by Neville Chinivasagam
Every right-thinking Sri Lankan, domiciled or exiled, and regardless of whether Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Moslem or Atheist, laments seeing the Peace Process faltering on the brink of wreckage led by Sri Lanka’s President Chandrika Kumaratunge. Her non-commitment to the Peace Process is a political sop to nations like the USA.
Her hodgepodge leftist minority coalition government vehemently opposes the ISGA as a Tamil hoax. They allege it declares Tamil Independence and Territorial Sovereignty of the NorthEast for creating Tamil Eelam. Shamelessly they say the Tamils are not to be trusted. Their political militancy demands unitary governance for perpetuating Sinhala Supremacy. In 1956 Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, President Kumaratunge’s father, started the Sinhala race hate against Tamils. Their hate, turning into genocide, predictably became "Tamil racial cleansing" in international law and history, like Hitlerism in Germany against the German Jews. Like Hitler, Bandaranaike unleashed a similar psychotic political vendetta with socialist fascism for a "Sinhala-Buddhist-Only" country.
The ISGA recaptures the consensual mindset and raison d’etre of the UNF, the previous Sinhala government, for a Sinhala /Tamil Peace Treaty. The UNF’s recognition and acceptance of the ISGA is the first step officially documenting the preliminary peace negotiation and sharpens the focus for setting up the conferential agenda.
The ISGA’s legal validity and political sensibility puts in document form the Tamil political-legal demands identifying the jurisdictional parameters for Sinhala / Tamil equitable governance in one system. The united political desire of the UNF, the Tamils and other races in Sri Lanka is for a definite and permanent Peace Treaty, irrefutable and sacrosanct with legal implications and consequences.
People everywhere in the world want Peace as a Divine Blessing. France and Germany’s Peace Pact is not only an example to EU unity, but to the whole world of how to bury enmity for the common good.
The ISGA’s constitutional wholesomeness is advanced Tamil prudence. In anticipation of defining jurisdictional difficulties for the type of political union ideal for Sri Lanka, the ISGA conceptualizes a Sri Lankan type of union. It draws to the negotiating table the Sinhala genocidal wars against the Tamils that led to the Ceasefire Agreement, and from it for a Sinhala /Tamil political union.
The ISGA, to my reading, envisages as best a type of federalism striking a conceptual resemblance to the Indian type of federalism. The Indian type is an adaptation (not adoption) of the US type of federalism. The idealism in both is the doctrine of territorial sovereignty. The doctrine distinguishes Sinhala territorial jurisdiction for localizing Sinhala regional administration; similarly, separation of Tamil territorial jurisdiction for localizing Tamil regional administration of the NorthEast. Each territorial jurisdiction being an equal and coordinate territorial sovereign equitably within a national jurisdiction, the source law authority being the country’s Constitution for a republic. ISGA prudence takes precaution against Sinhala parliamentary proclivity to abuse the democratic system of majority legislation by dictatorial discrimination, utilizing centralized unitary government for Sinhala Supremacy.
The ISGA consolidates consideration of a plethora of issues and synthesizes to the bare bones, or skeleton form, the national and international awareness separating Sinhala and Tamil territorial jurisdiction as decisive for an equitable Peace Treaty. Its paramount significance, principally for the concerned foreign nations, is that for over a thousand years Before Christ a Sinhala territory and Tamil territory co-existed, each as a separate royal kingdom. Accordingly each was a territorial sovereign identical to the Western European paradigm of territorial dukedoms from the fourteenth century that elucidated for the first time the meaning of "sovereignty" in national and international laws. The ISGA converts the practicality of localization or regionalism in the context of territorial sovereignty intelligibly, and focuses on the geographical separation of "Sinhala territory" and "Tamil territory" each as a separate "jurisdictional sovereign."
Happily the ISGA has a constitutional precedent. In 1926 The Kandyan National Assembly claimed Federalism. The Kandyan Sinhala rejected British colonial unitary governance. Their constitutional validity for federalism boldly demanded separation of the Kandyan Province (The Up-Country) as rightly Kandyan territorial sovereignty. They claimed legitimacy to localized territorial jurisdiction ideologically as Kandyan home rule (or Swaraj). The Kandyans, like the Tamils, despite British conquest, had not suffered radical, cultural or societal changes and especially loss of their respected customary law as a result of European conquests. The Sinhala of the West & South (The Low-Country) had been first conquered by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch and last by the British.
The Kandyan federal doctrine of territorial sovereignty rejected British colonial rule for unitary governance, centralized from the British Colonial Office in London. Doubtlessly, and in hindsight, the Kandyans were far seeing. It’s a pity the British Colonial Office did not give in to the Kandyan colonial effrontery. It was contemporaneous with the Free India Movement led by Indian intellectuals and political protagonists like Tilak; mainly educated in Britain. The Kandyans rationalized that a nation had its own type of life for its own destiny and freedom and "A Federal system will enable the respective nationals of the several states to prevent inroads into their territories."
Bandaranaike, a Low Country Sinhala who married into the Kandyan aristocracy was the ardent activist and instigator of Kandyan Federalism and separation for Kandyan Territorial Sovereignty and localization. Bandaraniake founded the SLFP and Chandrika Kumaratunge is now its political leader.
The spotlight on the ISGA has morphed into a looking glass. The ISGA is Sri Lanka’s defining moment.