transcurrents

Thamilchelvan and Tamil Politics – I

November 18th, 2007

by Rajan Philips

There are many pantheons in the small world of the formerly Ceylon, and now Sri Lankan, Tamils. There is more than one political pantheon and Thamilchelvan is the latest to enter the pantheon created and consecrated by the LTTE. His political life and dramatic death, a quick retaliation by the government to the LTTE’s Anuradhapura blitzkrieg a fortnight earlier, are symptomatic of many things that have gone wrong with Sri Lanka in general and among the Tamils in particular. Reactions and responses to his death have been mixed and divisive as indeed our politics are-outrage and mourning, revenge and celebrations, and middle-of-the-road concerns about the diminishing prospects for peace and political solution.

[S.P.Thamilchelvan attends a Reuters interview in Kilinochchi, May 7, 2005. Courtesy: Reuters/Anuruddha Lokuhapuarachchi - via Yahoo! News]

The public reactions to Thamilchelvan’s death are not the result of his military record but of his becoming the political face of the LTTE. He came into public view first in 1995-as the Leader of the Political Section and participating in the abortive peace talks between the LTTE and the Kumaratunga government. He was not much heard of before that, and there is not even an ‘honourable mention’ of Thamilchelvan in either of Narayan Swamy’s two books on the LTTE that are both recounts of violence rather than a study in politics. According to B. Raman, the Indian defence expert, Thamilchelvan is the only LTTE leader who may not have been involved in violence against non-combatants. Since 1995, Thamilchelvan has been LTTE’s smiling poster boy and the alter ego to Anton Balasingham. But unlike Balasingham, who was the retained theoretician almost from the inception of the LTTE, Thamilchelvan was groomed within the organization. He was the principal bearer of the political hat in an otherwise insurgent and military organization. He was the coordinator with expatriates who provided expert advice from the outside, and it was rumoured that Thamilchelvan was the main voice of moderation during the preparation of the ISGA document by the LTTE’s expatriate expert panel in Dublin in 2003. Thamilchelvan’s killing has produced a poetic irony: the government has exposed itself to criticism for targeted killing and for killing the prospect for peace in the short-term; on the other hand, given its own record as the past master of political killing the LTTE could hardly throw a moral stone at the government.

The reactions to Thamilchelvan’s death, even among the pundits, have been bordering on morbid curiosity rather than political reflection. There is no more talk in government circles about the APRC and its on-again, off-again deliberations. The buzz in Colombo is when, and not if, can the rest of the LTTE leadership be taken out? The government has mirror-imaged itself on the LTTE and is content with flexing its military muscle rather than rising above the LTTE and fulfilling the State’s political responsibilities. If the government or anyone else of political consequence in the South were to take these responsibilities seriously, they will pause to reflect on what have gone wrong in Sri Lanka and among the Tamils, and how to put them right.

First, anyone serious about Tamil politics should try to understand the trajectory of Tamil political leadership from the old elites, through a difficult transition, to the phenomenon that is the LTTE. Second, how and to what extent did the actions of the Sri Lankan State and governments contribute to the emergence of the LTTE claiming to be the sole representative of the Tamils? Third, what sense can we make of the LTTE phenomenon? Lastly, how can an exclusively military approach designed to overwhelm the LTTE be expected to lead to peace and reconciliation among the Sinhalese, the Tamils and the Muslims. Thamilchelvan’s political life and death provides the occasion and the backdrop to reflect on these questions.

[Ponnambalam Brothers - Arunachalam and Ramanathan]

The old pantheon

Forty years ago, about the time Thamilchelvan was born unknown and unsung in the obscure village of Mattuvil in the Jaffna Peninsula, the late A.J. Wilson, already the academic Brahmin of Peradeniya, presented a charmingly familial paper at the first International Association of Tamil Research (IATR) Conference in Kuala Lumpur. It was about the “Contribution of some leading Ceylon Tamils to the constitutional and political development of Ceylon during the 19th and 20th centuries”. The Tamil leaders featured were the elites of the elites among the Ceylon Tamils-members of the caste-ascribed and British-anointed Coomaraswamy family (to which the great Ananda Coomaraswamy belonged) of the 19th century; their nephews, the Ponnambalam (Ramanathan and Arunachalam) brothers who dominated the first three decades of the 20th century; the self-made and spectacular G.G. Ponnambalam who ended that dynasty; and the unspectacular but charismatic S.J.V. Chelvanayakam who was thrust into leadership after Sinhala Only. In the saga of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism, they belong to a distant pantheon, some more revered than others.

[G.G. Ponnambalam & S.J.V. Chelvanayagam]

When Wilson, who was Chelvanayakam’s son-in-law, presented his paper in Kuala Lumpur, both Ponnambalam and Chelvanayakam were in Dudley Senanyake’s ‘National Government’ (1965-1970), and there was a sense of complacency among the Tamil middle classes that the worst of Sinhala Only was over. Worse, however, was yet to come in the decades that followed-constitutional upheavals, failed Sinhalese insurrections, the anti-Tamil riots of 1977, 1981 and 1983, the rise of Tamil separatism and the ongoing Eelam wars.

Tamilchelvan was 17 years old when he joined the LTTE, one of many boys who voluntarily joined the ‘boys’. They were embittered by the experience of 1983, disillusioned with the prospects of life in Jaffna seen as not only neglected but also oppressed by Colombo, and lured by the mirage of a new state. The LTTE and half a dozen other organizations were already in place for boys like Thamilchelvan to dedicate their lives to. The leadership and the frontline members of these organizations represented a sea change from the elite leaders whom Wilson had portrayed to his elite audience in Kuala Lumpur. Almost all of the young militants were from humble homes, had no impressive academic records, and were not set on any professional career path-attributes that set apart the old leaders from the young upstarts.

The change was not the result of any social reform or revolution as it did not presuppose or produce far reaching or fundamental changes in the organizing principles or the social and economic relations of the Tamils. It was a displacement of the old leadership by a new set of actors, not a democratic substitution but an enforced filtering-up process brought about by Sri Lanka’s political and constitutional crises, economic constraints, the State’s military intrusion into Tamil areas, ambivalence of the old Tamil leadership, and large scale emigration by the Tamils.

JR and Amirthalingam: The crisis of transition

The Supreme Court in its August 2005 ruling on the tenure of the Kumaratunga presidency made official what was already commonplace-that the passage of the Sixth Amendment in the dark days of 1983 was the single most act that packed off the TULF parliamentarians and paved the way for the LTTE to take a stranglehold on Tamil politics. The pathetic ambivalence of the TULF leadership is no less blameworthy, although it has to be recognized that the TULF leader at that time, the late Amirthalingam, faced a crisis that none of his predecessors, the elites of the elites, had had to face in their time.

Amirthalingam was the sacrificial medium of transition from the old elites to the new upstarts. He had paid his political dues over thirty years and after a long apprenticeship under Chelvanayaksm was fully entitled to succeed him as the Tamil leader. But Amirthalingam was not elite enough for some of the Colombo Tamil elites who usurped the role of being intermediaries between President Jayewardene and the TULF. He was also subjected to lateral sniping by others with leadership ambitions within the TULF, and was viciously attacked in the editorials of the Saturday Review, the short-lived Jaffna weekly that Amirthalingam tartly described in Tamil as the “Saturn View”.

But the biggest challenge for Amirthalingam and the TULF arose from their ill-advised but inexorable attempt to tie the horns of two dilemmas. First, they proclaimed the Eelam demand while really intending to settle for a “viable alternative” through talks with the Sri Lankan government. If Eelam came by the way, that would be lottery! Second, while professing non-violent politics the TULF was also nurturing the Tamil militants as storm troopers. The militants were the TULF’s ’subcontractors’ for the questionable Eelam contract; however, the subcontractors eventually threw out the main contractor, and one of them, the LTTE, virtually eliminated every other group to claim to be the sole-representative of the Tamils.

[A. Amirthalingam & S. Thondaman]

As was revealed after the 1983 riots (first by CWC leader Thondaman in Parliament and later in Wilson’s monographs), between the Vaddukoddai resolution and the 1977 election, the TULF leaders reached an understanding with J.R. Jayewardene that the new UNP government would take steps to provide a viable alternative so that the TULF could safely drop the Eelam demand. By all evidence, the TULF kept to its end of the bargain and went so far as to help President Jayewardene by not fielding a TULF candidate in the 1982 presidential election (to avoid a split in the Tamil vote) and by choosing to “sit on its hands” during the referendum that followed.

Mr. Jayewardene, however, chose to play too-clever-by-half politics rather than act like a genuine leader and statesman and deliver on his undertakings. He kept the TULF, the then official Opposition, isolated from the SLFP and the Left Parties by threatening to abandon negotiations if there was any contact between the TULF and other opposition parties. Ultimately he offered less than nothing, when even something less than the 13th Amendment that came five years later would have sufficed before 1983. JR’s betrayal caused Amirthalingam dearly, eventually his life. He and the TULF lost all credibility with the youth and with vast sections of the Tamil expatriates who were already swelling in numbers. It is no exaggeration to say that JR helped put the Tiger in the saddle and let it ride the Tamils. JR’s betrayal and his lopsided foreign policy at that time also opened the backdoor for India to get involved at the highest level and in the deepest way in what until then was considered Sri Lanka’s ‘internal matter.’ The rest is not just history, as the adage goes, but has been our living experience. The suffering continues.

Related:

Part II: The roots of LTTE’s Militarism and Political Culture

Part III: Kinship, caste and the Diaspora in Tamil nationalism

Entry Filed under: transCurrents