By Jayadeva Uyangoda
One week after the representatives of the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE signed the MOU for a
post-tsunami relief mechanism, the political situation in the country continues to remain uncertain. It is
quite amazing that this MOU has also unleashed mainly negative political imagination in Sinhalese
society. The arguments against it are not very different from the ones put forward nearly fifty years ago
against the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact, and repeated every ten tears or so thereafter. They
point to a deep-seated inability of the Sinhalese nationalist forces to trust the Tamils and their
leadership. All the excuses to resist even a minimalist administrative cooperation between the Sri Lankan
state and the LTTE are rooted in a worldview that is rigid and obsolete. It is propelled forward by a group
with a psychological fear and mistrust built over the decades of enmity.
The challenge for any political leader who attempts today to transcend the limits of the Sinhalese
nationalist political imagination is about convincing the masses that the country should advance towards
peace by making compromises with the LTTE. Making compromises with the ‘enemy’ is not only a
political virtue, but also a political necessity. It presupposes that the political leaders are called upon to
provide both political and intellectual leadership. Advancing a settlement process in Sri Lanka, as
repeatedly demonstrated, is also an ideological struggle that a reformist political leadership needs to
successfully wage against the forces of resistance. It is also a task that requires addressing the deep-
rooted fears and anxieties so frequently mobilized by the nationalist political forces. In this task,
governments with limited reform capacity and wavering commitment to change have often failed.
Election priorities
After 39 JVP MPs left the coalition, the UPFA remains a minority in parliament. Some say that the
President may call an early parliamentary election. This option, they argue, will favour the President
because she would be in a position to ‘call the shots.’ There are others, particularly those of the
opposition UNP, who prefer a Presidential election on the assumption that the disunity within the UPFA-
JVP combination would favour Ranil Wickremesinghe, the UNP’s Presidential candidate. Meanwhile,
Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse’s camp seems to be getting a little impatient about the prospects of
his securing the UPFA Presidential candidacy. The JVP leaders too are trying to fashion the course of
political events in their terms. Yet, President Kumaratunga can still define how events should take shape
in the months to come.
The signing of the P-TOMS has failed to arouse public outrage, as anticipated by the JVP and the JHU
as well as some sections of the SLFP. The JVP’s protest rallies have mainly drawn the movement’s
members and supporters. The JVP’s strategy at the moment appears to be aimed at isolating President
Kumaratunga from the rank and file of the SLFP and then build a nationalist swing towards Prime
Minister Mahinda Rajapakse. This is a smart move on the part of JVP leaders who continue to maintain
links with the SLFP stalwarts even after leaving the coalition government. If this strategy succeeds,
Mahinda Rajapakse as the Presidential candidate would have to advance the JVP’s Sinhalese nationalist
agenda. The fact that Rajapakse has been refusing to take a public stand on any crucial national policy
issue is seen by the JVP as having given them enough space to push their agenda through him in
exchange for electoral backing. But Mahinda Rajapakse, as the cliché goes, is a hard nut to crack.
But the well-wishers of Mahinda Rajapakse as the next UPFA Presidential candidate – there are plenty
of them among political columnists – need to assess the impact of his Sinhalese-Buddhist image on the
chances of his winning a Presidential election. Encouraged by some of his newly-recruited and obviously
inexperienced political advisors, the Prime Minister has been carefully cultivating the image of a Buddhist
Upasakaya, visiting Buddhist temples and shrines practically everyday accompanied by state television
crews.
Message
This careful image-building of a future Sri Lankan President is now caught up with the Sinhalese
nationalist mobilization by the JVP and the JHU against the Joint Mechanism for post-tsunami rebuilding.
After the death fasts, protest demonstrations and resistance that the JVP and the JHU organized
involving Buddhist monks and Buddhist places of worship, the message that ethnic and religious
minorities in the country are getting is that there is a now new wave of Sinhalese-Buddhist extremism
and intolerance. Actually, the JVP and the JHU, in acute competition with each other, have been
mobilizing right-wing forces of Sinhalese nationalism that do not believe at all in minority rights.
Politically, they are Sinhalese-Buddhist supremacists. It is unfortunate for Prime Minister Rajapakse that
his carefully executed plan of building an image of a moderate Sinhalese nationalist, with some
unspecified concern for the minority communities, has now been subsumed in the majoritarian
nationalism of the JVP and JHU. Unless he changes his political strategy, Mahinda Rajapakse, as a
Presidential candidate, is unlikely to secure many minority votes. In the arithmetic of Presidential
elections in Sri Lanka, no candidate without minority, both ethnic and religious, support can conceivably
win. These observations might anger some of Rajapakse’s ardent supporters with access to the media.
However, it is time that they begin to be sensitive to how Rajapakse has become an unconscious political
victim to the extreme nationalist activism of the JVP and the JHU.
Resistance
As noted above, the events during the past few weeks also demonstrated the intellectual and political
incapacity of Sinhalese nationalism to come to terms with the contemporary political realities of Sri
Lanka. It is so grotesque to see how two Buddhist monks attempted to commit suicide merely because
the political parties they belonged to did not agree with President Kumaratunga’s new policy of politically
engaging with the LTTE. This is university undergraduate politics brought to national level.
Managing this resistance in a democratic manner and without resorting to violence is a challenge Mrs.
Kumaratunga continues to face. President Jayewardene responded to resistance in 1987 by unleashing
state violence and that soon created conditions for the JVP’s insurgency. President should focus more
on educating the SLFP rank and file on the new engagement she has initiated with the LTTE. Protecting
the party’s rank and file and providing them effective political-ideological leadership is the key to dealing
with the JVP-JHU campaign of resistance.
Indeed, many of those who resist the Joint Mechanism do not believe in political engagement with the
LTTE. Some are for a military solution to what they see as the LTTE’s ‘terrorist’ problem. There are
some others who would want the state to negotiated with the LTTE only the latter’s terms of surrender.
There are others who believe that any political arrangement with the LTTE should be backed by a
military alliance with an external power. But, serious political engagement with the LTTE operates on a
very different frame of assumptions. It gives the ‘adversary’ a status of parity as well as legitimacy.
It presupposes that in the transition from war to peace the state as well as rebels should jointly workout
frameworks for political-administrative collaboration. Working together with the state enables the rebel
movement to make a fresh attempt to work with the state against which they have fought a bloody war. It
also provides them opportunities to learn the processes of governance. These are essential
components of a long-term process of transition from protracted civil war to peace. Yet, there is very
little understanding of these dynamics outside Tamil society.
The path to peace in Sri Lanka is a difficult one. Political leaders who travel along that path would often
feel abandoned and isolated, deserted even by yesterday’s faithful.
Even a minor, minimalist building block for the edifice of peace will generate so much doubt and
resistance that peace-makers will have to be pragmatic and shrewd politicians as well as philosophers of
stoical persuasion.