Welcoming The Verdict Of The Tamil People
By Kalana Senaratne -September 22, 2013
Kalana Senaratne
The TNA has swept the polls in the North. More importantly, the Tamil people have voted courageously, convincingly, and clearly. It was an expected outcome, but as President Rajapaksa took off to New York, he would have known that numbers and statistics on paper, more than just mind-made presumptions, can have a very coruscating impact, that the numbers in this case do not lie; not in the ‘South’, and never in the ‘North’.
The election to the Northern Provincial Council (NPC) was not just a provincial election. It was that, and much more than that. It was almost like a referendum; not for a separate State, for the TNA Manifesto did not demand a separate Tamil Eelam State, in any explicit manner. But it was certainly a referendum of sorts, calling for the recognition of the right to self-determination of the Tamil people, for greater autonomy, for a re-structuring of the existing constitutional framework, and for accountability.
Lessons about the Conflict
The result in the North tells much about the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka.
Firstly, it tells us that the problem here is not just a problem of discrimination, or about the need for a more Tamil-friendly government in the ‘South’, or the absence of economic development. It is also not so much about the need to devolve a few powers to the periphery so that the people in those areas could benefit from them; a theory which was in any case rubbished when a Colombo-based Mr. CV Wigneswaran was nominated as TNA’s Chief Ministerial candidate. This is not a conflict that can be resolved only by enacting a new bill of rights, or by establishing more independent institutions.
Rather, the problem is more about nationalism and nationhood, about the Tamil people’s aspirations, about their need to be recognized as an equal nationality on the basis of equality and self-determination. It is a question that has to do with a deeply polarized polity, or deeply polarized polities. In broader terms, it is a question about how peoples with contrasting views about their nationhood, about their histories, can still co-exist peacefully.
