[TamilNet, Thursday, 03 October 2013, 23:38 GMT]The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) should learn from history, and from
the experience of their predecessors, on what should NOT be done,
writes Tamil Nadu political activist Poonkuzhali Nedumaran in a feature
sent to TamilNet this week. She cited the history of TNA’s predecessor
TULF failing in upholding the responsibility it was vested with by the
people in 1977, compromising with District Councils and how that
triggered the Tamil youth to lose confidence in parliamentary methods.
The NPC election results mean communication of a will than participation
in governance. With the Eezham Tamils rejecting the polity and rule of
the State in Colombo, the TNA must understand the responsibility vested
with them by the people, she further said.
The Eelam Tamils know very well, that after the elections, the Sinhala
rulers, having lost the elections, will avenge them outrageously with
their military. Even then, they have risked their life and have sent out
their message, Poonkuzhali said, adding that the message is nothing but
rejection of the polity and rule of the Sinhala State in Colombo.
The
election also shows that the Eelam Tamils are slowly coming out of the
trauma and have started to fight back. That is why - beyond dense
military presence, attacks on Tamil candidates, intimidation and
humiliation in polling booths, Eelam Tamils have risked their lives to
restore their dignity, she observed.
She traced a pattern in
Tamil voting since 1977: TULF contesting on the Vaddukkoaddai Resolution
based manifesto captured 18 out of 19 seats in 1977; 95 per cent
boycotted local body elections in 1983 when the LTTE called for a
boycott; TNA won 22 out of 23 seats in 2004; in 2005 when the LTTE
wanted people to boycott the presidential elections, 95 per cent
boycotted, and now the TNA victory.
The pattern is that whenever
Eezham Tamils get a chance to vote they listen only to their own parties
and not to any Sinhalese party. They categorically reject the rule of
Sinhala polity and the rule of southern Sri Lanka over them, Poonkuzhali
observed.
The election results also show what dangers are
awaiting Eezham Tamils in the North, through demographic changes in the
model that had already endangered the East, she cautioned.
“There
are chances that this election results would have sent alarming
messages to the ruling Sinhalese, which will motivate them to increase
the unauthorised rampant settlement of Sinhalese in the North. Already
the coastal areas of Vanni, Mannar and Mullaitheevu and the fertile
lands of Vavuniya are occupied by the Sinhalese settlers. If this
increases, the Eelam Tamils will be losing their legal hold on their
homeland,” she cautioned further.
What Poonkuzhali fears should
be achieved by the State in Colombo as quickly as possible, as the
‘lasting solution’ for the national question in the island, is the
envisagement of New Delhi and Washington that have designed and decided
the course of the genocidal war, and have set an internationally binding
post-war process based on the Sinhala State’s LLRC recommendations.
Therefore,
unless the Eezham Tamils, global Tamils and especially the Tamils in
Tamil Nadu exercise their geopolitical weight and address the struggle
directly and specifically against those two Establishments to the extent
of affecting their geopolitical interests, no solution is going to come
especially to the danger last mentioned by Poonkuzhali, commented Tamil
activists for alternative politics in the island.
How the
politicians were chosen for the NPC elections and what they have uttered
before and after the voting are also messages sent to Tamils everywhere
that the struggle is no more local or regional and that it has entered
into a hitherto unseen internationalised phase, and that Tamils have to
be prepared for that, the activists further commented.
* * *
Full text of the feature by Poonkuzhali Nedumaran:
As
nation-states move past war or even genocide, politics should
eventually return to normal. But Eelam Tamils, still recovering from the
killing field at Mullivaikaal in 2009, are put in a position to take up
an abnormal political course, while the intention of genocide against
them is very much alive and the structural genocide in a hitherto unseen
and accelerated way is a daily routine. It is in such a context, the
recent NPC election stands out, being different from all the ones that
preceded it in the island in the post-colonial times.
Electoral
politics in Sri Lanka can not be reasonably disentangled from political
definition of provinces in Sri Lanka’s constitutional scheme. The
provinces are the first level administrative divisions, and were first
established under British colonial rule in 1833, after abolishing the
territorial identities of the three kingdoms I the island. Initially
there were five provinces which became nine later. However, over the
next century most of the administrative functions were transferred to
the districts, the second level administrative division, and by the
mid-20th century, the provinces had become merely ceremonial, vacant of
meaningfully delegated political power.
The state’s allocation
of, or lack thereof, of Tamil political power within the constitutional
scheme of government has been a contentious issue since the dawn of the
post-colonial era on the island. Tamil political parties have
consistently requested for a greater voice in the political system, be
it through federalism or the exercise of the right to
self-determination. For example, right from 1948, the first political
demand of the Eelam Tamils was a Federal System of Government, in which
the Eelam Tamils have a single Province of their own with rights to rule
themselves. This demand had been insisted time and again by several
Tamil political leaders.
The 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord signed
between Rajiv Gandhi and J. R. Jayawardane, proposed an amendment to the
1978 Constitution of Sri Lanka, calling for Provincial Councils as an
elected administrative body. This amendment is popularly known as the
13th amendment. History suggests, the 13th amendment was subterfuge for
denying, rather than granting Eelam Tamils greater political autonomy.
Though it was said that the purpose of 13th amendment was
decentralization of powers, in practice it was not so.
While the
Eelam Tamil demand was for the integration of the North and East of Sri
Lanka as a single Province drawn from the Tamil homeland, the 13th
amendment essentially did the opposite. It failed in categorically
asserting to the unity of the North and East and it provided space for
Sri Lanka’s judiciary to delink even the provisional unity of the
contiguous space of Eezham Tamils. Furthermore, the demand for a Tamil
Province was primarily for the Eelam Tamils to have control over their
homeland. However, to obstruct and dilute this aspect, the 13th
amendment devolved power to all the 9 Provinces, of which
demographically, seven were Sinhala, and two were Tamil Provinces. While
there is not much need for the Sinhala Provinces to have additional
powers, as the Government of Sri Lanka is by itself a Sinhalese State,
the need of the Eelam Tamils was overlooked, obfuscated within the
political concept of unitary Sri Lankan identity.
The Provincial Councils thus formed are powerless. Even the basic local
administrative organs of Land and Police were vested with the Government
of Sri Lanka. This was nowhere near the Federal System of Government.
The Provincial Councils are neither federal in form nor in substance.
Now
with Sri Lanka hosting the Commonwealth Conference in November 2013,
and with the mounting International pressure, the Government of Sri
Lanka is forced to show the world that the Eelam Tamils are at peace and
the Government has restored democracy back in the island.
It is
in this context that the Provincial Council Elections were conducted in
the Northern Province of Sri Lanka comprising of Jaffna and Vanni
regions, which form the main part of Eelam Tamils' traditional home
land. The first election to the Northern Province under a provisionally
combined North and East, was conducted in 1987 with the presence of the
IPKF. After that, this is the second time that the Northern Province of
the island is voting to elect a Provincial Council. To camouflage the
disparity existing in the political arena, elections were conducted for
the Central Province and the North Western Province also along with the
Northern Province.
In the Northern Province, Tamil National
Alliance, comprising now of 5 Tamil Political parties, viz., TELO,
EPRLF, PLOTE, TULF and ITAK, has won 28 out of the 36 seats, thereby
qualifying to get 2 bonus seats. The ruling alliance, UPFA of Mahinda
Rajapakse has got 7 seats and Sri Lanka Muslim Congress has won 1 seat.
Setting
aside the debate on what powers that the Provincial council has, or
whether TNA is going to bring about a change, there is much more to
understand from the statistics the results provide.
Statistics
indicate that TNA has secured 84.37% of the total votes polled in Jaffna
and 65.89% of the total votes polled in Vanni region. Rajapakse's UPFA
has secured 14.2% in Jaffna and 22.1% in Vanni. Ranil's UNP has secured
0.34% in Jaffna and 1.04% in Vanni. The Jaffna and Vanni region have
faced 5 elections after the tragic end of the war in 2009. These include
the Presidential Election in 2010, General Parliament Election in 2010,
Local Body elections in 2009 and 2011 and the recent Provincial
Elections - 2013. The Presidential Elections which were held within one
year of the end of the war had one Tamil contestant among the list of
contestants. The lone Tamil contestant, M. K. Sivajilingam - an
ex-member of Parliament - was at that time not openly supported by any
political party. Mahinda Rajapakse who won this election secured 24.75%
of votes in Jaffna and 27.31% of votes in Vanni.
The
parliamentary elections which followed also saw Mahinda Rajapakse's UPFA
win. The TNA, which contested in this election won 5 out of 9 seats in
Jaffna securing 43.85% of votes and 3 out of 6 seats in Vanni securing
38.96% of votes. Rajapakse's UPFA closely followed TNA winning 3 seats
in Jaffna securing 32.07% of votes and 2 seats in Vanni with 35.07% of
votes. Ranil Wickremasinge's UNP won one seat each in both Jaffna and
Vanni. In the local body elections that were conducted in 2011, UPFA
secured 24.43% in Jaffna and 31.04% in Vanni, while TNA secured 64.85%
in Jaffna and 46.57% in Vanni.
These details project a picture
that from 2009, UPFA has been securing 24 - 32% of votes in Jaffna and
27 - 35% of votes in Vanni, which means that UPFA has almost one-third
of the people supporting it. The current results which shows that UPFA
has secured just 14.2% in Jaffna and 22.1% in Vanni is intrepreted as
the fall in the reputation of UPFA as a ruling party. In any elections
held in any part of the world, it is natural that parties may win or
lose based on their general reputation. But the elections in the Tamil
Provinces of Sri Lanka cannot be weighed with the same scale, and must
be distinguished. More than the reputation of parties, an ideological
paradigm has a significant influence on these polls.
To
understand this, we must analyze the the details of the election
results. It is important to note that the above details are calculated
based on the Total number of votes polled and not based on the number of
registered voters. Statistically, it is normal to evaluate the results
based on the number of votes polled (Quantitative). But these election
results not only reflect the numbers, but the minds of people in a
conflict situation (Qualitative). So it is essential to take into
account the polling percentage and also to evaluate the reputation of
each party based on the total registered voters.
For Instance, in
the Presidential Elections of 2005, when LTTE called in for a boycott,
Mahinda Rajapakse is said to have secured 28.31% of votes in Jaffna and
Ranil Wickramasinghe 68.72%. But the overall polling in Jaffna was just
0.73%. Hence if the polling percentage and the votes against the total
registered voters is not considered, the data is bound to mislead. In
this background, it is notable that the Presidential Election of 2010,
the general Parliament election of 2010 both saw just 25.66% and 23.33%
of polling respectively in Jaffna and 40.33% and 43.89% in respectively
in Vanni. Now, if we analyse the votes secured by UPFA in these
elections based on the total number of registered voters, it is evident
that UPFA has secured just 6.12% in Jaffna and 10.77% in Vanni in the
Presidential Elections. Similarly, in the Parliament Elections of 2010,
UPFA has secured just 6.6% in Jaffna and 14.05% in Vanni. If we apply
the same parameter in the current Provincial Council Elections in which
the polling was 64.15% in Jaffna and 72.44% in Vanni, the votes secured
by UPFA stands at 8.43% in Jaffna and 16.01% in Vanni.
On the
contrary, applying the same parameter, the TNA which secured just 9.03%
of the total registered voters in the Parliament Elections of 2010, has
now secured 50.12% of the total registered voters in Jaffna. Similarly
in Vanni, TNA which had secured 15.61% in 2010 has now secured 47.73% of
the total registered voters. While the votes secured by UPFA have not
shown much difference with the change in the polling percentage, the
votes secured by TNA shows a proportionate increase. If we need to
accept that there is not much change in the reputation of Rajapakse and
his governance, we must also accept that the reputation of TNA has
increased so rapidly from 2010 to 2013.
But both are not true.
The truth is that, whenever the Eelam Tamils people get a chance to
vote, they vote for their own Party, and not for any Sinhalese party.
They have categorically rejected the Sinhalese parties and thereby
Southern Sri Lanka ruling them. In 2010, the people were deprived of
thier fundamental right to cast their vote. Does that mean the Eelam
Tamil's right to vote is being reinstated now? Or the democracy is
restored in Sri Lanka? Rather, it is only that, the Eelam Tamils are
slowly coming out of the trauma and have started to fight back. That is
why - beyond dense military presence, attacks on Tamil candidates,
intimidation and humiliation in polling booths, Eelam Tamils have risked
their lives to restore their dignity. From 1977, the elections were
used by the Eelam Tamils to communicate more than just who their
representative was. The elections held in the Tamil homeland in the
island was never just to acquire seats and go by the governance of Sri
Lanka but rather was a vehicle to communicate their will.
In
1977, when the TULF contested the Parliamentary election with a single
point manifesto to achieve 'Self-Determination of Tamils through a
separate Tamil Nation', out of the 19 seats 18 seats were won by them,
indicating that the majority of the people were for separate Tamil Eelam
Nation. In 1983, during the Local bodies election, the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam called for the people to boycott the election, on
the line of the struggle for a separate Tamil Eelam Nation. Though LTTE
was at that time just one among the 5 militant organisations and the
smallest in number, the people accepted their call and 95% of them
boycott the election. In 2004 Parliamentary elections, the Tamil
National Alliance (TNA), then comprising of 4 Tamil Political parties,
viz., TELO, EPRLF, ITAK and ACTC, contested the election stating that
they accept the leadership of LTTE in the struggle for a separate Tamil
Eelam Nation. TNA won 22 of the total 23 seats. In 2005 Presidential
Elections, LTTE called for boycott and more than 95% boycott the
election. In Jaffna, which was under Government Control at that time,
the polling was only 1.21%.
As such, this Provincial Election
too, has been effectively used as a tool by the Eelam Tamils to express
themselves to the world, who are otherwise completely restricted of any
expressions due to the absence of constitutional free speech protections
and dense post-war militarization of Tamil home land. This is not just a
mandate in support of TNA as a political party. The people's decision
clearly indicates that the people want to rule among themselves and do
not want to be ruled by any Sinhalese party. It is nothing but a
complete rejection of the Sinhalese and the Southern Sri Lanka from
ruling them.
Further, this election cannot in anyway serve as a
facade for eluding Sri Lanka's responsibility for war crimes and
genocide. In fact, the attacks by the military on the candidates and
other such intimidating actions add to the crimes and human rights
violations of the Government of Sri Lanka.
An other important
message this Election results convey is the effect of Sinhalese
settlements, that bring about demographic changes in the Tamil homeland
thereby paving way for the Sinhalese parties to anchor themselves in the
Tamil homeland. This has already been achieved in the East. There are
chances that this election results would have sent alarming messages to
the ruling Sinhalese, which will motivate them to increase the
unauthorised rampant settlement of Sinhalese in the North. Already the
coastal areas of Vanni, Mannar and Mullaitheevu and the fertile lands of
Vavuniya are occupied by the Sinhalese settlers. If this increases, the
Eelam Tamils will be losing their legal hold on their home land.
The
Eelam Tamils know very well, that after the elections, the Sinhala
rulers, having lost the elections, will avenge them outrageously with
their military. Even then, they have risked their life and sent out
their message. With the Eelam Tamils rejecting the Sinhalese polity and
the State in Colombo amidst draconian laws and horrifying conditions,
TNA must understand the responsibility vested with them by the people
through this elections. In 1977, the TULF was vested with such
responsibility. TULF contested the elections with a single manifesto of
'Self-Determination of Tamils through a separate Tamil Nation', which
gained the overwhelming support of the Eelam Tamils. But after the
sudden demise of SJV Chelvanayakam, TULF gave up its will to
Self-Determination, and agreed for District Councils. This is what
triggered the Tamil youth to lose their confidence in such Parliamentary
methods. They were pushed to take up arms to defend and restore the
rights of their people and land. The TNA should learn from history. They
should learn from their predecessors of what should NOT be done.
Chronology:
