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Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

Even to take a cursory look at C. Suriyakumaran's latest anthology of essays 'Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis' subtitled 'Anguish-3' (so much anguish, so much heartburn) is to be seized both by a sense of sorrow as well as a sense of wasted opportunities. This book is a sequel to his original 'The Anguish of '83' and 'Anguish 2' and to see some of the titles of the essays itself is to realise how foolhardy, purblind and myopic we have been as a people until the Norwegians have had to herd us to a conference table at Thailand where itself some sections have prematurely begun building up grandiose and empty expectations.

Suriyakumaran is too modest a man to claim prescience but surely the ghosts of Messrs Bandaranaike and Chelvanayakam were hovering over the conference table in Thailand.

To read some of the titles such as 'Constitutional Reforms and the confusion with cantons', Sri Lanka's Provincial Council - Phase 3-Where do we stand now? 'Coalition Government to the fore: Will it solve the National Question?' etc, is to realise how vain and comic some of the fiddlings of our political Neroes of both camps have been while Colombo and Jaffna were burning for decades.

A former Executive Secretary and Regional Director for Asia and Pacific with the UN, Suriyakumaran who is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics as well was before that a widely-experienced public servant both at the centre and in the provinces (notably in Jaffna) when Sri Lanka was still Ceylon and something called a 'Tamil problem' was just emerging. In fact one of his seminal memories is being associated with the drafting of the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact and escaping with his life a year later during Ceylon's first communal riots.

For over five decades therefore he had been a keen, if steadily saddened, observer of our national discontent and most of the essays here are what he had written to newspapers, papers he had read at seminars and position papers and proposals which had emerged from the Centre for Regional Development Studies which he headed until recently.

Suriyakumaran writes without rancour although he is no Uncle Tom but this after all is the hallmark of a generation when ethnicity was no branding mark on the foreheads of people. He was educated at St. Anthony's College, Katugastota and would perhaps call himself a Kandyan Tamil and had even while the shadows were lengthening tried to keep the flame of inter-communal amity alive. He recalls a farm and farm house he had built in Mankulam in retirement which was to be a bio-technology centre. He says he had a pact with a Sinhala friend from his Government servant days whose father-in-law had opened up a plot off Gurutalawa for the two families to live in December-January in Mankulam when it was all beautiful and flowering there and in Gurutalawa when it was warm and shiny up there during the 'season.' All that had come to nought when first the Sri Lanka Army came to combat the LTTE, the Indians followed and between themselves the three forces laid low the Suriyakumaran project.

Suriyakumaran then belongs to another generation, almost another epoch, and his kind of philosophic detachment, historical breadth and irony of writing are naturally alien to a generation on both sides of the ethnic divide who have been brought up and reared on the competing rivalries. Yet the writer's detachment can be invaluable at a time when at long last some positive attempt appears to be made (even with foreign prodding) for the two communities to transcend their tragically intertwined destiny.

To Suriyakumaran it is axiomatic (and he repeats it more than once) that 'the diminution of a Nation State by crisis, is under any circumstances not of nationality, but of that particular State not fulfilling the needs of nationality. He complements this with the thinking of a fellow London School of Economics ideologue Ernest Gellner (later founder of the World Centre of Nationalism in Prague) who is quoted as saying that the ethnic brand of nationalism triumphed because the civic brand was scarcely given a chance by those who ran the State. So it was a failure of democracy or rather that brand of democracy which Sri Lanka adopted hanging on to the coat tails of its Westminster overlords.

That democracy was founded on the fallacy or folly of an ethnic majority which would be permanently in power (whether UNP or SLFP) but which was sharply divided on every issue and particularly the question of settling the Tamil National Question. Central Government, says Suriyakumaran, has been tenaciously exclusivist or uni-ethnic. The clear choice before any Government if it wants a unitary country is whether it still wants a Unitary Central Government or a participatory one, 'a matter of far greater significance in the long run,' he observes, 'to the South even than to the North.'

Here Suriyakumaran has certainly hit the bull's eye for after all was it not the fallacious majoritarian rule practised as democracy by all post-Independence Governments which led to the steady marginalisation of the Tamil community and then their estrangement from the political mainstream? From G.G. Ponnambalam's call for balanced representation (caricatured as Fifty-Fifty) this moved to Chelvanayakam's call for Federalism.

But still Federalism was based on the concept of a single country though calling for autonomy for the minorities in the areas which were their homes which the writer mordantly reminds us was defined for them by the majority community itself by telling the Tamils repeatedly in 1958, 1977 and 1983 'to go home.' So from a call for participation at the Centre, the emphasis shifted to power sharing at the periphery and then a demand for a complete break-up of the state. The sickness then was at the Centre, at the very seat of the Government, in the corridors of power in Colombo from which all power radiated.

Sinhala-dominated governments were quite satisfied to pander to majority prejudices while having the token Tamil or the token Muslim in the Cabinet. The Tamil and Muslim communities had no sense of sharing power at the Centre being in a permanent miniority in Parliament and not having the electoral clout to get the share of the pork barrel to have their districts developed.

So the answer is power sharing at the Centre (although this might sound amusingly quaint to those who talk of regional autonomy or more today) and it is interesting that repeatedly Suriyakumaran should hark back to the Executive Committee system which obtained under the Donoughmore Constitution and which the new United National Front Government seems intent on resurrecting.

It will be recalled that the late S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike was at one time a great exponent of this system and Suriyakumaran says today that 'a far more preferable system would be a transformed and radicalised use of the old executive committee pattern of the State Council in which the Minister was the chairman of a committee of MPs which itself would be composed by convention or otherwise of all communities, in which a minimum ratio of Ministers will be from the minority community, and in which a Deputy Prime Minister is from the minority community (or two deputies from the two minorities concerned).

But for those who might dismiss power-sharing at the Centre as old hat Suriyakumaran has other insights. He says that although the British introduced the Village Communities 'Ordinance in 1871 they failed to complement this with a regional or provincial council structure which would have decentralised power.

It was ironic that it should have been the Kandyan Sinhalese who should have asked for Federalism first before the Soulbury Commission (meaning regional or provincial councils) a proposal stoutly opposed not only by the Low Country Sinhalese but the Tamil as well! And in a little known aside Suriyakumaran reveals that in 1945-46 Bandaranaike had proposed the establishment of Regional Councils a proposal which had been shot down by his own ministerial colleagues fearing that since he had as Minister of Local Government at the time a base of 400 Village Committees this was a ploy on the part of Bandaranaike to make a major bid for power in a post-Independence context.

Which brings us to the fateful Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact which Suriyakumaran (among many others but consistently he) has seen as the solution to the National Question if it had not been scuttled by political opportunists and religious obscurantists and which would have prevented the consequent fratricidal bloodletting.

This recognised the North-East as a single linguistic region with two Regional Councils, for the North and the East, with provision for a merger at a subsequent time and which could work together if they so wished. This was the most far-reaching proposal to be made up to that time to resolve the problem and it is a melancholy thought that 45 years after it was scuttled we should still be in the same quagmire. The modern Sri Lankan National State after all is an artificial colonial creation. In historic times, says Suriyakumaran, peoples spread out differently in the country, developed different identities (ethnicities) and established specific civilisations, all of which also carried ineradicable linkages and similarities.

These two major groups (the Sinhalese and the Tamils) fought with each other historically at various times, he concedes, but this has to be the least of the arguments against oneness or sharing. With whom else, in History or across the world, do two peoples most easily or frequently fight than with their neighbours he asks. Historically therefore, the Sinhalese predominantly occupied the South of Sri Lanka and the Tamils and the Muslims the North and the East until British imperialism came along and in the name of the 19th century Nation State and British Unitarianism created a new phenomenon in the South, a Tamil community predominantly servicing the British administration and more often than not outweighing the Sinhalese. It only needed the advent of majoritarian rule parading as Westminster-style democracy to raise the cry that the Sinhalese should inherit the earth and that the Tamils should either be ejected, absorbed or go back to where they came from.

So where does all this historical detritus take us but back to Pattaya and Sattahip (exotic names until recently for all but, the initiated) where Minister G.L. Peiris spoke of the need to fashion new forms of state and government and Anton Balasingham spoke of concepts of homeland and self-determination.

Suriyakumaran is too modest a man to claim prescience or say 'I told you so' but surely the ghosts of all those British nation-state constitutionalists and of Messrs Bandaranaike and Chelvanayakam were hovering over the conference table in Thailand. Similarly, Suriyakumaran being an old-fashioned liberal intellectual, a Renaissance man, will still advocate participatory democracy at the Centre and devolution of power through Regional Councils, a refurbishment in fact of Bandaranaike.

But the question is whether after all the bitterness and bloodletting over the decades these will satisfy a new generation even as Suriyakumaran claims that after seven decades his own generation is ready to leave the stage of history sadly bereft of achievement not because of that generation's inherent weakness or failure (many of them were men of stature) but because of the collective karmic destiny of the yet to be founded Sri Lankan nation.

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