by Neena Gopal
‘This is an opportunity in Sri Lankan history that has not presented itself in over sixty years. There is the very real possibility here of a brand new dawn. We have the chance to work out an amicable arrangement; the voices of the people of the north and the east and all the other Tamils are being given a hearing, and we would be very remiss not to grab the moment, the opportunity, with both hands and work with the government on securing a future for the Tamil people who have suffered for long enough,’ he said.
Most significant was the casting out by the Sri Lankan people of the one man who not only crushed the Tigers but also opposed the rehabilitation of the thousands of Tamils dispossessed by the 2009 Eelam War IV—Mahinda Rajapakse.
‘The defeat of Mahinda Rajapaksa has opened new possibilities for our country. It has brought in a Parliament and a government that is not majoritarian. There is a shift, a change,’ he said. ‘The important thing is that we have the broad support of all Tamil parties on framing a new Constitution, with a proposed aim to bring in amendments that will work to benefit the Tamil people.’
Sampanthan himself made history of sorts when he was nominated—by the same Sinhalese majority that had been dubbed chauvinist by the Tamils—as the leader of the Opposition in Parliament, thus becoming the first Tamil in over thirty years to hold the post.
Except, discrimination against the Tamils is deeply entrenched.
A well-known Tamil-origin media baron—he did not want to be named—who exudes upper-crust class, vocalized a well-known discriminatory tool: ‘Even though I don’t look like a terrorist, and I’m a known face in the capital and in Jaffna, and drive a luxury car, I am flagged down and asked to produce my identity card and the car number is taken down because the identity card clearly identifies me as a Tamil. My Sinhala-speaking colleague never faces the same treatment.’
Suresh Premachandran, the former PLOTE leader, understands that kind of discriminatory language. At his home in a cul de sac in the suburb of Dehiwala, his brother, Sarvesan, who teaches in Colombo and was heading out to catch a bus to Jaffna that night, echoed the almost universal anger felt by Tamils at their continued victimization.
‘The war has been over for six years, but we are still stopped and searched on buses and trains,’ says Sarvesan. ‘There are different identity cards for each ethnic group—there’s one for the Sinhalese, one for the Muslims and one for us. And the police don’t even look at the other cards, they always look at mine, because it’s in Tamil. This must stop. If they want to integrate us into the mainstream, then it’s time every Sri Lankan, whatever his or her ethnic origin, is treated as equal. All our ID cards must be the same.’
On the A9 highway, as we headed to Sencholai a day later, my Tamil driver slowed down before an army patrol. ‘Now just see, he will try and find some way to extort money. He will say we were speeding or something.’ That is exactly what happened, except that before the army patrol asked any more questions of the hapless driver and we were delayed even further, I bought some tuppenny-ha’penny commemoratives of the Eelam war. And we were smilingly waved on. Two hundred Sri Lankan rupees lighter.
Premachandran who, like Ponnambalam, bit the electoral dust, reserves the bulk of his ire for the Sri Lankan government for going back on Rajiv’s Indo-Sri Lankan agreement. Harking back to the recurring theme that resonates across the north on its bifurcation from the east, thus ending the eighteen-year run of the United Provincial Council, Premachandran, like most Tamils, sees the division as a means to cut the Tamils down to size. ‘We want the north and the east re-united as was done post the agreement signed by Rajiv Gandhi and JR [Jayewardene],’ he said, while railing against the powers of the police to search and detain, which he said had not been curbed for twenty-five years.
Premachandran also brought up the newest irritant—the inability of the elected provincial government to govern. ‘No power devolves to the council which is an elected body, as power is vested in the governor and not the chief minister. Till today, this provincial council has no budget, but operates on a grant to meet the 90 per cent recurring expenditure. Just one small change is needed in the Rajiv–JR accord to empower the council,’ he says.
‘There are 80,000 war widows in the north and the east,’ avers Premachandran, ‘and 12,000 orphans and some 1000 war wounded. The Northern Council should have at least been allowed to provide for orphans and help rehabilitate and treat the wounded. Instead, we have 1,00,000 Sri Lankan soldiers, a peace-time army that is simply unprepared to help the people in the north and the east. What are they doing here?’ he asks with barely concealed scorn. ‘Farming?’
He isn’t far wrong. Soldiers driving threshers and harvesters are common on the road from Kilinochchi to Vavuniya and Puthukkudiyiruppu.
An equally big bugbear are funds from the diaspora that are available for reconstruction but, by law, cannot be touched. ‘The chief minister has been promised funding from the diaspora for the welfare of the war wounded, but he cannot accept it unless a legal proviso is made for the use of these funds.’
Colombo has held back from empowering the Northern Council in the fear that once that is done, the north and east will secede, using the Constitution rather than guns to get what they have long fought for, ‘and that we will become powerful again, masters of our own destiny’, Premachandran scoffs. He says, however, that the clamour for a federal system of government as it exists in India must be heeded.
Like Sampanthan, many old-timers, including the highly perceptive former vice chancellor of Jaffna University Prof. P. Balasundarampillai and a clutch of other intellectuals and politicians whom I meet one evening in Jaffna at the home of an Indian consulate official, are keen to soothe the ‘wounds’ of the war. Several had fought under the ITAK banner—funded, many say, by the Tamil diaspora—in the landmark election to the Provincial Council last year, and are looking at ways to secure the future of the Tamil people politically.
The Tamils’ embrace of the new political upturn raises several questions. Has the million-strong community completely abandoned its yearning for an independent state after the de facto state-within-the-state, courtesy Prabhakaran, which had given them the status of first-class citizens, was snatched away? Or are they still holding on to the hope that the hugely wealthy diaspora in Europe and Canada that had backed their battle once before, will come together again and fund another Tamil army to chip away at the dominant Sinhalese? If not justice, then retribution?
Sampanthan will have none of it, saying the imputation that Tamils would go back to violence and guns is downright laughable.
The man in the vanguard of the anti-Colombo refrain in Jaffna is Northern Provincial Council Chief Minister Wigneswaran. A respected retired judge from Colombo who was hand-picked for the job by Sampanthan, Wigneswaran is equally certain there will be no turning back the clock. But his campaign to rehabilitate war widows and the war wounded, and bring in investment for capacity-building and reconstruction by wooing India has run aground. Almost apoplectic with anger and frustration, Wigneswaran is constrained by the constitutional requirement that has overridden the 13th Amendment—that a governor, who is entrusted with more powers and answers only to Colombo, has to sign off on every proposal. So far, the governor hasn’t.
More lawyer-politician than economist, Wigneswaran, a Colombo native, knows he must guard against his fellow Tamils going back to believing that the gun is the only answer to their ills. He must keep their faith in the federal model alive and, at the same time, not be seen as Colombo’s cat’s paw, all too willing to do the Sirisena government’s bidding.
His one-point agenda that overrides all else is to restore to the Tamil people their sense of self-respect, and the first step towards that is to get every single soldier from the Sri Lanka Army off the city streets, even though the army itself believes its presence is necessary to ensure the continuing security of the north and the east. Tamils make up a population of roughly 1.6 million here, where the military has deployed 1,50,000
–2,00,000 troops.
Again, as he freely admits, ‘I have had no success with that either.’
As the army razes mile after mile of graveyards and tombstones that once, albeit ghoulishly, commemorated the Tamil Tigers martyred to the cause, erasing the last reminders of thirty years of the miseries of war, the Tamils of Sri Lanka know that the path to redemption cannot lie with yet another Prabhakaran.
Epilogue
THE PALALY OF OCTOBER 2015 is a world away from the one that I had seen on my previous visits. A barometer of the change that has overtaken the north is the runway and, in fact, the entire airbase—picture-perfect, rebuilt by the Manmohan Singh government as a gesture of goodwill.
The threat of war has long receded. No longer does it look as if it is bracing for an attack, for sudden conflict.
The only sign that it is still an active airbase comes from the SLAF aircraft that has landed just ahead of us. That, and the lone artillery gun at the far end of the runway, jutting out through sandbags against a cloudless blue sky. A helicopter hovers noisily overhead, while around us, fresh young recruits—men and women—are being put through their paces early in the morning.
Six years after the war ended, the SLAF has gone commercial with a vengeance. The last seat on a round trip via Trincomalee’s scenic China Bay on the newly renamed Heli Tours aircraft doesn’t come cheap. Ratmalana airbase in Colombo is awash with stewardesses and staff in smart new uniforms manning check-in counters that have replaced the rickety desks of the past. And the fifty-seater that takes off for the Palaly airbase is filled not just with servicemen and their young families, but dozens of well-heeled members of the Tamil diaspora, many returning to Jaffna for the first time since the war ended, along with insurance salesmen and businessmen.
Devi, a chic London-based former resident of Sri Lanka stands out with her fashionably short crop of grey and her designer handbag. Accompanied by her daughters, a grand-daughter, a British son-in-law and her husband, she is going to check on her grandmother’s home in Kankesanthurai—a house she has inherited but hasn’t seen since she left the country over thirty years ago.
‘My daughters were barely three and five when we last came here,’ she says. Emotional, not sure what she will find, she shows me pictures of a home that had borne the brunt of the war, first taken over by the IPKF and then the Sri Lanka Navy. Its roof had been blown off, some of the walls had caved in, and around it was nothing but desolation. She is keen to rebuild her turn-of-the-century home. Her husband, who came from Chavakachcheri, further east, which bore the brunt of all four Eelam wars, isn’t sure what they should do.
On the way back to Colombo a few days later, we meet again at the Heli Tours office in Jaffna city. Their mood is markedly different. Any hopes they had of rebuilding have been tempered by the reality of maintaining a house so far from what they had called home for nearly forty years. ‘I would much rather sell it,’ the husband says to me, out of his family’s earshot, as they head back to Colombo and on to the tranquillity of Galle for a destination holiday by the sea.
Six years since the prachanai—the troubles—came crashing down around their ears, the rage among the Tamils is waning. But the new government, an amalgam of two parties, the SLFP and the UNP, both ideologically opposed and arch-rivals, but united against Mahinda Rajapaksa, would do well not to take the Tamil community for granted.
The fury that once consumed the Tamils in the north and the east, fanned for thirty long years by Prabhakaran, with his masterly ability to inspire fear and adulation in equal measure, is no doubt greatly diminished. Where once there was seething anger bubbling just below the surface, drawing satisfaction from acts of revenge against the Sinhalese army of occupation, with no apologies proffered for the violence and brutality visited on the Lankan soldiery or Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, today, there isn’t regret, but instead a pang for a lost cause, an entire missing generation. And overlaying it all, fatigue.
There’s a weary acknowledgment that the Tigers who spoke out for them and fought in their name, had been outflanked and out-manoeuvred not just by Colombo, but by the Tamils’ greatest and most vocal supporters—the EU and Oslo. And with them, by a Washington and Delhi that could ill afford another cataclysmic 9/11, an IPKF disaster, or a Mumbai of 26/11. No outside power would countenance the separatist cause.
The language of war, of bluster and braggadocio is at an end. The Tamils in Jaffna are speaking a whole new vernacular. They know they have drawn the short end of the stick, that they must swallow their pride when asked by Sinhala-speaking policemen—and the numerous army patrols—deployed across the cities of the north, from Jaffna to Vavuniya and Kilinochchi, to show their ID cards. They are the vanquished, not the victors.
The hopes and aspirations of the people of Jaffna no longer lie with Kilinochchi but with Colombo and, once again, with New Delhi. India has responded by reaching out to the ordinary Tamil, building 50,000 homes to rehabilitate the displaced and the homeless, and rebuilding schools and hospitals, while diplomatically using every lever to ensure that the minority community is no longer neglected or treated like second-class citizens.
The Indian mission’s largesse has, however, left the 75,000 Tamil-speaking Muslims out of the reckoning, warns academic Ahilan Kadirgamar. He is a distant relative of the slain foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, and one of the many intellectuals who have returned to Jaffna to highlight the issues that confront a post-war north, including the plight of war widows turning to prostitution and the fate of the ‘disappeared’.
For the young, Europe and Canada still beckon. Foreign language institutes dot the Jaffna landscape, offering French, German and English courses. ‘When someone is learning English, you know he wants to go to a university abroad for higher studies, and if it’s German it’s probably because he wants to get a technical degree. If it’s French, then she’s probably looking for a husband . . .’ says an irreverent Tamil returnee.
For all the dark humour, Jaffna exemplifies the challenge before all Tamils—they know that this time they have to drive the hardest of bargains, while eschewing violence and strictly playing by the rules. This time, as they rebuild their shattered lives and homes, they must put a new leadership in place and hope that their collective voice of reason will water down the jingoism of the Sinhala majority that continues to shrug away the slights to tetchy Tamil pride.
Despite the sense of a new beginning and the perception that Jaffna stands on the cusp of a transformation, Prof. Pillai says—echoing what many old-timers feel—that with his children working in the UK and unlikely to return, even as question marks remain over the newly elected government and the provincial council’s ability to deliver justice to war-affected families, he didn’t see much point in holding on to his ancestral home.
Questions on where the ordinary Tamil stands as far as his politics, faith and societal standing are concerned, remain. For the Sri Lankan Tamil there are existential dilemmas that need to be resolved. The war had ended, Prof. Pillai said, but the grievances of Tamils defeated in the war, were yet to be addressed. ‘My wife and I aren’t sure as yet, but when I retire, maybe I’ll sell my home and go and live with my son and daughter.’
That’s probably why at the Palaly airbase, where even today nobody enters or leaves without an SLAF escort, neither the glorious sunshine, the abundance of cheerful bougainvillea that line the runway nor the happy tourists deplaning can chase away the ghosts of the past.
In this city of the defeated, of battles lost that could never have been won, at least, not in perpetuity, Jaffna, which epitomizes the heart and soul of the Ilankai Thamil, seems to have all but shaken off thirty years of ennui, of the endless wait for the night to end, for the tide to turn.
It is no longer a city in retreat, not defeatist by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, it seems like the Lankan Tamils are finally done waiting for someone, be it a Rajiv Gandhi or a Prabhakaran, a white knight or the prince of darkness, to come to their res
cue, and have taken matters into their own hands. This is their battle to fight, their war to win—but without guns and violence.
Despite all the naysayers and the doomsday projections by a clutch of writers and commentators, the Sri Lankan Tamil has gone from bust to boom. It’s still work in progress. But there’s no one and nothing to hold them back but themselves.
Across the narrow seas, in the serene, green expanse of Sriperumbudur, stands a memorial to Rajiv Gandhi to mark the spot where he had been assassinated. The high points of his tenure are many—he was elected with one of the biggest majorities in Indian history, he forged peace with the Sikhs without alienating the moderates, extended a hand of friendship to the Mizos, reached out to Beijing and Islamabad, took the first steps towards empowering the poorest of the poor in Indian villages by introducing panchayati raj and became the first to see the potential of India’s booming middle class as a boost for the economy— but his Sri Lankan misadventure may yet overshadow it all. Unless the Sri Lankan Tamil reclaims the lost legacy of Rajiv Gandhi, the man who offered them a promised land which his nemesis, Prabhakaran—consumed by violence, speaking only of vengeance and retribution—could never deliver.
1 D.R. Kaarthikeyan, Triumph of Truth, The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination: The Investigation (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 2004).
2 Subramanian Swamy, The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi: Unanswered Questions and Unasked Queries (New Delhi: Konark Publishers, 2000).
3 K. Ragothaman, Conspiracy to Kill Rajiv Gandhi from CBI Files (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2013).
1 M.R. Narayan Swamy, The Tiger Vanquished (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2010).
1 J.N. Dixit, India’s Foreign Policy—Challenge of Terrorism Fashioning Interstate Equations (New Delhi: Gyan Books, 2003).
