Questioning Tamil 'self-determination':

Re-imagining the State in Sri Lanka

by Mahendran Thiruvarangan

The election campaign of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and the Tamil National People's Front (TNPF: Gajen Ponnambalam's new outfit) in the North-East has re-animated the discussions on the political solution to the national question. While the major political parties in the South have rejected federalism, the federal solutions presented by these two fronts include the recognition of the Tamils as a nation or a nationality, their right to self-determination and the merged north-east of Sri Lanka as their homelands.

Pic: tamilguardian.com

Framing self-determination in a national collective sense indeed generates an oppositional consciousness among oppressed communities living under majoritarian, nationalistic states and strengthens their pursuit of emancipation. But ethnic self-determination alone would not lead to harmonious ethnic coexistence in multi-ethnic territories. This is why we need to discuss the inadequacies of the nationalist constructions of identity and territory in Sri Lanka.

Calling attention to the exclusivist predilections of Tamil nationalist politics, however, does not imply that all is well with the manner in which Sinhala-based political parties and social movements approach the national question. The JVP's outright rejection of federalism, for instance, deserves as much criticism as the narrow articulations of national self-determination by the TNA and the TNPF.

The political identity of the collective Tamil self that calls for its liberation is a product of the prolonged discrimination that the Sri

Lankan State has directed at a section of its polity. This point is lost on Tamil nationalists when they frame Tamil as a pre-political identity with origins in the pre-colonial era. State re-formation is a process and each phase of this process involves addressing the consequences of the current state.

But Tamil nationalism attempts to re-form the State on a clean slate by re-framing an identity that has arisen as a consequence of the existing state as pre-political. When nationalism combines territories with identities in a one-to-one manner without attending to the competing claims over land, the project of self-determination, which arose organically in response to hegemony, loses its radical edge. Instead of challenging the ethnic binaries produced by the state and imagining a shared future for everyone inhabiting its territory, nationalism seeks to re-organize those binaries territorially and institutionally in a divisive manner.

State building

Post-colonial state building in Sri Lanka has been an exclusivist project spearheaded by Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. The disenfranchisement of the Hill Country Tamils, the 'Sinhala Only' policy, the constitutional protection accorded to Buddhism, state-sponsored violence against ethno-religious minorities and the state's involvement in the ethnic re-engineering of the island's north-east underline the Sinhala-Buddhisisation of the Sri Lankan state.

Tamil nationalism emerged as a movement of resistance when state-aided discrimination against the Tamils and the political aspirations of an educated Jaffna-based Tamil middle class with a strong sense of cultural self-consciousness converged. The Tamil middle class' pre-occupation with the history and identity of its community in the island alienated the other communities. And the collective failure of Sri Lanka's polity, including the majority community, to build common social movements that could challenge Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony has contributed to a larger section of the Tamils viewing national self-determination within the north-east of the island as the only viable solution to the national question.

Rather than initiating a politics that would bring the communities divided along ethnic and religious lines closer to one another, Tamil resistance focuses more on creating a unit of self-rule for its people. Structurally this unit was conceived as either a separate Tamil state or a federal administrative body in the north-east. As evident in the election campaign of the TNA and the TNPF, Tamil nationalism, even today, views the separation, territorialisation and constitutionalisation of pre-political national identities as the sole pathway to counter the majoritarianism of the State.

The TNPF proposes a bi-national state as the solution to the national question. The sovereignty of this bi-national federation is conceivable only if the separate sovereignties of the pre-colonial Sinhala and Tamil nations are recognized in a political contract. In advocating this line of thinking, the TNPF overlooks the polarizing nature of its nationalist project and the manner in which renders the large number of Tamils living outside the north-east as secondary citizens in their present locations.

Federation

When Judah Magnes and Martin Buber proposed a federated bi-national State as a solution to the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine, Hannah Arendt in 1943 opposed it on the grounds that their use of the term 'federation' reproduced the nation-state in a different way. Arendt argued that in order to prevent member nations of the federation from being discriminatory like the nation-state, no member nation should have its own sovereign authority.

Instead of distributing sovereignty among member nations, Arendt recommended the dispersion of sovereignty into a plurality that is irreducible to two autonomous nations. The rationale behind Arendt's opposition to national sovereignty was that 'national' interests, unlike common interests, privilege one community over another. She argued that federation should be re-imagined as a structure that makes it "impossible (for one) to conceive of a nation or its actions outside the context of plural and concerted action" (Judith Butler. Parting Ways (2012). Page: 146).

Thus, Arendt viewed the Jewish community as a nation "only as long as that national status did not give them sovereign power to decide with whom to govern the state" (ibid). Arendt does not reject bi-nationalism wholesale. But her critique of the bi-national federation proposed by Magnes and Buber underlines the importance of striving for racial equality and cohabitation in the peripheries of the state.

A similar critique exposing the divisive nature of the TNPF's bi-nationalism is necessary to carve out a federation in Sri Lanka that ensures the protection of regional minorities inhabiting the territories of the Sinhala and Tamil nations. Such a critique would inform us that the

major ethnic communities in Sri Lanka - the Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and Hill Country Tamils-that share the land with one another cannot demand self-rule in delimited territories in the name of their nations alone.

Sharika Thiranagama raises a pertinent question with respect to State reforms in Sri Lanka: "What do we do when people have homes but no homeland? When the places they live in are not the places they are recognized to belong in?" (In My Mother's House: Civil War in Sri Lanka(2011). Page 255).

The movement of Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim labouring people across the national territories from pre-colonial and colonial times have created economic communities that do not align neatly with the Tamil nationalist narratives about territory.

On the other hand, state-aided colonization has altered the ethnic make-up of the island's territories. Even as we unequivocally condemn the State's attempt to settle Sinhala people in the Tamil majority areas with a view to changing the demography of those regions in ways that would benefit its Sinhala-Buddhist project, and demand the resettlement of the evicted, we need to keep in mind that the settled Sinhala populations have now become a part of the polity of the north-east and that they too have a place in the historical narratives of the region.

Similarly, many Tamils and Muslims displaced during the war from the north-east are now living in places like Wellawatte and Puttalam which according to the TNPF's bi-nationalism lie within the territories of the Sinhala nation. These minority populations, minority economic communities and migrants disrupt the project of national self-determination in Sri Lanka.

Bi-nationalism

The TNPF's bi-nationalism has no place for the Muslims, Hill Country Tamils and other minority communities in the island. The party's Manifesto states that the TNPF would recognize the right to self-determination of the Muslim and Hill Country Tamils if the two communities make such a demand. Whether or not these communities articulate themselves as nations, we need to recognize that they too contribute to the ethnic plurality of the island, and that, as constituents of its polity, they are not subordinate to the Tamils or the Sinhalese.

Ethnic pluralism should be an important consideration in State re-construction in Sri Lanka where ethno-nationalist majoritarianism is felt by the minorities in their everyday lives. But in finding durable solutions, we should pay attention to the complex ways in which ethnic identities are situated territorially.

'Liminality' is a useful concept to describe the relationship between territory and ethnicity in Sri Lanka. Liminality denotes the State in which the identity of something is ambiguous, mobile and fluid, as opposed to being singular, fixed and static.

There are many regions in the island, including several areas of the North and East, whose identities are luminal due to ethnic diversity, people's mobility and colonializsation.

For a robust re-invention of Sri Lanka and its North-East as places of radical plurality where communities can co-exist peacefully, State-(re)formation needs to foreground the liminality of the island's territories. Liminality disallows the sovereignty of a territory to be predicated on an ethnic group exclusively while making it impossible for us to imagine it by excluding that group. The 'self' or 'selves' that constitute a new political order is, therefore, both singular and plural simultaneously. As the state simultaneously pluralizes its citizens (Sri

Lankans) as subjects (Tamils, Sinhalese, and Muslims) and singularizes its subjects as citizens, state re-construction needs to be seen as an unending revolution.

Self-determination

Ethnic equality which, in Tamil nationalists' view, is achievable only via national self-determination, is in fact a state of existence that is always 'to come' and is always undermined by the hierarchies of class, caste and gender that the state produces when it (re)makes its citizens as subjects with multiple identities and vice versa.

'Self-determination', in national terms, may work when we emphasize our collectiveness in the face of domination. But the self (and, selves) that seeks to re-constitute itself (themselves) as a new polity under a new political structure at the centre and the peripheries of the state, cannot be the same as the self that struggles to liberate itself from the existing political system. This is because the ethnic plurality that we observe in the country at present is ungraspable by the territorial dualism that Tamil nationalism advocates.

The non-dualist plurality of the island's ethnic landscape is a productive challenge to federalism in Sri Lanka because it compels us to situate our efforts to promote ethnic cohabitation as inseparable from our quest for a more egalitarian state. Tamils in the north-east of Sri Lanka may well demand a measure of self-rule in that region. But they cannot self-determine in isolation of the Muslims and Sinhalese who also inhabit that territory.

In the run up to the General Elections, both the TNA and the TNPF would glorify the slogans of Tamil nationalism - nation/nationality, self-determination and homelands - as non-negotiable principles to attract voters. But the Tamils in the North-East should be wary of the polarizing ideology of nationalism and chart, beyond the electoral battlefield, an inclusive political route for their liberation by building bridges with the other communities with whom they share this island.

(Mahendran Thiruvarangan is a graduate student in English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and, a member of the Collective for Economic Democratization in Sri Lanka)