by Taraki; Daily Mirror, Colombo, February 27, 2004
Polarization of political forces inevitable
The Parliamentary power equation after the April 2 general elections is set to sharply reflect an acute polarization of political forces in Sri Lanka. The seats in Parliament are going to be divided mainly between two fundamentally distinct political formations.
On the one hand we would have UNF and UPFA, both of which are basically Sinhala majority alliances with Muslim and hill country constituents. And on the other, we would only have the Tamil National Alliance.
Forming the government is the sole aim of the UNF and the UPFA. And the sole aim of their respective minority constituents is to secure plum positions in the government that the UNF or the UPFA might form after April 2.
But the main, if not sole, objective of the TNA is to seek a mandate for the fundamental principles on which the preamble to the LTTE’s ISGA proposal is based.
The TNA mandate will question the legitimacy and right of the unitary state of Sri Lanka as it is constituted by the Constitution of 1978 to rule over Tamils in the northeast.
This means we are going to see the bifurcation of the Sri Lankan polity in the new Parliament. The only consolation for those who are dead against any sort of bifurcation of this country is that it would be within the confines of the national legislature.
The only time in Sri Lanka’s history that its polity was divided this way was in 1977 when the TULF sought a mandate from the Tamils of the northeast to establish the separate sovereign state of Thamil Eelam.
It was almost taken for granted after the TULF dropped its demand for a separate state and went into exile in 1983 and that such a polarization, as a reflection of the northeast Tamils’ reluctance to be part of the country’s polity, may never recur.
This belief was further strengthened when several Tamil groups from the northeast that were willing to bargain for their respective non-separatist political agendas with either of the two main parties in Colombo contested elections to Parliament in 1989, 1994 and 2000.
Since 1989, the PLOTE, EPRLF, TELO, EROS, TULF and the EPDP (since 1994) have been carving up political space in the northeast into many disparate and incoherent fragments which confounded and diluted the political ethos of the Vaddukkoddai resolution of 1976.
This was a good guarantee that the Sri Lankan political system would not get polarized as starkly as it did in 1977. The emergence of the CWC and the SLMC as independent minority players in the Parliament numbers game for cobbling alliances together to form governments in Colombo was also an important factor in ensuring that the divisive polarization of 77 would never be repeated.
The multiplicity of minority parties that came to parliament since 1989 was, by design or by accident, the Sri Lankan political system’s antidote to the separatist tendency in the northeast from ever finding unified political expression at an election.
But today the wheel has turned a full circle. The multiplicity of Tamil parties and groups in the northeast has shrunk dramatically since 2000 due to two important reasons. The first was the impact the major military victories of the LTTE had on the Tamil psyche. The second was what came to be perceived among the Tamils as an endemic: the inability on the part of the non-LTTE Tamils parties and groups to “deliver the goods”.
Since 2000, the CWC and the SLMC have become integral parts of the UNF. They have neither the political compulsion nor the necessary regional bases now to act as independent kingmakers. The greed for lucrative portfolios is only compulsion that drives their political strategies today.
Arumugam Thondaman has clearly stated that his party’s firm policy is to ‘serve’ his people by aligning with parties that come to power in Colombo.
In rejecting Chandrasekeran’s call to all upcountry Tamil parties to unite under one umbrella, Thondaman making it quite clear that the CWC has no intention acting as a third force during or after the elections.
If Rauff Hakeen manages to scrape through in Amparai (Digamadulla) the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress might get three MPs from the east. And the seats the SLMC might secure in Trincomalee and Batticaloa would be gained solely because of the special arrangements it has made with the UNP in those districts.
(Yet he has already begun sending out signals that the SLMC might join the UPFA if it were to form the government)
Therefore the EPDP, PLOTE and the independent group fielded by Veerasingham Anandasangaree in Jaffna are the only parties that may stand in the way of the Sri Lankan polity’s political bifurcation from becoming impeccably complete at the conclusion of the April 2 polls.
We have to leave the PLOTE out in this regard because the party has decided to echo the TNA’s line now. It says that the government has to speak only to the LTTE to settle the ethnic conflict. The party is contesting in the electoral districts of Batticaloa and Vanni.
It cannot win a single seat in the Vanni if more than ten thousand people from LTTE held areas north of Vavuniya and Mannar cast their votes on April 2. The PLOTE would be quite lucky if it gets a few thousand votes in Batticaloa.
Hence the question is whether the EPDP and Anandasangaree can get any seats in Jaffna. The two are actually going to compete with each other in Jaffna at this election.
Why?
Firstly the size of the voting population that usually sits on the fence in any election until the tail end of a campaign is negligible in the north today.
The TNA will get the votes of die-hard sympathizers of the LTTE, personal supporters and kinsmen of TNA candidates, traditional followers of the TULF and the FP, ex-members and supporters of the TELO and EPRLF and above all it would secure the votes of all those who think they should support the LTTE and TNA at this election to prevent war from breaking out again.
Therefore the EPDP and Anandasangaree are going to be left only with those voters of Jaffna who dislike the LTTE and the TNA for various personal or general reasons. (They can also count on some caste votes)
In Jaffna if a voter is not strongly opposed to the LTTE or the TNA, then the chances are that he or she would not vote for the EPDP or Anandasangaree.
The two may find it difficult to woo the voters who backed former Hindu Affairs Minister Maheswaran in the general elections of 2000 and 2001. They voted largely for the man and not for his party – the UNP.
And Maheswaran has promised to campaign for the TNA in Jaffna. Another problem facing them is the fact that many voters who are disgruntled with the Tigers such as some traders affected by ‘taxes’ say they would still vote for the TNA because they do not want the war again. They do not like the LTTE but think that war is worse.
They think fighting would start again if the SLFP-JVP combine comes to power again. Making the TNA win is the best way to prevent the SLFP-JVP from forming the government in Colombo is their line of reasoning.
Therefore the EPDP and Anandasangaree are going compete for the anti-LTTE vote in Jaffna and thereby divide it to their disadvantage.
The voters from the Kilinochchi who would turn up at the clustered polling booths in Muhamalai on April 2 pose the biggest calamity for the two if the President and the military fail to find some pretext to stop or limit them as they did in December 2001.
There are more than fifty thousand voters in the Kilinochchi district, which is part of the electoral district of Jaffna. As things stand this week- the beginning of the campaign in Jaffna -it appears that, all things being equal, Douglas and Anandasangaree cannot hope to vie for more than two of the nine seats in the peninsula.
One or two swallows do not make a summer. Therefore the bifurcation of the Sri Lankan polity in Parliament seems inexorable after April 2.
Negotiating a durable and acceptable solution to the conflict sans clever dilly-dallying is the only way for the Sri Lankan state to prevent that bifurcation from going beyond the confines of Parliament.
The Daily Mirror, Colombo
February 27, 2004
Originally published February 28, 2004