Politics, Like Nature, Abhors A Vacuum: The TNA Moves Nearer Centre Stage
Prof Kumar David
Something is quietly happening below the radar; it is not declared, nor is it policy, and I think the TNA senses that all this complicates its life; but when there is a political vacuum other actors, inevitably, are sucked in. What is the political vacuum? Who is being sucked in? There is an empty space in southern (Sinhala) politics; the turncoat left which kowtows to Mahinda Rajapakse is dead; it’s now called the Dead Left. The UNP is as impotent as a surgically castrated eunuch. Hakeem and the SLMC are competing with the Dead Left for the rank of first licker of presidential boots. The radical left is splintered. The opposition is a vacuum that would do Evangelista Torricelli proud!
The reluctant floss breezing in to these vacated spaces, believe it or not, is the TNA and its spokesman Sampanthan (S1) and Sumanthiran (S2). It started before the Northern Provincial Council elections and reached a high point in S2’s address to parliament in early December in the budget debate. I am surprised how many Sinhalese friends and the flood on the web pointing out that S1&2 are taking up national issues better than the Sinhala opposition. Maybe people are impressed by the novelty of a party long identified with Tamil politics expanding its compass to national issues. Or maybe it is approval of the TNA for not playing dirty politics, at least not to the same extent as others. Either way it is a sign of puberty; the TNA is morphing. This is welcome; let us wish S2 ever thicker testosterone.
If the TNA enters national politics, without compromising its mandate from the Tamil people, (and why not? what’s the contradiction?), it would be a great gain. The fault with Tamil politics for seven decades is not that it focussed on Tamil issues, that is a must, but that by and large Tamil political ideology remained reactionary. You want examples? I will give you examples. Think of hardened old comprador GGP who voted to strip plantation workers of their citizenship; think of diehard SJV who opposed everything progressive that NM and the old-left attempted on the social and economic front. Think of the quintessential petty bourgeois Amirthlingam – in fairness, he was not a fossilised reactionary. Now things are changing. It is not that Ganesh, lord of wisdom, visited S1 in a trance, it is not that S2 experienced epiphany on the road to Jaffna, it is that if things that should happen don’t happen, then other things happen; my vacuum theory.
