The Tamil polity in Sri Lanka faces insurmountable challenges in its struggle for a political solution. Following the death of R. Sampanthan, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) leader and patriarch of the Sri Lankan Tamil people, this struggle will only deepen.
Sri Lankan Tamils, a minority in Sri Lanka, make up 11.2 per cent of the population. The Indian Tamils (also often referred to as plantation Tamils or Indian-origin Tamils) are a smaller group, making up 4.2 per cent of the population. The Sri Lankan Tamils live in the north and eastern parts of Sri Lanka. When the word “Tamil” is used in the Sri Lankan context, it does not include the Muslims, although they speak the same language, and it does not include the Indian origin Tamils.
The “solution” to the Tamil question refers to the granting of equal rights as well as allowing the Tamils to nominally administer the region where the Tamil population is in a majority—a sort of federal set-up as in India. But successive governments have refused to concede this demand. Before 2009, when the LTTE dominated the discourse, they demanded the creation of an independent Tamil homeland comprising the Tamil-dominated areas of north and east Sri Lanka.
After the defeat of the LTTE in 2009, successive Sri Lankan Presidents promised a solution to the Tamil demand for larger rights within a united Sri Lanka. President Mahinda Rajapaksa made several such promises, including in interviews to this correspondent in 2012, insisting that “domestic remedies” (as opposed to international diktats) were the way forward for Sri Lanka.
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The current President Ranil Wickremesinghe said in a 2015 interview to The Hindu (when he was Prime Minister) that he was hopeful of a solution to the Tamil question. He added that the issues involved were “complex” but that the political situation after the national election at that time was “favourable for forging an enduring political solution to the Tamil question”. He reiterated this position after he was appointed President.
A lasting solution
After Sampanthan’s death, many Sri Lankan leaders have once again talked of the need for a lasting solution to the Tamil problem but have not mentioned any specifics. For instance, Harsha de Silva, a leader of Samagi Jana Balawegaya, the main opposition alliance in parliament, said: “Every person deserves the same rights as a citizen of Sri Lanka. Every person also must bear the same responsibility. The above must never be based on ethnicity, religion or any other segmentation ... Sampanthan ... said in the parliament that Tamil people need a solution that the Sinhala majority are willing to accept...We must at least now be honest.”
Despite assurances and utterances, and several rounds of talks with the TNA, when it was headed by Sampanthan, no concrete steps have been taken. In his last interview to a media house, given in December 2023, Sampanthan told this correspondent that he hoped “better sense will prevail on the President and the government. The only way forward for Sri Lanka is for the government to realise that everyone is equal and accord the solution that Tamils have sought for decades.”
In a parliamentary speech in February 2018, while countering propaganda by the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s party), Sampanthan said: “We only talked about a solution that is acceptable to our [Tamil] people that is reasonable, substantial power-sharing within the framework of a united, undivided, indivisible single country. That was the propaganda that we carried out in all our areas ... How dare President Rajapaksa say that Eelam could bloom after the election? This an attempt at deception of the people in the south, the innocent people in the south. It is a deception of everyone, including himself.”
Power of collective bargaining
Sri Lanka will elect a new President in September-October 2024, and invariably it will be a Sinhala who will occupy the office. In earlier elections, at least one serious contender for the post of President has reached out to the Tamils, promising solutions. It is unlikely to be any different in this election either.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa with the delegation of the Tamil National Alliance in Colombo in March 2022. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement/President’s Media Unit
The Tamil parties need to reach a consensus on who they will support for the post so that they can leverage the power of collective bargaining. The TNA, an agglomeration of three Tamil political parties—Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK), Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation, and People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam—is the largest formation. Other Tamil parties which have managed to garner votes in the north or the east include the Tamil People’s National Alliance, the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF), and the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF). The EPRLF, earlier a constituent of the TNA, quit the alliance after the 2015 election. The main Sinhala political parties of the earlier years, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the United National Party, have some support areas where the Indian Tamils live. This area is largely dominated by the Ceylon Worker’s Congress.
Other players
As of now, it is not clear if the TNA can hold on as a political grouping of Tamil parties of the north and the east and take a clear stand on who it wants to back for the post of President. In order for the TNA to function as a well-knit body, a clear leader needs to be accepted and backed by all the parties in the formation.
On January 21 this year, Jaffna District MP S. Sritharan was elected as the president of ITAK, a post earlier held by Sampanthan. Sritharan does not have the wide acceptance that Sampanthan enjoyed within the TNA.
Meanwhile, the former Northern Province Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran and his party, Thamizh Makkal Kootani, are looking for political relevance. Wigneswaran, a former Supreme Court judge who was made Chief Minister of the province in 2013 after the first provincial election in over three decades was held at Sampanthan’s insistence, later broke away and started his own political formation.
One of the two rising stars in the Tamil political horizon is the TNPF’s Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, who has been an independent entity and this has yielded some political dividends so far. The other popular politician is Shanakiyan Rasamanickam of the ITAK.
The outlier in this group is Minister Douglas Devananda of the Eelam People’s Democratic Party, who now sees himself a major player in northern Sri Lanka. He has been a Minister for more than a decade and a half, and has held a seat from Jaffna since the early 1990s. Douglas has often taken up the issue of Indian fishermen poaching in Sri Lankan waters, and has turned into a bitter India-baiter after his attempts to “settle” a criminal case against him in India failed. The TNA and many in the north view him as a collaborator.
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The eastern region of Sri Lanka, home to Sampanthan, has two such major collaborators—former Eastern Province Chief Minister Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan Pillayan and Karuna Amman (Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan), formerly LTTE’s head of eastern command and founder of the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal. Karuna and Pillayan both held Ministerial positions and have now been cast aside by the dominant Sinhala political parties. Pillayan still has clout, although limited, in eastern Sri Lanka.
Tamil politics in Sri Lanka has always been complicated, and Sampanthan’s demise adds a new layer of complexity. News of the unearthing of a mass grave in the northern province will put additional pressure on all Tamil political formations to take maximalist positions. Asked if this was a possibility, one Tamil leader, who did not want to be named, asked: “What did [Sampanthan] ayya’s position achieve?”
