INDIAN MODEL HAS NO RELEVANCE
An NGO "intellectual" who has come across my name in a list of representatives of political parties in a committee to evolve a home-grown constitution thinks that I have changed my position on the terrorist problem. He thinks that I have accepted the position of the NGO "intellectuals" that there are problems that the Thamils face in this country because they are Thamils. My position remains the same.
However, this does not mean that I at any time entertained the view that there is no problem in the country to be solved. Most of what I have written in the recent past both in Sinhala and English has addressed this problem that has to be solved. The problem as far as I am concerned is not the non existing problem of Thamils having problems merely because they are Thamils, but that of depriving the Sinhalas of their language and their culture the due place in the country.
It is now becoming increasingly clear that the president is under pressure from western countries, India and Japan to devolve power to the provinces based either on some European model or on the Indian model. As I understand he wants the above committee as well as the panel of experts to come up with a solution in keeping with the history, geography including resources, demography, and other relevant factors connected with the country. The president does not specifically say that legislative power has to be devolved to the provinces. I will not go into details at present but will only mention that a solution to the terrorist problem has been so far delayed due to the fact that the Sinhalas are not united on the identification of the problem. The so-called international community is in a position to apply pressure on the government and the president mainly because of the disunity among the Sinhalas. When I say the disunity of the Sinhalas, I do not mean the squabbles of the UNP and the SLFP who are at loggerheads on this important matter. They, especially the UNP, are trying to solve a problem that has been defined by the "international community". There should be some agreement among the Sinhalas beginning with the formulation of the problem. Though there are some disagreements among the Thamils themselves, they generally agree that the so-called grievances of the Thamils have to be rectified. Some would say the Thamil aspirations have to be fulfilled, but the solution they come up with is devolution of legislative power to the provinces demarcated by the British. The LTTE and their henchmen, the proxies, NGO "intellectuals" and the likes would argue further that the Northern and Eastern Provinces should be merged. However, it is unlikely that the Karuna faction would agree to this "solution" as the Eastern Province Thamils have a different identity to the Northern Province Thamils.
Recently the Indian Foreign Minister flew to Colombo to ask the government to devolve power to the British demarcated provinces without delay. Having spent a day or two in Colombo he flew back to Delhi as if he were another viceroy in a hurry. The trouble with Sri Lanka is that the country has been asked to serve a number of viceroys simultaneously. These viceroys want to impose their solutions to the so-called ethnic problem. They do not realise that the situation in Sri Lanka is very different from that in India or any other country in the world. Let us consider the Indian situation and compare it with Sri Lanka.
The Indian model is not acceptable in Sri Lanka for historical and demographical reasons. India had not been a single country before the British arrived in that part of the world. There had been various states or kingdoms but never a single state. It was the British who unified the country together with what is known today as Pakistan and Bangladesh, artificially. As the colonialists left British India disintegrated and Nehru faced the problem of keeping even the present India intact. Even at the time of independence there were several principalities ruled by various rajas.While Pakistan and Bangladesh became separate countries first based on religion, namely Islam, and then on language, Urdu and Bengali, the present India could have disintegrated on the basis of language. The Panikkar commission was appointed by Nehru to find a way of keeping these language based regions together within the ambit of an Indian state. It has to be recalled that the British had demarcated the country into several provinces or presidencies when the Panikkar commission undertook its work, and that the Panikkar commission did not adhere to the provinces as had been demarcated by the British, and that the boundaries of the states created by the commission did not coincide with those of the British demarcated presidencies. The Madras Presidency did not become Thamil Nadu after the Panikkar commission, contrary to what is believed by some people. The Indians did not want to adhere to the provinces as demarcated by the British.
In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, those who want us to adopt the Indian model want to stick to the boundaries marked by the British. The separatists want to have the best of both worlds, in spite of not having military strength to achieve what they want through "war". In any event, as we have pointed out on a number of occasions, unlike in Thamil Nadu and India, the demography in the Eastern Province and Northern Province in Sri Lanka does not justify combining those two provinces to a single unit in a confederation. Unlike in India more than sixty per cent of Thamils live outside the Eastern and the Northern Provinces, and there is no substantial Thamil majority in those two provinces to call it a "Thamil province". The LTTE, while opposing the so-called majoritarianism of the Sinhala people in the country as a whole want to practice it in the Eastern and the Northern Provinces on the Muslims and Sinhalas in those two provinces.
In order to justify an "Eelam" the separatists, over the years, have concocted so-called grievances, a geography with a Thamil homeland and a history of a Thamil kingdom. The late Kumar Ponnambalam had said on a number of occasions that the Thamils were not fighting to redress the grievances but to fulfil their aspirations. Then the late Neelan Thiruchelvam had to concede that there was no Thamil homeland as such. The history the separatists have concocted is nothing but rubbish that does not have an iota of evidence. Thus the problem boils down to one of Thamil racists having an aspiration to establish a state of their own anywhere in the world for the first time. It is remarkable that even in India there had never being a Thamil state as such, and as a corollary no Thamil nation. None of the Chera, Pandya, Chola, Vijaya Nagar kingdoms can be equated to a Thamil kingdom. The Thamils who cannot establish a state of their own anywhere else in the world want to have their Elam carved out of Sri Lanka with the assistance of the western Christian states, depriving the Sinhalas their due place in the country.
Let us briefly go into the recent history beginning with the Portuguese. When the Portuguese arrived, according to their historians there were several kingdoms, including the Jaffna kingdom of the Arya Chakravartins. No historian Portuguese or Dutch or British has referred to a Thamil kingdom. The Arya Chakravartins had been sea pirates, and that fact itself shows that the kingdom that the Arya Chakravartins established in Jaffna could not have been a Thamil kingdom. Sea pirates do not take large armies or convoys of ships carrying men and women to establish kingdoms. The Arya Chakravartins in any event could not have been Thamils as they referred to themselves as Arya. However the ethnicity of the ruler is not a factor in identifying a kingdom, and if that was the case there would not be an English kingdom, with its kings and queens, except perhaps Diana Spencer and Camilla Parker, coming from Germany, Greece and other European countries. It is the Thamil racists who resort to this type of argument, when they want to identify the Sinhale as a Thamil kingdom simply because four Vadiga kings originally from Telugu country ruled that kingdom before the British were able to annex the country with wily diplomacy of Doyle and the others. If the Thamil racists are consistent then they should have identified the English kingdom as a German kingdom or a French kingdom. However, consistency is not a virtue of Thamil racists whether educated or not.
The Portuguese historians clearly refer to the king of Sinhale as the emperor, who commanded allegiance and submission from the other kings. It is obvious that the westerners who refer to the Bhikkus as monks, as it is customary for them to use that term in their culture, looked at the system in Sri Lanka from their point of view. The terminology of kings and emperors is relative to the western culture, and they would not have understood the rata system that prevailed in Sri Lanka at that time. The country had been demarcated into three regions or ratas, Ruhunu, Maya and Pihiti that had the mapas and epas in the ratas other than Pihiti or Raja Rata where the king lived. The epas and the mapas looked after the respective country (rata karaveeya) on behalf of the king. It is very likely that lately a Yapa looked after the Yapapatuna as has been observed by others, and Arya Chakravartins could be considered as Yapas who had to obtain permission from the Sinhala king to use the title king or raja.
What is most important is that in the Arya Chakravarti kingdom there were Sinhala inhabitants. Perhaps there were some Velakkaras who had been brought by Sinhala kings. I do not deny that there were Thamils in this kingdom but what I am trying to say is that the kingdom cannot be identified as a Thamil kingdom. There had not been any permanent Thamil settlements in Sri Lanka before the eleventh century, according to historians such as Prof. Karthigesu Indrapala, who was the first Professor of History at the University of Jaffna, let alone Thamil kingdoms. Even after the eleventh century there had been no Thamil kingdom as the Arya Chakravarti kingdom cannot be identified as a Thamil kingdom. After the Arya Chakravarti kingdom was defeated by the Portuguese the Thamils who were living in the peninsula appear to have dispersed to Vanni and even to Bharat. When the Dutch captured the peninsula from the Portuguese, they had to bring people from South of what is known as India today, for their tobacco cultivation. The presence of Thamils in the Eastern Province is even a more recent phenomenon as demonstrated by the differences between the Northern Province Thamils and the Eastern Province Thamils.
If that is the history then the demography certainly calls for a de-merger of the Eastern Province and the Northern Province, as the Thamils are not even in a majority in the former. Unlike in India where "ethnicity" can be associated with "locality" (or residence) in Sri Lanka as far as the Thamils are concerned they are a dispersed group. More than fifty percent of the Thamils live outside the Northern and the Southern provinces, and of the population in the two provinces the percentage of Thamils is not even seventy. These basic facts cannot be ignored and considering also the fact that India was never a single country before the British arrived but consisted of number of kingdoms that were united into a federation by the colonialists whereas Sri Lanka had existed as an eksesath rajya for thousands of years with a well developed rata system which was not a federal system, the Indian model preached by the Kautilyas and air dashing foreign ministers has to be rejected.
Professor Nalin de Silva
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