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| Sunday, 8 January 2006 |
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Contending
over forms of state
Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Gunfire in a Cathedral and claymore mine explosions on the roads of the unquiet North cast a pall over the receding year and threw their long dark shadows into the incoming year as well. These steady eruptions of violence have now become the LTTE's accompaniment to the advent of the new Government. The LTTE is seeking to provoke the state and its armed forces into a confrontation and by involving schoolchildren and university students give a subtle veneer of civilian support to its armed campaign. It knows that the armed forces are on strange terrain and it will need only that much of provocation for them to possibly go back to ways which successive Governments and high commands have tried to suppress since July 1983. The truce is appearing to be fragile indeed. The LTTE also appears to be in something of a dilemma. This is because the Rajapakse administration which the international media and their domestic cohorts tried their best to paint as 'hardline' is refusing to wield the Big Stick. It has on the contrary continued to hold out its hands in the direction of negotiations. Whether it is serious or not about a negotiated settlement the LTTE would want to recapture the moral high ground before talks begin. Hence its current aggressive posturings. The LTTE surely realises that just as much as it would not like to lose the initiative the Government too can not be lax on the security front. Hence the changes in the upper echelons of the Defence Ministry and the Army and the renewed search operations in Colombo. So the circle is joined and the cycle continues to spin. Meanwhile the possibility of talks remains remote with the two sides wrangling on the venue and the Government's critics trying to make out that its election pledge of a unitary state would be an insuperable obstacle in the way of talks. But the main imperative surely is to begin negotiations because even seemingly inflexible positions can dissolve once the two sides sit round a table. The LTTE after all refused for long years to budge from the so-called Thimpu principles until the Oslo declaration committed the two sides to consider a federal solution. Federalism after all is not a concept entirely alien to the SLFP. In fact its ancestry can be traced back to the late Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike the founding father of the SLFP. It was Mr. Bandaranaike on his return from Oxford who introduced the concept into colonial Ceylon's political vocabulary. Subsequently the Kandyans demanded a federal state for themselves to alleviate the rigours which colonial rule had imposed on them. It was only very much later that Mr. S. J. V. Chelvanayakam established the Federal Party and it is this association of the concept with a minority nationality which has made it a bogey in the eyes of the Sinhala majority. It is also worth recalling that Mr. Bandaranaike was ready to grant a Regional Council to the North and the East even with the powers to link the two provinces and it was the opposition of the J. R. Jayewardene - led UNP and the Maha Sangha which made him abandon his proposal. It is also worth bearing in mind that until the waning years of President Kumaratunga's regime a federal model was official SLFP policy and it was the perception (whether right or wrong) that the western powers considered to be sympathetic to the LTTE were seeking to impose this model on the Sinhala polity which made sections led by President Rajapakse and the JVP and the JHU oppose a federal model. But state craft as opposed to oppositional politics being above all else a matter of real politik there is nothing to prevent the exploration of a solution on federal lines but consonant with the realities of the Sri Lankan situation. Such an exploration will have to necessarily take into account the aspirations of the Tamil people for a degree of self-government and the fears of the Sinhala people that this could be a stepping stone to a separate state. It will also have to take cognisance of Muslim interests in the Eastern Province and accommodate them in a harmonious structure. For this primordial phobias and ancestral fears on both sides of the communal divide will have to be dissipated. The building of trust between the two communities will have to precede the talks proper. For this it is necessary that any such exercise which has hitherto been confined to the Government and the LTTE or the two Peace Secretariats should be extended to cover the people as well and not necessarily the NGOs or other such lobbies and interest groups. What is necessary is not to cling to concepts such as 'unitary' or 'federal' but to place all such concepts on the touchstone of the Sri Lankan reality. After all there is no special sanctity attached to any particular verbal form or concept. It would appear that the concept of federalism which has found favour even with the UNP although it had no compunction in condemning President Kumaratunga's proposed constitution of 2000 on similar lines is more acceptable to bourgeois liberal circles while the nationalist forces seem to see in the unitary state a safe anchor. How best to reconcile these two systems so that wide-ranging devolution could be brought about to the Tamil and Muslim people within the parametres of the country's territorial integrity and without doing violence to the political unity and integrity of all of Sri Lanka's people is the challenge the New Year places before the new Government. Joseph Pararajasingham 'Murder in the Cathedral' was the title of a verse play by T. S. Eliot, the poet of the urban wasteland, and while it is unlikely that those who killed Joseph Pararajasingham the Batticaloa District TNA MP soon after he had received communion on Christmas Day at St. Mary's Cathedral would have heard about Eliot's play this grotesque spattering of blood in a place of worship was symbolic of our ghastly times. While we do not have the knowledge to speculate about his assassin it is more than likely that it will join that long catalogue of crimes ascribed to unknown gunmen. We remember enjoying Mr. Pararajasingham's hospitality on a visit to
Batticaloa in 1997 in the company of Dharmaratnam Sivaram another victim of
the faceless assassin. So many slaughtered and so much blood engulfing this
land. And to what point? |
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