by Jayadeva Uyangoda; Daily Mirror, Colombo, published March 19, 2004
Northern and Southern monolithic blocks divided as crisis deepens
Whatever the outcome of the election, and whoever forms the new government, the immediate task that the new regime faces would be one of establishing a new political equilibrium without which no measure of political stability could be restored.
With only two weeks to the parliamentary election, Sri Lanka’s polity continues to go through a process of acute fragmentation. The bifurcation of the LTTE is the latest manifestation of this trend.
Although it has provided a good reason for some Sinhalese nationalists to feel jubilant, the political implications of the LTTE’s split can also be quite alarming. In a few weeks we might see the consequences of it on the national polity.
During the past few weeks, two developments occurred quite unexpectedly indicating that even those solid institutions in Sri Lanka’s polity are not stable. In both instances, the challenge to the monolithic organizational stability of the entity in question has come from within, mounted by the organization’s own cadres. Karuna’s challenge to the LTTE’s Vanni leadership is one. The other is the emergence of a movement of militant Buddhist monks in the electoral arena. Everything solid does not vanish into the thin air, they only crack within.
LTTE split
The split of the LTTE, as spearheaded by its Eastern military commander, has brought into crisis two of the fundamental tenets of Sri Lanka’s post-colonial Tamil nationalism. The first is the notion of unity and homogeneity of the Tamil ‘nation.’ The second is the concept of territorial unity of the Tamil ‘homeland.’ With this crisis, the LTTE’s autonomy project, as emerged during negotiations with the UNF government, has reached a critical turning point. The path to move forward from the present impasse by either military or political means, is not easy for either Vanni or Batticaloa leadership of the LTTE.
At present, there is a stalemate between the LTTE’s Northern and Eastern factions. It, to use an academic expression, is a mutually-hurting stalemate that cannot prolong. And that constitutes a fundamental challenge for the Colombo-based Sinhalese political class as well as the international custodians of Sri Lanka’s peace process. Any adventurous move from Colombo to capitalize for partisan advantage, either politically or militarily, the LTTE’s weak moment would further escalate the unfolding crisis. The difficult task before them is to assist both factions of the LTTE to resolve the internal crisis without resorting to war and violence. Although most of Colombo’s political commentators have not yet realized it, this crisis of the LTTE has the potential to develop into a fundamentally serious crisis of the Sri Lankan state. The paradoxical specificity of Sri Lanka’s current conjuncture is that a crisis within the LTTE is also a crisis of the Sri Lankan state. To manage this extremely delicate crisis, the UNF and the Freedom Alliance leaders as well as the leaders of the state armed forces will need to act with extreme care, caution and prudence. This is despite the sense of statist triumphalism being expressed in some TV chat shows as well as newspapers columns.
Sangha split
The breakup of the monolith of the Buddhist Sangha organization has brought into surface in a decisive manner the fundamental cracks of the Sinhalese-Buddhist polity. This bitter schism between the JHU-monks and Alliance-monks has called into question the organizational and ideological unity of the Sinhalese nationalist project. The Buddhist Sangha, the so-called cultural and ideological cadre of Sinhalese nationalism, has ceased to be a unified entity. Sri Lanka’s Buddhist Sangha have had organizational divisions, in the Nikayas, that were institutionalized around caste and regional identities.
Yet, at least during the past five decades, it had maintained an iron framework of ideological unity. The Buddhist Sangha is now divided into two antagonistic camps. As clearly indicated in posters, clandestine publications, rumours of character assassination, and even in speeches made at public meetings, the two camps are engaged in a nasty factional war minus the shooting.
In this backdrop, the Buddhist Sangha can no longer claim, with any degree of public legitimacy, that they are the unified vanguard of the Sinhalese nation. When one camp publicly accuses the other of being agents of the West, the Christian church and the dreaded NGOs, their role of being the moral community of the nation has now been brought into question, and it has happened from within.
Fractures
For a student of political sociology, these are of course very serious developments. One troubling conclusion one can arrive at is that all of Sri Lanka’s political societies – Sinhalese, Tamil as well as Muslim – are thoroughly fractured entities. A fractured polity that is caught up in a self-made process of recurring fragmentation is one that cannot have stability in its institutions of governance or certainty in its trajectories of political change.
The context of Sri Lanka’s recurring process of political instability and uncertainty is characterized by two fairly serious developments for which the current Sinhalese political class is responsible. The first is the weakening of the democratic institutions of governance.
The second is their refusal to abide by the rules of consensus governance.
A fractured polity requires for its stability strong democratic institutions as well as consensus among the political elites. During the past few years, and particularly the past few months, we witnessed how the Sinhalese political elite engaged in a twin process of institution weakening and consensus wrecking.
Thus, when we are approaching the parliamentary elections of April 02, the political equilibrium that prevailed at the time of parliamentary dissolution no longer exists. What obtains instead is an acute disequilibrium, accentuated by the cracking up of two great monoliths, the Buddhist Sangha organization in the South and the LTTE in the North and East. Whatever the outcome of the election, and whoever forms the new government, the immediate task that the new regime faces would be one of establishing a new political equilibrium without which no measure of political stability could be restored.
Further fragmentation
However, the next parliament, if we interpret the indications at present, would be a thoroughly fractured one, accurately representing most dimensions of the fragmentation prevailing in the polity.
Hostilities that exist at present among all major political entities would define the post-election alignments and actions, creating new conditions for further fragmentation. Most portent for greater fragmentation of the polity would be the Alliance’s move to change the constitution through extra-constitutional means.
The Alliance, if it forms the next government, should not go in this direction. But the logic of Alliance politics is that there is no way for them to now abandon that disastrous course of action. The Alliance’s constitutional reform initiative is propelled by a logic maximizing partisan gains in a conjuncture of total breakdown of dialogue with its opposing camp, the UNF. The PA and UNF appear to be engaged in an all out war, that goes far beyond the reasoning of inter-party competition. Thus, both the Alliance and the UNF are caught up in a self-made trap form which they have no easy escape.
Meanwhile, it would be an absolute illusion if the UNF or the Alliance leaders think that they can resume negotiations with the LTTE at their will after April 02. Actually, the political and strategic conditions that existed as the backdrop to negotiations have now largely disappeared. With the break up of the LTTE’s Eastern command, a new condition of strategic asymmetry has developed in the LTTE’s relationship with the state. Meanwhile, sections of the Colombo’s political class might be tempted to exploit the LTTE’s new weakness for their own strategic advantage. That will obviously bring under tremendous pressure the ceasefire agreement as well as the prospects for early resumption of talks. Actually, the internal crisis of the LTTE has made it extremely complex even the first steps towards the next phase of negotiations. But, the political elite in Colombo does not seem to be preparing for that difficult task. The electoral agenda has diverted all their energies to the intense competition for maximizing partisan gains.
In brief, Sri Lanka is in a deep and deepening political crisis.
The election outcome is not likely to ease the intensity of the crisis. Political actors in Colombo as well as their advisors of all colours do not seem even to be able to comprehend the gravity of the crisis.
They all seem to believe that politics is all about serving their own wishful thinking. All appear to behave under the illusion that the things are normal. Things indeed are not normal.
In an exercise of political whistle-blowing, one can only say at this stage that Sri Lanka is quickly moving into a phase of exceptional crisis