever in New Delhi,
which has welcomed and supported the LLRC report and urges its ‘visible’
implementation.
The TNA has now expressed its interest in a foreign facilitator.
Firstly, in so doing, it is being precipitate. Following the Norwegian
facilitation, the majority of Sri Lankans are averse to excessive
externalisation. Furthermore, the call for third party external
facilitation is warranted only if there is an impasse of long duration
in negotiations and not when the government is eager that the TNA
participate in a multi-party process of deliberation in the country’s
legislature.
Secondly, given that India is itself not interested in such a role in
any formal sense, it is unlikely - despite the excellence of its new
equation with the West - to welcome extra-regional intrusion in the
matter.
Though it is far more realistic on the matter than the Tamil
Diaspora, the TNA has not yet accepted the reality - repeatedly proven
by history, including at Nandikadal - that the parameters of the
possible for Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism are the limits prescribed by
Delhi in accordance with its own reading of India’s national interest.
Any attempt to exceed those limits are an exercise in futility, and
Delhi’s limits are the 13th amendment and ‘building upon it’.
War crimes
By releasing on the eve of the visit by the Indian External Affairs
Minister, an extensive attack on the LLRC report and reiterating its
call for in international mechanism of inquiry into so-called war
crimes, the TNA demonstrated three things:
*Unconcern over the need for creating the right climate for dialogue
with the government, insensitivity to Lankan public opinion and
obliviousness to the party’s profile and positioning in the Lankan
social and political mainstream at this point of (post-war) history
*Disregard for sensibilities of New Delhi, the possible negative
impact upon Delhi’s ability to take up devolution with Colombo, and for
the success of the Delhi-Colombo talks
*Increasing susceptibility to its extra-regional (Diaspora) and
sub-regional (Tamil Nadu) lobbies/constituencies which have the
aggressive activism and fanatical mentalities of anti-Castro Miami
Cubans.
Equal rights
Even if there were to be agreement between India and the US on the
Tamil issue, it would be heavily weighted in favour of India’s position.
What is more important, the sustainability of the implementation of
even such a condominium, would be its level of acceptance by Sri Lanka,
which means its level of acceptance by the majority of the Sinhala
majority - because the acceptance by an incumbent administration is no
guarantee of popular consent.
The good news for liberal minded reformists is that all opinion polls
from 1997 show a remarkable consistency in that the bulk of the Sinhala
people are far from averse to a solution based on a combination of
tri-lingualism, equal rights and the improvement through strengthening
of the existing provincial level devolution of power.
Thus the limits of achievable Tamil aspiration reside at the
(shifting) point of intersection of Indo-Lankan positions, based on
(relatively consistent) perceptions of the respective national interests
of the two states. To be strictly accurate, in order for their
successful realisation, Tamil aspirations for constitutionally
irreducible political space must accommodate themselves intelligently
within a Delhi-SLFP-UNP triangle.
Arab spring
What if such intelligent realism does not prevail? What if Tamil
politics operates on the scenario of externally propelled ‘regime
change’, mistakenly identified with the Arab spring? The
politico-ideological outcomes of the Arab spring have not been more
propitious to the rights of minorities, hence the apprehensions of the
Copts, the Catholics and the Kurds.
The two-pronged strategy of escalating external pressure paralleling
an accelerated Tamil political drive should be thought-through to its
conclusion by its votaries. We have been there before, twice in the past
quarter century. |