Tamil Question: Is It Between The Leaders Or The People?
By Vishwamithra1984 –August 3, 2016
“Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorism
Let us not constrain ourselves to the arguments and debates bandied about by so-called pundits. Most of these self-proclaimed pundits, University academics, professionals and leadership groups usually are almost always wrong or late in understanding the real reasons behind a knotty issue that has been irking our nation- Sri Lankan nation- for quite a long time. A long, long time indeed. The Tamil Question and its multiple facets, ranging from Tamil homeland, discrimination at all levels of civil life, independence of movement, assembly and speech to University entrance anomalies, are all deeply rooted in a fundamental premise of being treated as second-class citizens in a country whose Constitution enshrines clauses and chapters upholding and protecting all minorities as equal before the law.
Whether any Sinhalese agrees or not, the writer, a Sinhalese Buddhist, most unequivocally writes and affirms that it is beyond any shadow of doubt or suspicion that the notion of that mal-treatment of our minorities is a fact. The inbred thinking of the majority Sinhalese is fundamentally flawed. That flaw is shared by all majority communities of the human family. In the context of nation states and racial demarcations, it has been observed that power of the majority almost always prevails. However, in modern history- excluding, of course, the countries that were ruled by colonial powers of the British Empire and other imperial powers such as the Portuguese and Dutch- South Africa, until the White-minority rule eventually gave up under severest of international pressure, was the last country where a majority was ruled by an under-numbered minority.
