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| Sunday, 21 September 2003 |
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Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Those wiseacres generally known as political commentators, the well-informed sources (whoever they may be) and most of all the firemen (journalistic jargon for those foreign correspondents who swoop down on any trouble spot and hence are supposed to know a little about everything) have gleefully got their teeth into a juicy piece of flesh.
This is the apparent disappearance of the once ubiquitous LTTE ideologue. Anton Balasingham (there is a minor academic fire raging on whether he possesses a doctorate or not) and his apparent replacement by the party's political wing chief S. P. Thamilselvan (SPT). Of course Thamilselvan was always there but now that Bala is not around this has become news for the international media industry. Conspiracy is the name of the game. As the story goes Mr. Balasingham who has suddenly been discovered to be a moderate (apparently on the basis that he stands for Federalism) has been replaced by SPT who is dubbed a hawk and is said to be Prabhakaran's voice. Another version has it that the ailing Bala has had enough of the game and now wants to write his autobiography perhaps in a bid to outdo his wife's memoirs which sent Mr. H. L. D. Mahindapala into such a rage that several sheets of a daily English newspaper's op-ed page had to be devoted to his apoplexy. But if SPT is his Master's Voice wasn't Mr. Balasingham? For the fact is that in whatever nice or polite phraseology he may have expressed himself, whatever tautology he may have engaged in Mr. Balasingham (with or without a PhD) was very much the Tigers' voice. For the Tigers speak with one voice. Not for them the evasions, the sophistries and the ambiguities of their counterparts in the South. Whether they call it a separate state, a Federal State or an Interim Administration the bedrock of their demand and their long-term goal will not change. Tactical shifts there might be changing moves on the chess board but their strategy remains constant and here they speak with one voice. But more important than this idle media patter is the generational changing of the guard which this Prabhakaran-Balasingham-SPT equation signifies, for the change is not only among the generations but also within the hierarchy of the LTTE which has been one of the most monolithic guerrilla groups in contemporary memory. Until recently even Prabhakaran was an enigmatic and elusive figure (part of the title of the now much-advertised book by M. R. Narayana Swamy). Even less is known of SPT and the only fact that an enterprising foreign correspondent was able to unearth about him recently is that he is said to be called 'The Cobra' apparently because the cobra is supposed to smile before it strikes and SPT also smiles. It has been Balasingham who has been hogging the limelight because of his international connections, Australian wife, proficiency in English (very rare among the hard-core Tigers) and his high-profile role as chief negotiator and spokesman. In fact they represent not merely three generations but also three fairly distinctive stages of the development of the Tamil political movement. Bala belongs to the pre-1970 period when the Tamil political movement was still proceeding within the politico-constitutional channels of the post-colonial Sri Lankan state. Let us not forget after all that the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (of which Mr. S. J. V. Chelvanayakam was still a member) was one of the constituent parties of the first post-Independence Government of Prime Minister D. S. Senanayake. The disenfranchisement of Indian Tamil plantation workers and the increasing radicalisation of the Tamil middle-classes which the ACTC leader G. G. Ponnambalam perhaps could neither comprehend nor control led to the bifurcation of Tamil politics and the formation of the Federal Party or the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi (more accurately rendered in Tamil as the Tamil State Party). But even with the Sinhala Only Bill of 1956, the attacks on unarmed Tamils performing satyagraha at Galle Face and the much more serious communal riots of 1958 the FP adhered to the parliamentary path. It even briefly considered supporting Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike's Government of July 1960. It was a constituent of the Dudley Senanayake Government from 1965 to 1968. It was a signatory earlier to the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact which the former Prime Minister was forced to abrogate under pressure from Sinhala extremism. The Language of the Courts Act, the Reasonable Use of Tamil Act and the Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Bill were all attempts by Sinhala-dominated governments of both major political parties to grant in some measure the demands of the Tamil people. While these were only legislation there were also two major efforts at re-structuring Centre-Periphery relations, namely the B-C Pact which proposed Regional Councils and the District Councils proposed by Dudley Senanayake in 1968. Both attempts were scuttled by the forces of Sinhala extremism. Of all this Balasingham had something of a ring-side view as a journalist working at the 'Virakesari' and later as a translator at the British High Commission. Contemporaries remember him as a quiet young man not given much to politics but it is safe to assume that he was quite representative of that generation which believed in constitutional means however remote this possibility might have appeared by then. But Prabhakaran was still coming to grips with all these facts as a teenager and not a very academically-inclined one either. He was four years old when the 1958 riots broke out, 14 years old when the alliance between the UNP and the FP collapsed and 18 when the first Republican Constitution was proclaimed. By the late 1960's then the politico-constitutional campaign centring on such middle-class issues as language and employment was exhausting itself. The huge parliamentary majority which the SLFP-LSSP-CP United Front Government obtained in 1970, the Constitution it enacted in 1972, the FP's open hostility towards this and the UF's own unconcealed hostility towards the FP and the standardisation procedures enforced in the admission to the universities all combined to transform Tamil hostility to active resentment and even sullen anger. The Tamil Establishment sought to contain this within the confines of the Tamil United Liberation Front (with the triumvirate of Chelvanayakam, Ponnambalam and Thondaman at its head) but the young men were getting ready to take over. The 1972 Constitution has been widely blamed for fuelling the Tamil youth rebellion but in retrospect it would appear that this was another example of the blind spot in the Sinhala Establishment about the National Question although paradoxically enough the father of the Constitution was Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, he of the famous 'One language one nation, two languages two nations' speech. The Constitution as well as the socio-economic measures taken by the UF Government of the day were a reflexive response to the JVP Insurgency of 1971. For them the Tamil grievances were still marginal, an example of how even professed internationalists such as the leaders of the LSSP and the CP could be led astray by majoritarian grievances and sentiments. But it was the North which was becoming the focal point. Alfred Duraiappah, the popular SLFP Mayor of Jaffna, was murdered by Prabhakaran himself as it has now been established. He may not have been a bright student but as a devotee of Clint Eastwood Thambi was learning to shoot straight and knew in his bones that Tamil resentment at the domination of Colombo regimes was coming to a head. The increasing impotence and marginalisation of the Tamil political Establishment (even after becoming the official parliamentary opposition in 1977) and the rise and profligacy of armed youth movements is now part of our collective national tragedy although there is no lack of the purblind who still think of it as the "Tamil problem" or even ask audaciously what the Tamil grievances are. The hegemony of the LTTE over the rest of the Tamil movement (whether political or military) appears as the twisted, tragic and deformed logic of a history which neither the national political leadership nor the blinkered intelligentsia have had the imagination to grasp. The LTTE was never a Marxist group although it might have found it convenient to mouth such phrases particularly through Balasingham. But it is in essence a Tamil nationalist movement of the preponderant petit-bourgeois youth with a strong hegemonic character (not ironically enough unlike its bete-norie, the JVP, on this score). Hence the withdrawal of Balasingham with his predictable lounge-suits and his gift for instant phrase-making and the accession of S. P. Thamilselvan. Prabhakaran being Prabhakaran is not giving up the throne but SPT's arrival completes the generational cycle. For these are the young men who grew up with the struggle, had not met any Sinhalese except soldiers and had not known any other home than the jungles of the Wanni or the seedy lodging houses of Chennai. In 1995 when a group of us visited Jaffna during the LTTE's brief honeymoon with the PA of President Kumaratunga it was the first time that Thamilselvan was meeting any Sinhala civilians. Among us journalists were Victor Ivan and Nandana Weeraratne (later of the BBC) while a delegation consisting of Bishop Kenneth Fernando, the late Charles Abeysekera and Dr. Jayadeva Uyangoda were already there trying to persuade the LTTE to release a large number of policemen in their custody who had begun a death fast. (Later they were released in the presence of the media team a day after the official delegation had returned to Colombo with a single policeman as their trophy). Even then SPT was very much in command talking to the delegates, liaising with the ICRC and giving us interviews. Even then he was heading the LTTE's political wing at the age of 28. In fact the release of the policemen in the presence of the media was considered a Public Relations master-stroke on the part of both SPT and his chief. So an entirely Tamil-speaking, Jaffna-born and bred young man takes the place of the older generation. If Balasingham was reared both by politics as well as the struggle both Prabhakaran and SPT have learnt their lessons entirely in the grim hide-outs and training camps of the struggle. If Prabhakaran is now older (he will be 49 in November), perhaps more mature and a husband and a father SPT (although himself married) is more representative of the youth both of the North as well as the South though he will not be able to communicate with them since the average Sinhala young man like SPT himself does not know English while both do not know the other's language. In 1995 too SPT used to smile often and he continues to smile still. Would it be too much to expect that his arrival on the negotiating stage will herald a better understanding between the two generations separated by their geographical gulf, the entirely Sinhala or entirely Tamil speaking, deprived and dispossessed youth with their shattered dreams and bedraggled hopes but still determined to carry on their quest for a larger ideal? |
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