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| Sunday, 5 December 2004 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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A generation of sleep-walkers Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake It was D.B.S. Jeyaraj, now long domiciled in Canada, who during the palmy eighties when we were both in the shelter of 'The Island' reminded me that both of us belonged to 'Prabhakaran's generation.' Jeyaraj was born in March 1954, I in August and Prabhakaran in November. The choice of Prabhakaran to represent the 1954 born was not entirely because Jeyrarj himself was a Tamil. For good or ill Velupillai Prabhakaran after all was the man who had changed the contours of the country into which we had been born 50 years ago, a different time and even a different country as the late Mervyn de Silva was fond of saying. Common memories What common memories, what common formative experience could a Sinhala child and a Tamil child born in 1954 find that would bind them in communion? Such a prospect was receding steadily because in many senses 1954 was a watershed year. In two years it would be 1956, the year of Sinhala Only and the beginning of Tamil embitterment. Two years later would come 1958, the first major communal conflagration which compounded by the supervening years has brought the country to its present impasse. If popular legend is to be believed the burning alive of a Hindu priest in a kovil in Panadura during the communal riots of 1958 had had a formative influence on the child Prabhakaran then living in a southern suburb of Colombo. Jeyaraj and I attending as we did private fee-leaving schools (he St. Thomas' I Trinity) were at least able to cling on to the last vestiges of a common legacy. Paradoxically enough this was the English language bequeathed to us by our last imperial masters which over 50 years after their retreat acts as the common bond between the communities in our otherwise fragmented land. Although under the official policy all of us had to study in our respective mother tongues, in the private schools our classes were composed of children from the Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim and Burgher communities and our common bond was the English language which we studied in a common class. Of course there was a strong class element in this seeming solidarity because all of us came from upper middle or middle class homes which were separated from the purely Sinhala or Tamil speaking middle or lower middle classes who formed the generality of the people. By this means it was hoped that fraternal ties between the communities could be preserved but events were to prove this an illusion in the face of the deepening communal schisms of the decades which followed. Indifferent student At his Valvettithurai school Prabhakaran had no such advantage or link language. His education was predominantly in Tamil and anyway he was an indifferent student. Both Prabhakaran in VVT and his Sinhala counterpart in a southern school were the victims of a cruel if well-intentioned policy. Educational psychologists were unanimous in their view that a child was best educated in his or her mother tongue but what happened was that teaching in Swabhasha was accompanied by a jettisoning of English, the gateway to the world. Gripped by extreme nationalist sentiments a newly-emerged elite who occupied influential positions in the cultural Establishment saw the English language purely in terms of its privileged position in the social hierarchy without appreciating its tremendous potential as a means of communication or as the key to new currents of knowledge. The result was the creation of two entirely mono-lingual generations walled in by incomprehension. In the enclosed Tamil milieu in which Prabhakaran found himself fresh currents were provided by the literature emanating from South India. Academic and scientific literature coming from Tamil Nadu was supplemented by literature of a decidedly Tamil nationalist bent. In the 1970's when Prabhakaran was going through his secondary education this was accompanied by rising nationalist sentiments among the Jaffna political classes which oriented them increasingly in the direction of separatism. Paradoxical decade The 1970's were a paradoxical decade in Sri Lankan politics. They began with the installation of the United Front Government composed of the SLFP, LSSP and CP routing the UNP of Dudley Senanayake and sweeping to a two thirds victory in Parliament. That Government led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike was pledged to the most radical program of reforms of any government since Independence embodied in a Common Programme which the three parties had signed in 1968 at Kandy's Bogambara grounds. These included ceiling on landholdings and houses, the nationalisation of the import-export trade and the proclamation of a new Republican Constitution. But the euphoria was marred by the Insurrection led by the JVP which broke out 11 months after the UF's triumph at the hustings. Coming as it did so early in its rule the JVP's revolt alerted the Government to the necessity for even more radical social, economic and political changes. But the revolt of the Tamil youth came only after and perhaps as a response to the Constitution proclaimed in 1972 so that there was no constitutional framework available for containing the aspirations of the Tamil people. What is more the Tamils were represented in the 1970 Parliament (which was converted into a Constitutional Assembly) by the Federal Party which actually advocated such anachronistic notions as the full right to private property. Youth discontent By the midpoint of that decade Sri Lanka had experienced the exploding discontent of the youth belonging to her two main communities. Only 20 years old Prabhakaran had taken his first life when he shot and killed Jaffna's SLFP Mayor Alfred Duraiyappah as he left a kovil after worship. That was the first signal of a rebellion which has threatened the vivisection of the country. While the perpetrators of the April Insurrection were brought to trial and sent to prison the Tamil terrorists proved to be elusive. The Prabhakaran generation then is no monolithic entity. There are no common memories, no central formative experience bringing it together. Although born a bare six years after the dawn of Independence its adolescence and young adulthood have been spent in a world riven on communal and class lines. The Sinhala Only Bill which was meant to make the administration more accessible to those who had no knowledge of the coloniser's language only succeeded in kindling discontent among the Tamils. The dislodging of English succeeded not in fostering a new Sinhala or Tamil intelligentsia rooted in the soil but confining each to sullen mono-lingual pockets at war with each other while the urban elite with their continued mastery of English maintained its sway over society. It was also the first generation to take to the gun. There may have been no communication between the two branches of the mono-lingual youth but they were united by their choice of violence. The shot guns and the crude home-made bombs of the JVP gave way to the AK-47, the T-56 and an assortment of the LTTE's sophisticated weaponry. Insurrection, individual terrorism, guerilla warfare, hit-and-run tactics and conventional warfare were all tried out by the rebels on both sides of the communal divide. The State was besieged both from the North as well as the South. A whole generation had embraced violence as their political creed and the path to an imagined salvation. Diaspora It is also a generation which has been orphaned, decimated and scattered. Thousands have died - The JVP's insurgents killed by the State's forces of counter terror, the LTTE's insurgents and the so-called Sinhala Army made up of the sons of peasants and workers, the youth of two communities locked in deadly combat because of the failure of their political elders on both sides to build the Sri Lankan nation. Thousands of less fortunate Tamils and Muslims in the North and the East have been subjected to privations, barrel bombings and indiscriminate killings by the security forces in the wake of LTTE attacks while their more fortunate fellows have been able to migrate to make up the large Tamil diaspora now scattered all over the globe. Now at 50 Velupillai Prabhakaran confronts the shift from the military to the political plane in the Tamil campaign for self-determination. He has been the product and the leading figure of Tamil nationalism rather than the Marxist theories of self-determination and resultant socialist transformation championed by other groups such as PLOTE, EPRLF and EROS. His chosen method has been violent engagement with the armed forces of the Sri Lankan state either through his initial tactics of guerilla warfare or the later conversion to more conventional forms or a combination of both. He has been an inspired military commander while being ruthless towards his rivals including those whom he has suspected within his own ranks. If politics is war by other means the LTTE chieftain now has to choose what means are best suited for attaining his goal in today's context. Symbols of new SL But what of Prabhakaran's generation? The time when Jeyaraj and I shared the same class room with boys of all communities has exhausted itself. Only memories are left of that past while we who underwent that experience either drift like ghosts through the new mono-lingual milieu or are strewn over the world, the detritus of a dead era. The symbols of the new Sri Lanka are those who sport the exclusive Sinhala or Tamil badge. Caught between an expired bi-lingualism and a mono-lingual nationalism menacing the very basis of a united Sri Lanka we are a generation of sleep-walkers tottering towards what looks alarmingly like a collective national doom. |
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