Liberal pluralism, Tamil People’s Council and the new Constitution
The people of this country should be the architects of their constitution. Though as everywhere else, politicians and constitutional lawyers would play a decisive role in authoring the constitution, there should be avenues for social movements, trade unions and activists and intellectuals to offer direction to the processes of drafting the new constitution. Unfortunately, there is very little conversation on the constitution between academics and experts working in the field of constitutional law and academics and activists working in the areas of identity, economy, gender, culture and literature in Sri Lanka.
by Mahendran Thiruvarangan
( January 14, 2016, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) More than six years after the war’s end, a particular line of thinking has come to the forefront in Tamil nationalists’ defence of their ely, on ethnicity or culture, it tends to build a one-to-one relationship between cultural identities, territoriepolitics around national self-determination. I would broadly describe this philosophy as liberal pluralism. Predicating the politics around state re-formation primarily, if not sols and the state. It is not an entirely new phenomenon as far as Tamil politics in Sri Lanka is concerned. It has been the bedrock of political reforms proposed as solution to the national question by a wide variety of actors in the country and in the diaspora ranging from liberal intellectuals based in Colombo to sections of the Leninist left to the old Federal Party, sections of today’s Tamil National Alliance, the bi-nationalist Tamil National People’s Front, journalists and various militant groups and organizations like the Trans-national Government of Tamil Eelam and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the latter would not settle for anything less than a separate Tamil state in the north-east of the island.
