Photo courtesy of Minority Rights Group
Tamil politics in Sri Lanka has entered uncharted territory. The cracks in Tamil politics had been evident for some time but with the September 21 presidential elections, it has broken into fragments.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake received little support from the Tamil electorate but so did the candidate endorsed by the Tamil Nationalist Alliance’s (TNA) leadership (Sajith Premadasa), the so-called common Tamil candidate fielded in a challenge to the TNA (Pakkiyaselvam Ariyanenthiran) and the incumbent candidate (Ranil Wickremesinghe). Breaking with a long tradition of electoral loyalty to the leadership, the Tamil vote is thus comprehensively split. This impedes bargaining positions on cardinal Tamil grievances and aspirations.
Yet the present political moment also opens new opportunities. Much depends on the November 14 parliamentary elections but even now it is clear that the NPP has overhauled Sri Lanka’s party-political landscape. President Dissanayake has pledged to deliver on the promises of the public uprising of the 2022. This implies a fundamental re-democratisation of Sri Lanka and a new constitution. That agenda arguably creates a new window to address long standing minority grievances through stronger forms of power sharing, regional autonomy and legal safeguards for minorities.
With that outlook, many of the familiar problems and tensions of Tamil political history come back to the fore. The common tendency is to treat Tamil party politics as similar to the politics of the other ethnic communities. This is a mistake, in my view. After all, there is a more fundamental contradiction at play between the central aspirations of Tamil politics and the basic tenets of the political landscape in which they operate. The Tamil nationalist movement has historically questioned the very demarcation of the Sri Lankan “demos”, the political community in whose name democracy exists. To pursue their aspirations, they have been forced to participated in a political framework that they reject on principle terms.
The resulting political schizophrenia is not unique to Sri Lanka. We see similar contradictions in Catalonia, Northeast India, Quebec and Kurdistan, to name some well-known examples. To interpret the politics of such independence movements from the vantage point of the formal democratic arena is to misunderstand what they are. Precisely because of the principle contradiction between the foundational premises of the political system and their political cause, we see unusual forms of transgression, creative manoeuvring and skulduggery.
This may include strategies such as an electoral boycott or an election that is treated as if it was a referendum or the creation of purportedly democratic institutions that lack a legal basis. Such political practices are democratic in the sense that they solicit popular opinions to effect political change. But they are also undemocratic because they push or break the existing rules of democracy. If we interpret such political tactics from a formalistic stance, we miss the point.
Instead I have argued in a recent book that we should treat transgressive forms of democratic politics from a performative perspective. That is, we should consider how political claims are enacted, with what kind of scripts and symbols and how such performative repertoires are understood by political constituencies. In formal terms, an electoral boycott is merely a form of political absence and an illegal referendum is a nullity. But in performative terms they are highly potent and consequential political expressions.
The Tamil nationalist movement has a long history with such transgressive political repertoires. The first electoral boycott dates back to 1931 when the Jaffna Youth Congress opposed the first general election. In the 1970s, we saw Tamil leader S.J.V. Chelvanayakam demonstratively vacate his seat in parliament, in a principled rejection of the new constitution. His party then enacted the 1977 elections as a plebiscite on the call for a sovereign Tamil state as formulated in the Vaddukoddai resolution.
During the subsequent civil war, such performative allusions to Tamil sovereignty escalated to new levels. Through the creation of the North-Eastern Provincial Council, in lieu of a separate state, India’s federal government went all out to help Chief Minister Varadaraja Perumal and his elected councillors enact themselves as a Tamil government of sorts in the late 1980s. After the retreat of the Indian military, the LTTE filled the void and established institutional structures for a de facto Tamil Eelam state while taking parts of the provincial council and other state entities on remote control.
It makes no sense to understand the political landscape that resulted based on a formal organogram of state structures. None of this was legal, in formal terms none of it even existed, but it had major political ramifications, both locally and internationally. It mesmerised big parts of the diaspora, it inspired some international sympathisers and it appalled and alerted others, most obviously in Colombo and New Delhi.
After the watershed moment of the LTTE military defeat of 2009, Tamil politics struggled to return to its pre-war repertoires. On the one hand, Sri Lanka’s democratic arena was more closed than ever. In post-victory Sri Lanka there was very little legal or political space for Tamil nationalism. On the other hand, the democratic arena radically opened up due to the return of multi-party Tamil politics.
During the later years of the war, the TNA had emerged as a parliamentary appendage of the LTTE. Leveraging the military prowess of the armed militancy, it controlled the Tamil vote and TNA leader R. Sampanthan presented himself as a stateman-like figure. After the war, all the other Tamil parties and youth groups made a comeback and the Tamil political arena became a pluriform space. Intra-Tamil contentions along lines of caste, class, region, gender and religion came back to the fore and so did Tamil-Muslim relations. This severely complicated TNA attempts to perform Tamil national aspirations.
Initially, proponents of Tamil nationalism mainly engaged in what I call “oath of allegiance politics” where voters were called on to pledge support to the articles of faith of Tamil nationalism as a public articulation of Tamil national grievances and aspirations. The 2009 diaspora referendum and the TNA campaign for the 2010 parliamentary elections are good examples. Ariyanenthiran’s claim to a “vote for liberation” in this year’s presidential election follows a similar plot. On the provincial level, the TNA resorted to a second political repertoire – “performing political abstinence”, for example when it boycotted the 2008 Eastern Provincial Council elections. However, in a competitive Tamil political arena, there is a risk that principled abstinence degenerates into a political absence because other parties fill the void. And that is precisely what happened.
So when the TNA finally committed to participating in the 2013 elections in the Tamil heartland of the Northern Province, it resorted to a third repertoire – “performing institutional deficiency”. The TNA governed the North not to show their potency and their ability to deliver patronage as most Sri Lankan politicians would but to exhibit the shortcomings of the Provincial Council system, thus proving that Tamil grievances demand a better solution. Again there is a risk. What if voters conclude that it is not only the system that is deficient but the TNA’s political leadership? How the Tamil community answered that question in recent years is a matter of interpretation, but the self-implicated breakdown of Northern Provincial Council in 2018 was not a good show for the TNA.
With President Dissanayake’s election, the spirit of the 2022 aragalaya uprising gains a new lease of life and the Tamil political leadership faces a fresh opportunity to make their case on the national question. If the president’s NPP alliance secures a strong result in the parliamentary polls, there is scope to address some of Sri Lanka’s most persistent governance problems and possibly for a constitutional reset. In that context, the bold Tamil repertoires of the past are likely to be a liability. Performative enactments of national self-determination, the Tamil homeland and the glorification of martyrdom will raise hackles with the government and its constituencies.
However, the legacy of the aragalaya offers an opportunity to shift the Tamil political repertoire. The uprising evinced a cross-ethnic desire at re-democratising Sri Lanka. That pursuit will require the Tamil parties to at least partly rearticulate Tamil grievances as civic concerns over governance, democracy and rule of law. This changes the script from demanding the Sinhalese to give in to the demands of Tamil sovereignty to one of popular sovereignty where a civic collective takes on a corrupted, self-indulgent political elite.
After all, getting rid of the monarchy-like executive presidency, strengthening public service commissions and redressing the Colombo-centric nature of politics would serve all communities, including the Tamils. Fixing the well-known faults of the Provincial Council system would be a logical extension of that. President Dissanayake’s political predecessors rebelled against this very system in the 1980s but the NPP vows to have broken with its militant past. Salvaging this legacy of the 1987 Indo-Lankan Accord or upgrading it would in effect amount to a minimal form of regional Tamil self-government. In the same spirit of the aragalaya, it would obviously have to take responsibility for its own minority concerns within the Northeast.
Such a performative shift from a Tamil separatist repertoire to a civic democratic one ironically takes us back to the political schizophrenia that we started out with. After all, it requires Tamil leaders and their voters to mute what has historically been their strongest democratic conviction in order to participate in the democratic arena. The outcome would fall far short of Tamil homeland aspirations but it would be massive step forward for all Sri Lankans.
The author is Associate Professor in Peace and Development Research at Gothenburg University (Sweden) and has conducted field research in Sri Lanka over the past 25 years. This is a shortened version of the recent book “Performing Sovereign Aspirations: Tamil Insurgency and Postwar Transition in Sri Lanka” available free of charge via the Cambridge University Press website.