During the recent Presidential Election campaign, the newly elected President and other members of the National People’s Power (NPP) made a promise to the people of this country, particularly to the Tamil people, that the Provincial Council system would be protected, elections to the councils would be conducted soon, and constitutionally devolved powers to the councils would be fully implemented.
Among the various other promises that were made, this promise is most significant and of paramount importance to the Tamil people.
The newly elected Government now declares that there is no place for racism and religious discrimination in this country. It tries to give a distorted interpretation of the results of the recently concluded Parliamentary Elections, especially in the Northern and Eastern Provinces in which six Tamils were elected from the NPP, by saying that the racism that existed hitherto among the Tamil people has now been defeated.
Racial discrimination
The Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) Government and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) must clearly understand one important fact, which is that since independence, all the governments that came to power and ruled in Colombo have pursued a policy of racial and religious discrimination against the Tamil people and unleashed a wave of oppression that very often was violent in nature.
The disenfranchisement of upcountry Tamils in 1948; State-sponsored pogroms of Tamils in 1958, 1977, 1981, and 1983, often downplayed as minor ethnic riots; and the enactment of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) targeting the Tamil youth are some in the long list of discriminatory policies pursued by governments that compelled the Tamil people to resist this real threat to their very existence and to struggle against this brutal and inhumane oppression.
Resistance to injustice, oppression, and existential threat is not racism; on the contrary, the pursuit of a policy rooted in a Sinhala Buddhist hegemonistic ideology aimed solely at destroying the language, culture, education, and religion of a people on the basis of race is real racism.
Attempts to change the demography and destroy the very identity as a nation through economically non-viable State-sponsored Sinhalese colonisation schemes in the traditional habitat of Tamil people is racism at its core, and we agree that this racism needs to be eradicated.
Over 10 years have elapsed since the last Provincial Council Elections were held. The administration of the provinces is now handled by loyal bureaucrats appointed by the Government. The newly elected Government is not showing any indication of holding the election soon. Instead, some vague utterances are being made that it is planning to hold this election in the latter part of 2025 or early 2026.
On the other hand, JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva has clearly stated that the 13th Amendment is an unwanted burden and will be abolished. The JVP’s stand on the national question is well known, and that is the view that there is no racial or religious conflict between the Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim people and that we are all Sri Lankans.
By constantly repeating this, the JVP is trying to establish that Sri Lanka does not have a national problem and that therefore there is no need for a resolution. It is a simple and naïve explanation to a complicated and serious problem.
Strongly racist Sinhalese leaders like Wimal Weerawansa, Udaya Gammanpila, and Sarath Weerasekera also want to abolish the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, and they are fully against power-sharing arrangements. On the matter of devolution, what is the difference between the JVP and these so-called Sinhalese racist leaders?
Past attempts at devolution
It must be clearly stated here that the Indo-Lanka Accord was signed between the Governments of India and Sri Lanka primarily to resolve the longstanding national question. Then President J.R. Jayewardene (JR) signed on behalf of Sri Lanka and then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi signed on behalf of the Government of India and the Tamil people.
In order to implement the agreed provisions of the accord, the 13th Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution was introduced. Although the primary purpose of the accord was to address the national question and envisage a resolution to it through the devolution of legislative, administrative, and executive powers to the Northern and Eastern Provinces as one unit, which were acknowledged in the accord as the historical habitat of Tamil people, the Government introduced a Provincial Council system to the entire country, including the seven other provinces, that never demanded any devolution.
The Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), which formed the first Provincial Government in the merged Northern and Eastern Provinces, wrote several letters to the Government in Colombo pointing out the inadequacy of the powers devolved and the need for their enhancement beyond the 13th Amendment. The Chief Minister had 13 meetings with the then President to discuss this but failed to enlighten him on this issue.
All other Presidents who came to power after JR accepted the inadequacy of the 13th Amendment and promised action to rectify it.
President R. Premadasa appointed a Parliamentary Select Committee to study the issue and submit a report recommending measures to address the inadequacy of devolved powers. President Chandrika Kumaratunga submitted a proposal envisaging a union of regions as a model of devolution, which was thwarted by the combined Opposition. President Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed an all-party committee headed by Dr. Tissa Vitharana which also studied the issue and submitted a report on devolution.
Subsequently, during the so-called period of good governance under President Maithripala Sirisena, attempts were made to draft a new constitution that would adequately address the national question. Incumbent President Dissanayake was also an active participant in that process. All these attempts were purportedly made to find a solution based on power-sharing that went beyond the 13th Amendment, accepted by all to be inadequate.
The Leftists’ metamorphosis
Unfortunately, the new Marxist-Leninist Centre-Left Government is showing signs of completely abandoning the power-sharing model with enhanced devolution beyond the 13th Amendment as a meaningful solution to the national question, and denigrating the legitimate aspirations of the Tamil people as a symptom of economic disparity and underdevelopment.
At this juncture, it is important to remember that just after independence, the Communist Party of Ceylon passed a resolution at its national convention that the Tamil people of the north and east must be given powers to govern themselves, which stance it later abandoned as it gradually morphed into a Sinhalese nationalist party.
Likewise, when the Sinhala Only Bill was tabled in Parliament, Colvin. R. de Silva, the Leader of the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), declared that two languages meant one country and one language meant two countries, warning that if Sri Lanka were to remain as one country, the Sinhala and Tamil languages must be given parity of status.
But de Silva too, as the principal architect of the new Republican Constitution, failed to keep the provisions of Article 29 from the previous Donoughmore Constitution, which had been included as a guarantee for the rights and safety of Tamil people.
Subsequently, another Leftist leader of the Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), Vasudeva Nanayakara, who once said that Tamils had the right to self-determination, later changed his stand to say that the Tamils did not need any power-sharing arrangements. This is the short history of Sri Lanka’s Leftist parties’ metamorphosis from firebrand Marxists to deplorable racists.
From the outset, the self-declared Marxist JVP held an openly anti-Indian and anti-Tamil view, and its political rhetoric reflected this mindset. During its first insurrection in 1971 and the second in 1987-’89, it did not have any Tamils in its membership.
According to the JVP, the main enemy of the Sinhalese people is the scourge of Indian expansionism and their agents, the Tamils of Sri Lanka, who pose an existential threat to the two-millennium-old Sinhalese civilisation. At the peak of its anti-Indian frenzy in 1988, the party even forced traders and vendors to change the name of onions from ‘Bombay onions’ to ‘big onions’.
Therefore, just because the JVP carries a label of ‘Leftist’ does not mean that it will bring justice and equality to the Tamil people. The Tamil intelligentsia and academics who believe that since the NPP is a Leftist organisation it will offer a just solution to the sufferings of the Tamil people must not forget the past history of these recently enlightened saviours. The JVP must first acknowledge and unequivocally tell the Tamil people that there exists a question of nationalities in Sri Lanka, and that it needs to be resolved to the satisfaction of the reasonable aspirations of the Tamil people.
Committing to a meaningful solution
Until a framework for a reasonable settlement is reached, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which is an inseparable part of the Sri Lankan Constitution, must be fully implemented, elections to the Provincial Councils in the north and east held immediately, and the administration handed over to elected representatives from the two provinces.
The last remaining constitutional safeguard for Tamils of the north and east is the 13th Amendment and the Provincial Council system. All attempts, covert and overt, to remove this last remaining safeguard, like what the Sinhalese rulers successfully did with Article 29 of the Donoughmore Constitution, must be exposed and resisted.
Many say that although the Provincial Councils have existed for the past 37 years, people have not gained any benefit from them and they are a white elephant that needs to be disposed of. But one should not forget that the Government waged a brutal civil war for 26 years, and after the war ended, all governments that came to power in Colombo, including the present one, continue to keep land under military occupation and the people under constant surveillance using the notorious PTA.
During the past 15-year period of absence of armed conflict, and after much persuasion and pressure from the international community, only one election to the Northern Provincial Council was held and people had only four years of administration by elected representatives.
Instead of encouraging and helping with resources to establish a vibrant provincial administration, the regimes in Colombo spent much of their time and resources in designing and implementing administrative mechanisms and actions to undermine the limited autonomy the provinces had.
It is high time Tamil political parties discard the puerile notion that talking about the 13th Amendment is a sacrilege and demand the implementation of the amendment in full until a meaningful solution satisfying the just and legitimate aspirations of the Tamil people is negotiated and agreed upon.
For the first time since independence, the Tamil people of the north and east have entrusted their future in the hands of a Sinhalese-dominated political party. It is up to the leadership of the NPP and its Tamil elected representatives from the north and east to work diligently to fulfil the aspirations of the long-suffering Tamil people. Will they do it?
(The writer is a former Member of Parliament)
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication)