-By Anubhawananda
(Lanka-e-News -10.Sep.2024, 10.45 pm) On October 6, 1974, Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike arrived in Jaffna to open the Jaffna Campus of the University of Sri Lanka (present-day University of Jaffna). The Prime Minister was scheduled to participate in several events in Jaffna, including the inauguration of the new university. However, young Tamil militants, including Velupillai Prabhakaran, decided to boycott her visit. They hoisted black flags across Jaffna as a protest and instructed the people of Jaffna not to attend any event in which the Prime Minister participated.
One of the unique aspects of this protest was that, for the first time in history, the Tamil militants issued orders and threats against the Tamil elite political representatives. They warned parliamentarians like S.J.V. Chelvanayakam, V. Anandasangaree, A. Thiagarajah, V. Dharmalingam, C. Arulampalam, S. Kathiravelupulle, K. Thureiratnam, and V.N. Navaratnam not to participate in any events with the Prime Minister.
Velupillai Prabhakaran and young Tamil militants launched a bomb attack on the house of V. Ponnambalam, a Communist Party politburo member who served as the Prime Minister’s interpreter during her Jaffna visit. Prabhakaran later assassinated Alfred Duraiappah, the mayor of Jaffna and SLFP leader in the region, on July 27, 1975. This assassination marked the beginning of a wave of killings that claimed the lives of many Tamil elite politicians such as A. Amirthalingam, V. Dharmalingam, Yogeswaran, Sivasithamparam, Neelan Thiruchelvam, and Lakshman Kadirgamar.
Since the establishment of universal suffrage, the political affairs of both the South and the North were controlled by the elite class. In the North and East, Prabhakaran’s gun put an end to the dominance of Tamil elite politicians. For over three decades, Prabhakaran subjugated the Tamil elite political class in the North and East, beginning with the events surrounding Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s visit to Jaffna on October 6, 1974.
Caste factors play a significant role in Tamil politics, with the Tamil elite political class coming from higher castes. Prabhakaran, who came from a caste deemed lower, controlled these elite politicians through armed power and established himself as the sole leader of the Tamil people. The lower-caste Tamil people saw this as a cause for admiration and some joy.
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) was a creation of LTTE leader Prabhakaran, intended as a tool for representing the LTTE’s ideology in Parliament. Prabhakaran used these Tamil elite politicians as his pawns, sending a select few to Parliament, some of whom were directly linked to the LTTE. Through his representatives, Prabhakaran controlled the TNA parliamentary group.
During that period, TNA figures like Sumanthiran, Gajendra Ponnambalam, Maavai Senathirajah, Suresh Premachandran, and Joseph Pararajasingham acted as mere sycophants of Prabhakaran. Whenever summoned, they considered it their duty to appear before him in Wanni. They accepted his instructions and orders as divine commands. The Tamil elite politicians were freed from this bondage only after Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka militarily defeated the LTTE in May 2009. Without that defeat, politicians like Sumanthiran and Gajendra Ponnambalam would still be Prabhakaran’s political slaves.
After the defeat of the LTTE in May 2009, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) was liberated from Prabhakaran’s control. Senior TNA leaders like R. Sampanthan and Maavai Senathirajah decided to distance their political movement from the LTTE’s shadow and return to democratic politics. Their goal was to achieve a peaceful solution to the Tamil people’s problems through negotiations with the South, believing that a resolution could be found by engaging with Mahinda Rajapaksa after the war.
However, LTTE sympathizers within the TNA desired a more radical political approach and found support from the pro-LTTE Tamil diaspora. During the 2010 general election, Gajendra Kumar Ponnambalam pushed hard for LTTE sympathizers to be nominated. When the TNA leadership refused, Gajendra Kumar Ponnambalam, Selvarajah Gajendran, and Padmini Sidhambaran broke away to form the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF). Despite this, Ponnambalam’s new party secured only around 6,392 votes in the Jaffna district and 1,182 votes in the Trincomalee district. They failed to win a single seat.
In the 2015 presidential election, the Tamil National People’s Front decided to support Maithripala Sirisena, a Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist, based on their trust in Ranil Wickremesinghe. They believed that Sirisena and Wickremesinghe would deliver a new constitution to provide a political solution to the Tamil people’s problems and quickly address the everyday issues faced by the people of the North and East after the war.
Based on these promises, the Tamil National Alliance supported Sirisena, leading to his victory with about 75% of the vote in the North and East. The Yahapalana (Good Governance) government of Ranil and Sirisena came to power largely due to the support of the Tamil people in the North and East.
Though the Tamil people placed their faith in the Yahapalana government, southern politicians once again deceived them. The intention to provide a political solution through a new constitution for the Tamil people’s issues was never realized. Sirisena, displaying his political immobility, betrayed the Tamil people by aligning himself with Sinhala-Buddhist nationalists.
The failure of the Yahapalana government to resolve both the political and economic issues of the Tamil people led to growing dissatisfaction, which was directed at the TNA, who had negotiated with the government. This was first evident in the 2018 local government elections, where Gajendra Kumar Ponnambalam’s Tamil National People’s Front made significant gains.
The TNPF garnered 63,246 votes in the Jaffna district and sent 81 representatives to local government bodies, winning about 20% of the vote in the district. The TNPF managed to gain control of two of the 13 local councils in Jaffna, marking a significant defeat for the TNA, which, despite winning 13 councils, failed to secure a majority in any of them.
In 2019, the Tamil people of the North and East, having been deceived by Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe in 2015, once again fell into the same trap at the behest of the TNA. The TNA decided to support Sajith Premadasa for president. However, Premadasa had spent his entire political career trying to outdo Mahinda Rajapaksa in Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism. It was Ranil Wickremesinghe who convinced TNA leaders to support such a character.
After losing the 2019 presidential election, Sajith Premadasa never visited the North and East again. As opposition leader, he never raised any issues concerning the people of these regions in Parliament or outside it. Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sajith Premadasa, and Maithripala Sirisena should publicly apologize for deceiving the Tamil people.
Since 2009, the Tamil people have come to realize that they gain nothing from their association with the southern Sinhala elite political camp. They expressed this realization in the August 2020...
Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, who had faded from the political scene after failing to win even a single parliamentary seat in the 2010 and 2015 general elections, has re-emerged along with his staunch Tamil nationalist politics. His party, the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF), secured two parliamentary seats, while the coalition led by former Chief Minister Wigneswaran won one seat. The Tamil people of the North and East have gravitated towards a more radical nationalist political force, rejecting the moderate elite parties that engage in negotiations with southern Sinhala governments, believing that such negotiations have failed to deliver for the Tamil people. This defeat also led to the dissolution of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA).
After the 2019 presidential election, Sajith Premadasa showed little interest in addressing the concerns of the Tamil people of the North and East. Despite this, M.A. Sumanthiran and a group of representatives from the Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK) decided to support Premadasa in the upcoming presidential election. Sajith publicly promised to resolve all the issues of the Tamil people. Neither Sajith nor Sumanthiran felt any shame. While one faction of Tamil elite politics is deceived by Sajith’s promises, Wigneswaran supports the Tamil national independent candidate, Pakeselvam Ariyanethran. Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam’s TNPF has decided to boycott the presidential election. Therefore, it is clear that no candidate will receive a substantial number of votes from the Tamil electorate in the North and East this time.
The vote base of the ITAK, the main force within the Tamil National Alliance, has eroded over time. The same fate has befallen Rauff Hakeem’s Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC). It is unlikely that the Tamil people of the North and East are ready to be deceived again by the southern elite politicians that Sumanthiran and his allies are supporting. As mentioned in Ajith Kumarasiri’s latest brilliant song "The Luck of the People," the people of this country, regardless of whether they are Sinhala, Tamil, or Muslim, are in a state of being constantly "deceived and misled, even in their dreams."
Just as the people in the South have rejected the Sinhala elite political class, the Tamil and Muslim populations are rejecting their respective elite political leaderships. This trend is particularly evident among the youth in the Tamil and Muslim communities. As a result, we anticipate a shift in the voting behavior of the Tamil and Muslim electorate across the country, including in the North and East, in this presidential election.
(Translated by a staff writer)
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by (2024-09-10 17:24:56)
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