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Consensual politics

If there is any one salient feature that has marked the nearly half-century of attempts to resolve the ethnic problem, it has been the consistent failure to achieve inter-party understanding in order to implement a solution. The inability of political parties - major and minor,and especially those that are largely based on the majority Sinhala community - to reach a collaborative plane has been the bane of all efforts at a settlement.

Four times the two major national political formations, the UNP and its allies and the SLFP and its allies, have taken the initiative to resolve the problem and have either come with some formulae or, at least on one occasion, actually set about implementing a formula. All four times, the failure, often at the last minute, of the party in Opposition to support the initiative has seen the initiative either even make a start or, not get very far.

Both the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact and the Senanayake-Chelvanayagam Pact were formulae satisfactorily evolved and acceptable to the Tamil people, but remained solely on paper simply because the political party in Opposition agitated against it. In 1987, the nation saw an attempt to actually implement a settlement formula under the Indo-Lanka Accord and the 13the Amendment, but this too became ineffective in the ensuing bloodbath between Government and Indian forces on one side and Northern and Southern rebels on the other.

The Constitutional reform formula evolved by the PA Government in 1999-2000 did initially receive the Opposition UNP's collaboration, but inter-party tensions did not allow that collaboration to be taken to its logical conclusion of an Act of Parliament. This is why all right-thinking citizens will watch, with bated breath, as the principal political parties of the country make efforts to consult each other as then stage is set for the direct negotiations. Here, the ethnic minority parties in both Government and Opposition may a have key role to play in helping bring the two biggest parties together.

Ultimately, there is the hope that, at last, consensual politics will come to the nation's rescue.

Kashmir's agony

If the movement towards collaboration in this country is a cause for optimism here, the recent violent events in the troubled state of Kashmir is a cause for alarm about the continuing threat to peace and stability in this entire region. The latest massacre of civilians by suspected Kashmiri secessionist militants has once again raised tensions between India and Pakistan after some faint thawing in recent months.

Whether or not the militants who carried out the strike came from Pakistan or, were resourced by Pakistani groups is not necessarily crucial to the larger issue of the future of the people of Kashmir.

The Government of Pakistan has the enormous challenge of extricating any of its agencies that may have some entanglement, witting or unwitting, with extremist religious elements that have adopted violence as their means of politics. This armed politics has ranged from general support for all neighboring Islamic communities they feel are threatened by what they perceive to be an overbearing Western cultural Goliath, to direct support for the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination.

At the same time Islamabad has to safeguard its own genuine strategic interests in the disputed mountain region to which Pakistan and India lay claim.

Delhi, on its part, faces the equally difficult challenge of resolving a festering sore left over from Britain's colonial rule in a manner that will not endanger its own strategic interests as South Asia's great power while at the same time providing for some means by which the people of Kashmir determine their own future.

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