The rationality of Tamil Freedom
The Tamil struggle for political emancipation in Sri Lanka has changed over the past sixty years in both the political objective it has pursued (from equitable power-sharing at the centre, to federal autonomy, to an independent state of Tamil Eelam) and in the modalities it has adopted (from negotiation by political elites, to mass protest and civil disobedience, to armed struggle). At different moments, what later became described as ‘national liberation5 has been rationalized through differing, though not exclusive, frameworks (resisting ‘state discrimination5 or pursuing ‘self-determination5, for example) and drawn on different legitimating logics (‘historical5 existence in the island's Northeast or present-day ‘Sinhala chauvinism5, for example). Despite the heterogeneity of claims, arguments and modalities adopted over decades by Tamil actors, this dissertation argues that a specific rationality, which it terms ‘Tamil Freedom5, has informed Tamil political activity since well before independence. This political rationality is to be found embedded in the texts, practices, problematizations, programmes that have emerged over that time, as well as the activities of a multitude of actors. The essential elements of this rationality are, as Rasaratnam (2009) has outlined, firstly, that the Tamils and the Sinhalese comprise distinct and equal collectives (‘Tamil5) and, secondly, that the Tamil collective's pursuit of progress, broadly defined, should be unhindered, in particular' by Sinhala domination (‘Freedom5).
Precisely what the Tamil collective is - a ‘people5, a ‘community5, a ‘nation5, a ‘race5, etc - is less important in this rationality than the notion that Tamils and Sinhalese constitute the same type of grouping and are equal in the sense of
collectives rather than as individuals. It is this logic that, for example, underpins
assertions by Tamil politicians of the late nineteenth and eai'ly twentieth centuries that Tamils and the Sinhalese are the two ‘founding races of the island5 (Wilson 2000:48) or by more recent Tamil leaders that “the Sinhala nation wants to
continue the war' to subjugate the Tamil nation” (Pirapaharan 1998, see also LTTE undated:4, TNA 2001, 2004). In other words, what is taken-for-granted is that
these collectives exist and, just as importantly, are equal. For example, as discussed in more detail below, the demands for power-sharing put forward by successive Tamil leaders are rooted in the notion that Tamils and Sinhalese compromise distinct and equally valuable collectives and that it is between these two wholes that power must be shared.70 It can already be seen how the notion of equality between collectives would render that of Tamils as a ‘minority’ and Sinhalese as a ‘majority’ problematic when it underpins distributions of state power. Tamil and Sinhala collectives in this rationality are thus political entities, imbued with (equivalent) rights and responsibilities. Moreover, there cannot be a single ‘Sri Lankan’ collective in this logic, unless it is based on equal ‘Tamil’ and ‘Sinhala’ ones.
The basis of the ‘Tamil’ identity in this rationality is an inexact admixture of language, ethnicity, cultural practices, historical habitation on the island, and so on.71 Crucially, however, an implicit condition of membership of the Tamil collective is the acceptance of the equality of the Tamil collective to the Sinhala collective. In other words, those who deny either the existence or equal worth of the Tamil collective (say by accepting that Tamils have a minority status in Sri Lanka) are not considered part of it, even if they claim the ethnic, linguistic or other attributes of ‘Tamilness.’ In this way too, the Tamil identity here is an inherently political one (Rasaratnam 2009). Concomitantly, well being or rights of the collective is privileged over the individual’s. This is not to say individual rights are inconsistent with Tamil Freedom, but - just as the rights of state trump those of individuals (in the context o f ‘national security, say) - the rights of the
‘Tamil’ individual are subordinate to the well being of the ‘Tamil
people/race/nation’. The homogeneity of the Tamil collective does not extend, however, to all aspects of ‘being Tamil’. In other words, Tamil Freedom accepts
70 These proposals including a ‘50-50’ split at the centre between Sinhalese and non-Sinhalese, and forms o f territorial self governance in the Northeast - federal autonomy, an independent state or, more recently, a Tamil-dominated ‘interim administration’.
71 Inevitably, there is disagreement as to where the boundaries of this collective are to be found. Religion, for example, is not integral to the Tamil identity; most Tamils are Hindu but a sizeable number are Catholic or Anglican. However, the island’s Muslims mostly speak Tamil but see themselves as a collective that is distinct from the ‘the Tamils’. At the same time, the label of ‘Tamil-speaking people5 has been used by both communities and embodies the notion o f a shared identity vis-a-vis the Sinhalese and the Sri Lankan state.
the existence of various differences - class, religion, caste, region, etc - amongst Tamils but does not see this as contradictory to the notion of a rights-bearing
* • 79
Tamil collective. "
What exactly constitutes progress in this rationality — be it modernity, economic prosperity, cultural achievements, social improvement, or ‘development’ - is less important (and indeed has changed over time) than the sense that advancement is a good that should be pursued by the collective. Thus, the notion of progress or improvement here is akin to what Mclellan (1995:71) has called the
Enlightenment project of modernity, the belief that man can effect material and moral progress through the application of reason and science. For example, the commitment to moral and material progress and improvement that underpinned the constitutional foundations of the British colonial state was taken on board by Tamil politicians from the late nineteenth century onwards and was used to increasingly frame a criticism of colonial governance (see discussion in Scott
1999). The LTTE meanwhile argues: “ours is a national liberation struggle, a struggle for freedom to shape our future political destiny” (LTTE undated: 4, emphasis added). This second dimension of Tamil Freedom is important in the sense that, rather than redress for the past, what matters more in governmental calculations is the removal of, and safeguards against, bars to the “Tamils’” future progress. In this logic, a lasting peace rests more on guarantees against future repeats of past injustice, rather than correctives for past ‘grievances’. For
example, just prior to independence, the past injustices of Colonial rule were less a source of concern and a target of Tamils’ agitation than Britain’s promulgation of a unitary constitution that effectively institutionalised Sinhala numerical superiority in Parliament and, thus, a veto over future Tamil interests (Indrakumar 2001:227).
72 Over the past century, Tamil leaders espousing both socially progressive and regressive attitudes towards caste, gender, class, etc have taken up the defense o f ‘Tamil’ interests. Whilst for some Tamil political actors, gender and caste hierarchies were seen as a natural part o f the Tamil collective (see comments by Ponnambalam Ramanathan in 1934 on extending the vote to lower castes and women cited in Russell 1982:16), Tamil activists, particularly since the 1970’s, have tended to see the eradication o f these hierarchies as part o f the collective progress and
improvement o f the Tamil collective. The LTTE’s explicit programmes o f social emancipation - - see ‘Socialist Tamil Eelam’ (LTTE undated) - were not, for example, in the foreground o f Tamil leaders pursuing ‘Tamil’ interests in the late 1800’s or early/mid 1900’s.
Whilst the idea of the Tamil homeland has become as a foundational component of Tamil political thought and practice, the rationality of Tamil Freedom itself does not turn upon a territorial space. For example, Tamil political activities before independence, whilst positing the Tamils and Sinhalese as the two
‘founding races' of the island, envisioned the entire island as a common homeland the governance of which would be a project shared between these races (GG Ponnambalam cited in Indrakumar 2001:4). The post-independence
operationalising of the rationality of Sinhala-Buddhism through state-sponsored colonisation of Tamil areas and the enactment of discriminatory state politics led to programmatic responses in the rationality of Tamil Freedom, whereby the Northeast, where the majority of Tamils have resided for centuries, become conceptualised as a geopolitical bastion, only within which could the interests of the Tamil collective and the possibilities of its progress be pursued (Tambiah
1986:80). The ‘Tamil homeland’ is thus a political technology of government through which the programmes of federal powersharing and, later, independence and statehood were pursued in response to the problems for Tamil Freedom that arose after independence.73
Tamil Freedom as government
Despite its inherent logic of racial superiority, colonial rule in Ceylon was unproblematic in one importance sense: it did not operate through a hierarchy of indigenous races. Instead, it constituted Tamils and Sinhalese as distinct and implicitly equal collectives (Scott 1999). Moreover, colonial rule adopted a light touch approach to governance in which Tamil literary, cultural, religious and social traditions (but not, of course, martial ones) continued to flourish - even though conversion to Christianity was heavily, if non coercively, supported. Tamil leaders of the late 19th century and early 20th century also welcomed the
73 This is not to suggest there is no basis for a homeland, of course - Tamils have long
predominated the island’s Northeast (see discussion in Winslow and Woost 2004:2006) - but that the incorporation o f this ‘fact’ into the Tamil political project is a programmatic step. As Tambiah puts it, “the slogan o f ‘traditional homelands’, whatever its objective truth, is first and foremost a
political claim meant to ensure the security o f the Tamils [and] ... is integrally connected to Tamil
modernising aspects of colonial rule (in terms of imports of education or technology, for example) as well as the opportunities for their community’s economic progress via trade across the island and the rest of the empire. Their logic was that the benefits of modernity could and should be taken up, but without losing the Tamil (or Sinhala) identity, that the ‘improvements’ made possible by Western civilization should be taken up without necessarily becoming
Westernised (see, for example, a speech by Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan quoted in Vythilingaml971:477-83).
However, as independence neared, the constitutional model being envisaged by Britain for a future Ceylon - a Westminster Parliament-style distribution of power across the island i.e. representation based on individuals grouped by territorial space - was decidedly not the right disposition of people and things. Not only would this give Parliament a de-facto Sinhala majority, and thus a veto over Tamil interests, such an organising of political life was devoid of any political
recognition of the Tamil collective (or, for that matter, the Sinhala one). In the 1920s Tamils began asking for power to be balanced across the island’s
indigenous ‘races’ (Wilson 2000:chapter 4). This notion of powersharing across collectives was the basis for All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) leader G.G. Ponnambalam’s often misquoted and mocked proposal in the mid 1930s of ‘SO SO’, whereby seats for the Sinhala majority (50 percent) was balanced by equal representation in total (50 percent) for all the minorities (Tamils, Muslims and Upcountry Tamils). ‘50-50’ was thus a programmatic solution, based on the tenets of Tamil Freedom, to the problem of possible Sinhala majoritarianism. The proposal was rejected out of hand by the Sinhala leaders and the British rulers. In the elections to the new Parliament, the Sinhalese captured 67 percent of the seats, a share that would increase and stay around 80 percent in later decades (Krishna 1999:67-8). Sri Lanka’s parliament today has 225 seats of which about thirty represent the population of the Northeast.
The period after independence was turbulent for the island’s minorities. As noted above, almost a million Upcountry Tamils were promptly disenfranchised while state-backed Sinhala colonization of the Tamil- and Muslim- dominated Northeast accelerated. The problem of Sinhala colonization was quite specific in Tamil
Freedom terms: it was not racial hostility to Sinhalese per se, but the inexorable weakening of Tamil political power entailed by demographic dilution of Tamil- majority areas when political power is parcelled territorially. Different Tamil leaders envisaged different ways to address this. The ACTC continued its policy of pursuing ‘responsive cooperation’ with ‘moderate’ Sinhalese leaders based on the logic of equal co-existence (Wilson 2000:79). But some Tamil politicians, led by S J.V. Chelvanayagam, split from the ACTC and formed the Federal Party (FP), advocating, as its name implied, “the demand for a Tamil majority region with a high degree of provincial autonomy in a federal, rather than unitary order” (Krishna 1999:71). The ACTC and FP thus adopted different programmes in response to the problematization of Sinhala colonisation. Both parties were, however, also committed to a united country: the FP also envisaged “maintaining the unity of the country while preserving the integrity of the Tamil people by the establishment of an autonomous Tamil State within the framework of a Federal Republic of Ceylon” (TULF 1976). Just like ‘50-50’ before it, federalism was a programmatic response in the rationality of Tamil Freedom to programmes (colonisation) being pursuedin the rationality of Sinhala-Buddhism.
The republican constitution in 1972 gave a pre-eminent position to Buddhism, in addition to the Sinhala language, and concentrated power in the Sinhala-
dominated legislature (Goodhand 2001:31). It also presented Tamil Freedom with a crisis. Not only had Tamil leaders’ earlier efforts to negotiate with Sinhala leaders effectively come to nought, Tamils were now living under a constitution institutionalising a racial and religious hierarchy. The response engendered by Tamil Freedom was to constitutionally separate the Tamil homeland from the British-engineered all-island state. In May 1972, the FP, the ACTC and the (Upcountry Tamils’) Ceylon Workers’ Congress united to form the Tamil United Front (TUF). In 1975 the TUF changed its name to the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) “to indicate its explicitly secessionist aim” (Krishna 1999:76) and issued a clarion call for the establishment of the independent state of Tamil Eelam in the Northeast. This new programme of Tamil Freedom was vividly enunciated in the famous Vaddukoddai Resolution passed at the TULF’s first annual
convention on May 14, 1976. Stating that the Tamils are “a nation distinct and apart from tire Sinhalese” the Resolution protested that Colonial power “over the
entire country” had been “transferred to the Sinhalese nation on the basis of a numerical majority, thereby reducing the Tamil nation to the position of subject people” (TULF 1976, emphases added). In other words, quite apart from what had happened following independence, the British constitution itself was now held to have established a hierarchy between the two collectives. Setting out the
discrimination against Tamils since 1948 and the refusal of Sinhala leaderships to accept even minor Tamil demands, the Resolution called for “the restoration and
reconstitution of the Free, Sovereign, Secular, Socialist State of Tamil Eelam”
(Ibid). Independence, the TULF said, “has become inevitable in order to safeguard the very existence of the Tamil nation” (Ibid).
These changes since 1972 have been described as “a momentous shift in the political aspirations of the Tamils, from demands for structural changes and constitutional reform, to an assertion of the right to self-determination” (De Silva
1988:154-5). However, it can be seen how all these categories of ‘aspirations’ nonetheless sprang from the same political rationality, that of Tamil Freedom. It can also be seen how all these different ways of pursuing a better world in terms of Tamil Freedom clash with what Sinhala-Buddhism defines as ‘right
disposition’ of people and things on the island. Following the TULF’s landslide victory in the 1977 elections, which it contested on the single issue of Tamil Eelam, it was not only held that a “mandate to create an independent Tamil state” had been issued, but that a “Tamil national consciousness” had emerged
(Balasingham 2004:29, emphasis added). Given that the Vaddukoddai Resolution emphasised that in the new state, “caste and ... inequality of any type based on
birth shall be totally eradicated and its observance in any foim punished by law”
and that “Tamil Eelam shall be a secular state giving equal protection and
assistance to all religions”, it is worth noting how citizenship was conceptualised in a state that was to comprise the Northeast i.e. including a majority of the Muslims and some Sinhalese; the Resolution declared:
“the State of Tamil Eelam shall consist of the people of the Northern and Eastern provinces and shall also ensure full and equal rights of citizenship to all Tamil
speaking people living in any part of Ceylon and to
who may opt for citizenship. ... The constitution of Tamil Eelam shall be based on the principle of democratic decentralization so as to ensure the non domination of any religious or territorial community by any other section” (TULF 1976, emphases added).
Sinhalese in other parts of the island, the Resolution suggests, either would not, or perhaps should not, apply. It is also taken for granted that the Tamils, if not the Tamil-speaking people, would wish to live in Tamil Eelam. Moreover, it is also worth noting how the rights of the Sinhalese (minority) in Tamil Eelam were envisaged: “Tamil shall be the language of the State but the rights of Sinhalese speaking minorities in Tamil Eelam to education and transaction of business in their language shall be protected on a reciprocal basis with the Tamil speaking minorities in the Sinhala State” (TULF 1976, emphasis added). In other words, Tamil Freedom’s crucial notion of equality between the island’s two ‘founding races’ was built into not only the constitution (citizenship) of Tamil Eelam, but into the state’s future relationship with its Sinhala neighbour.
The problematic of ‘armed struggle’
Since the early eighties, the ‘war for national liberation’ has become the quintessential programme of Tamil Freedom, embodying a vision of two independent states - two equal collectives - that would allow the Tamils (and separately the Sinhalese) to pursue progress on their own terms, and pitting a Tamil military against a Sinhala one. Anti-state violence is, of course, integral to a ‘war for national liberation’. However, unlike that of Liberal Peace, in the
rationality of Tamil Freedom, violence is imbued with specific political and moral significance. To begin with, violence is a technique of both oppression and
resistance i.e. it is a technology of governance that can be deployed in the pursuit of a given political rationality. For example, since independence, the island’s history has been “punctuated by bouts of amiihilatory violence, often called pogroms, directed against the Tamils in 1956, 1958, 1977, 1981 and 1983” (Krishna 1999:67) in which Sinhala political leaders, state agencies and even
Buddhist monies participated.74 Krishna points out that these “periodic explosions of violence against Tamils represent efforts to put them back in their places on grounds they have become too assertive and need to be taught a lesson”
(1999:54). Conversely, as Herring notes, “official complicity with and encouragement of newly virulent ethnic forces in the pogroms reinforced perceptions that the state could be dealt with only through violence” (2001:165).
There are two ways in which Tamil Freedom is embodied in ‘aimed struggle’. On the one hand, violence is unavoidable resistance to state violence: “the Tamils took up arms when they were presented with no alternative other than to defend themselves against a savage form of genocidal oppression, when peaceful forms of democratic political agitations were violently repressed” (LTTE 1997:5). On the other hand, violence is deployed in the service of an explicitly political goal: as the LTTE argues, “the aimed struggle of our organisation is only a means to