Minority Report: Sri Lanka’s Tamil Question
| by Dr Dayan Jayatilleka
“The multitude of workers and peasants…cannot allow the dismemberment of the nation…”
- Antonio Gramsci (1919)
“Gramsci’s strategy follows from his concept—quite original in Marxism, of the working class as part of the nation”
- Eric Hobsbawm (‘Gramsci and Political Theory’)
( April 13, 2014, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Intervening in the debate on Tamil nationhood and self-determination Prof Kumar David accuses me of abandoning my youthful Leninism (‘Self-Determination as a 21-C Concept-Justice Wigneswaran and Dr Jayatilleka use outdated categories’, Kumar David, Sunday Island, April 13th 2014). I debated Prof Kumar David on the same question exactly three and a half decades ago in the Lanka Guardian. I was twenty two. In the latter half of my fifties I am far too old, and the Sri Lankan crisis has gone on for far too long, at the cost of at least one blighted generation, to permit myself the indulgence of existential experiments and adventures with ideological prisms, tattered maps and rusted weapons. To me, ideology, Leninist or otherwise, has little to do with my practice as a political scientist, analyst and ‘public intellectual’. I try my poor best to get at the fundamentals, the essence and the real dynamics of things. Lenin matters as a political thinker and practitioner of genius. To me, as a political scientist working in the 21st century and in the global south, Gramsci matters even more.
