Ayyo',does it still have to be 'our Tamils' and 'their Tamils' ?
N Sathiya Moorthy-July 16, 2018, 8:20 am
Chennai, 12 July 2018
In a way, it could not have happened at a worse time for Vijayakala Mahendran, who has since bowed out as State Minister for Child Welfare, following her controversial ‘we want LTTE back’ kind of public statement, at an official function in native Jaffna. Detractors cannot blame the Rajapaksas for triggering the controversy after Vijayakala said what she should not have said, meant whatever she did not mean to mean, but then the ‘LTTE row’ did help to an extent the New York Times story on China’s Hambantota Port firms spending on incumbent Mahinda R’s failed presidential poll campaign of 2015.
It was possibly something that the authors of the New York Times story might not have bargained for. But then, the Vijayakala controversy has shown that corruption and even sovereignty-centric issues of the China payment and Hambantota port deal(s) kind are not as much an issue as any remote talk of LTTE’s revival, again involving issues of sovereignty, territorial integrity and national security, on land and in the seas (as the ‘Sea Tigers’ showed).
It is not if Rajapaksa’s SLPP-JO parliamentarians alone behaved unruly inside the Chamber, forcing Speaker Karu Jayasuriya to tick them off. Outside of the House, a section of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP colleagues did voice similar demands. UNP back-benchers were in the front, demanding action against a fellow-party colleague, the only woman Minister from the ‘minority’ Tamil community (which in linguistic terms comprise the SLT, Upcountry and Muslim denominations).
It is easy to dismiss the anti-Vijayakala protests as a reflection of ‘southern chauvinism’, but the latter is as much a reality as the intent and content of Vijayakala’s call for LTTE’s ‘return’ was. Rather, the latter alone triggered the former, at least in this case, and the LTTE remains a grave political and electoral issue, at least down South. If nothing else, families in deep South would not want jammed telephone lines connecting to their dear ones working or living in capital Colombo, whenever a ‘terror attack’ used to be reported on TV until the end of the decisive ‘Eelam War IV’ in May 2009.
Not at all naive
Heard on the YouTube or such other medium, Vijayakala’s reference to the need for LTTE’s ‘return’ was as naive as may have sounded to her Tamil sympathisers, whose numbers may have increased, after all, since. Widow of UNP Tamil parliamentarian, T Mahendran, shot in cold blood outside of capital Colombo’s Ponnambala-vaneswarar Kovil on English New Year Day, 2008, Vijakala has since been an elected MP, and Minister since the incumbent Government came to power in 2015.
It means that from being a housewife/home-maker, Vijayakala has travelled a lot in political terms – and should have known what to say and what not so say, whether in public or even within ‘closed doors’. At the public function in Jaffna’s Veerasingham Hall, the Minister was only talking about the safety of women, and the rest of the population in Tamil areas, these past, post-LTTE years, and could well have left it at that. It was not to be.
‘Cultural policing’
Obviously, with future elections in mind, and also to garner a share of hard-line Tamil votes sympathetic to the LTTE’s cause and ways, Vijayakala said that they could walk freely on the streets when the LTTE was around. It was a fact, as the LTTE’s disciplinary procedures were so severe that no Tamil would want to violate them and pay for it with his or her life. In certain communities, and certain nations, such behaviour would have been dubbed ‘cultural policing’, but not in Jaffna, not in LTTE-controlled Tamil areas across the North and the East of Sri Lanka.
It is anybody’s guess why Vijayakala could not have taken up the increasing concern of the Jaffna population with her own Government, of which she was also a Minister, and in private. Or, taken it up with Northern Province’s Tamil Chief Minister C V Wigneswaran, who then could well have (rightly) pointed out to her, how ‘Police’ powers under 13-A had not been devolved on the Provinces, 30 long years after being incorporated in the Constitution.
By taking it up with her Government-appointed Northern Province Governor Reginald Cooray, DIG or IG of Police and all the rest of the political leadership from President Maithiripala Sirisena and PM Wickremesinghe, she could have still kept the issue alive. Why, she could have also flagged a new awakening in ‘distant South’ over the imminent need for ‘Police’ powers for the Provinces, of which the North was only one of the nine, where alone her party too was not as strong as elsewhere.
Went beyond the brief
Even for a public function, sponsored by the Government or not, Vijayakala went beyond her political brief as a people’s representative and also as a Minister, when she said that they ‘wanted the LTTE back’. It was a political message to hard-line Tamils who may have been unhappy with the TNA and not satisfied with rivals from within the Tamil polity.
If Vijayakala had hoped to cash in on such emotive appeals, particularly to the northern women populace, she has lost her job, long before the elections are here. Now, it remains to be seen if the UNP would re-nominate her in Elections-2020 to Parliament, which thankfully would come only after the presidential polls by January that year.
In between, the UNP has set up a four-member panel to study and report on the issue, for the leadership to initiate disciplinary action, if found needed. The police has also been at it, to ‘investigate’ if her statement tantamount to support for an outfit that is a ‘banned organisation’ in the country, and which is still perceived only as a highly-motivated, well-armed ‘terror group’, confining it within the public imagination, as much in the North as in the South.
Better or worse still, over a week after Vijayakala’s resignation, there are still news reports about the UNP’s internal inquiry intend on taking a serious look into the affair, to initiate further inner-party disciplinary action against the ‘sacked’ Minister. Other reports have also spoken about the Attorney-General directing the Inspector-General of Police, the top-most cop in the country, to follow up on the pre-resignation instructions to the effect.
Yet, in the Tamil areas, and wherever Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora live, they still perceive the LTTE only as a ‘protector’ of Tamil interests, people, culture and language -- independent of their ‘love’ or hate for the LTTE. Very few see the LTTE as a ‘terror group’ as the ‘Sinhala South’ or a section of the ‘Eastern Muslims’ or the rest of the world might see them, still.
Celebrating ‘Black Tigers’
Incidentally, only days after the Vijayakala row heated up, sections in northern Jaffna and Kilinochchi districts reportedly celebrated the foundation day of the dreaded ‘Black Tigers’ suicide-squad on 5 July. According to news reports, LTTE’s ‘Tiger’ logo and maps of ‘Tamil Eelam’ were on display, with the result, the police has pressed investigations into the issue.
In context, any digging up of the Vijayakala episode further could only be counter-productive in terms of mainstreaming Tamil sentiments, post-war, post-LTTE, which has already been a tardy affair at best. An impression could well be created that Vijayakala was being isolated and pushed to the corner, not only because she was a hapless woman parliamentarian in a male-dominated polity, but more because she was a Tamil.
This kind of sentiments have been ruling the streets of Sri Lanka for long, almost since the imposition the ‘Sinhala Only’ law and the consequent Tamil protests, leading to the LTTE war and violence. Nothing has been done to erase this impression about the Tamils, or such impressions of the Tamils, which is an hourly affair in daily interactions with the police or other Government officials, many of whom definitely have developed a ‘Sinhala superciliousness’.
Shock phrase, not ‘stock phrase’
In political terms, it could well have electoral consequences for the ruling combine in general and Vijayakala’s UNP in particular. The party is otherwise considered relatively ‘Tamil friendly’ compared to other southern Sinhala parties and leaders. For winning elections or even forming a new government in the place of the incumbent coalition in the current Parliament, they need the TNA, even if not their own MP, Vijayakala.
Leave aside the ‘political solution’ under a new Constitution that UNP’s Wickremesinghe had reportedly promised the TNA leadership ahead of the presidential polls of 2015, and which promise has not been kept, at least thus far, irritants of the Vijayakala kind could jeopardise the UNP-TNA relations, whatever that be. Worse still in the reverse, as any accommodation of Vijayakala could well spoil the UNP’s limited chances with the ‘Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist voters’, whose numbers are substantial and whose sympathies are still with the war-winning Rajapaksa clan.
According to media reports, TNA’s hard-line ‘rebel’ Northern Province Chief Minister C V Wigneswaran has defended UNP’s Vijayakala, though there is no love lost between him and the Centre, especially with party Prime Minister Wickremesinghe. Another TNA leader, the no-nonsense parliamentarian, M A Sumanthiran, is reported to have said that ‘southern Sinhala leaders’ alone ‘pressured’ Vijayakala into talking about ‘LTTE’s revival’ – though he is not known to have explained it.
In the early stages of the delayed digging up of the Vijayakala row, she was reported to have told Deputy Minister Ranjan Ratnayake, "Ayyo, they have misquoted me", or something to that effect. For the uninitiated, of whom there are many even among the urbane sections of the Sinhala elite, ‘Ayyo’ is a Tamil exclamation of sorrow, sadness and shock.
Obviously, Vijayakala used it as a ‘shock’ phrase, and not a ‘stock’ phrase. But then, the way her statement has been marketed for the Sinhala audience, and the way further action has been promised against the ex-Minister, it could well be in future, as in the LTTE past, "Ayyo, the nation is at it again."
That said, there is no denying that all the issues that Vijayakala flagged at her Jaffna speech on personal security are prevalent across the country and across the world. She however needs to ask herself, if they required the LTTE to restore what essentially is a Law & Order issue, which is what any democratic or not-so-democratic Government are expected to dispense to their people. Here dictatorships may have often succeeded more than democracies.
(The writer is Director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, the multi-disciplinary Indian public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi. email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorty.com)
