WHY UNITARY - II
There are some private organizations owned largely by Tamils and it would not be an academic exercise to find out the percentages of Tamils employed in these institutions. I am of the opinion, going by the hearsay evidence, that the statistics, if computed, would dispel to a certain extent the myth that the Tamils are discriminated against by the government, unless they want too claim that Tamils are discriminated by Tamil entrepreneurs as well. As stated last week, the politicization of recruitment to the public sector has created some discrepancy in respect of the ratio of Tamils employed in the public sector to the national ethnic ratio of Tamils but these could be corrected with administrative directives.
The Tamil elite have always projected what they lost in their privileges as discrimination against the Tamils in general and this trend became a routine for the Tamil elite after the formation of the Federal Party. As a case in point I would mention the so called discrimination against Mr. (later Dr.) Chanmugam who was supposed to have been deprived of the Government Scholarship in Mathematics in 1961. It is not the only example but it illustrates what happened during those days.
When Mr. S. L. Gunasekera questioned late Mr. Kumar Ponnambalam as to the discriminations against the Tamils the answer was sending the tax forms by the Inland Revenue Department in Sinhala. It can be said that the so called grievances are of that nature that can be corrected without any legislation enacted in the Parliament let alone a separate state or even a federal state.
The Tamil elite and the leaders in the early days did not talk of the grievances of the Tamils in general. They were interested in enjoying more power at the legislature over and above their population ratio. They could not adjust themselves to the changing conditions created by the increase in numbers of the Sinhala members in the legislature after the introduction of universal franchise.
As mentioned earlier Mr. Chelvanayakam who realized that the Tamil elite would not be able to reduce the Sinhala majority to a minority by conniving with the British, as it was impossible to do so, and not because the British were fair - minded knew that he could not achieve his ambition of a separate state without the support of the Tamils living outside the Jaffna Peninsula. Thus Mr. Chelvanayakam evolved a strategy to establish a separate state.
He and the Federal Party invented the concept of a Tamil Speaking People(s) incorporating the Tamil living in the Northern and the Eastern Provinces, the Tamils of recent Indian origin and the Muslims. In order to establish a separate state the Federal Party wanted a region. The present Northern and the Eastern Provinces finally demarcated by the British only as late as 1889, was the selected region which was declared to be the so called Tamil homeland. The Vadukkodai resolution formally announced the intention of the Federal Party that was Federal in English but Tamil State Party in Tamil. The objective of the Federal Party was to establish a Federal state first and then a separate state in accordance with the "little now more later" strategy of Mr. Chelvanayakam.
In order to claim that the Northern and the eastern Provinces demarcated by the British as the Tamil homeland the Tamil "scholars" invented a history of Tamils based on Yalpana Vaipava Malai and other such works that cannot be considered as historical writings. The Federal Party was not interested in scholarly works and what they wanted was a "justification" of their claim that the two provinces mentioned above constitute the Tamil homeland.
It is clear that the Vellala Tamil elite of the Jaffna Peninsula were not interested in the "welfare" of the Tamils in general. They wanted a Federal state with the Northern and Eastern Provinces marked as the Tamil homeland in which they could dominate. According to the Tamil elite there was discrimination against the Tamils. If there was discrimination against the Tamils then the Tamil elite should have come out with a solution to solve that problem that was supposed to be faced by all the Tamils living in the country. However, the solution they proposed was a Federal state with Northern and the Eastern Provinces as one unit. It is clear as a crystal that the so called solution is not a solution to the problem formulated.
The problem is about a community living in the whole island but the solution is territorial. One cannot have a territorial solution to an ethnic problem unless of course a vast majority of the ethnic community concerned lived in that territory, leave alone rhetoric of homelands. Unlike in India where a vast majority of Tamils live in Tamil Nadu and the vast majority of people living in Tamil Nadu are Tamils, in Sri Lanka the majority of Tamils live outside the Northern and Eastern Provinces and in the Northern and the Eastern Provinces there is a substantial non Tamil population consisting of Muslims and Sinhalas.
The solution proposed does not solve the problem formulated assuming of course that there is such problem. The Tamil Vellala elite of the Jaffna peninsula most of whom are now living in green pastures in the west, want the Tamils living in the Northern and the Eastern Provinces to fight for a land where the former can rule. The so called grievances were later converted to aspirations of the Tamils but whatever the nomenclature may be a territorial solution cannot be given to a community based problem, even if such a problem exists, in the context of the demography of Sri Lanka.
The problems such as issuing tax forms and employing police constables who can speak Tamil in areas where a sufficient number of Tamils live can be solved in a Unitary Sri Lanka with more administrative powers given to the local government and district level bodies. The only purpose of setting up a Federal state, if not as a stepping stone for a separate state is to satisfy the ego of Jaffna Vellala Tamil elite most of whom now live abroad who probably want to have a territory for themselves to be ruled by their kith and kin.
Professor Nalin de Silva
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