(MENAFN- Colombo Gazette)
By N Sathiya Moorthy
In a recent interview to a Tamil YouTube channel, Upcountry Tamil leader and founder of the Tamil Progressive Alliance (TPA), Mano Ganesan, has spoken extensively about how the nation, starting with its Tamil-speaking people should aim at accepting every ethnic community as it comes, and not aim at homogenisation or assimilation. Without citing the Indian example in the immediate neighbourhood or quoting independent India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, he was only reiterating the other's prescription for India, in the immediate Sri Lankan context: 'Unity in Diversity.'
The problem with Mano Ganesan's prescription is not the truth of what he said, which is unchallengeable unless one wanted to be biased about it true and true. The issue here is about the need for ex-minister Mano to begin it all at home, with his Upcountry Tamil community and polity. They are supposed to have begun once again with what in effect should be dubbed the 'unity conclave' in Colombo over the weekend, where representatives of multiple Upcountry Tamil political entities met to discourse an action plan to reach there in the future.
Of course, this was not the first attempt of the kind. In the post-war scenario, veteran Upcountry Tamil leader, P P Devaraj, had attempt to bring all community-based political leaders together. Having gone into more than semi-retirement, his initiative was expected to bear fruit. If nothing else, no one else would question his motive or aspirations to take over the leadership of a larger Upcountry Tamil grouping.
It all began well with a meeting of Upcountry Tamil intellectuals identifiable with multiple political parties of the community, followed by a couple of a larger group discussions. It did not go beyond it. Reason: Political egos of those like Mano Ganesan, and the bigger one of the late Arumugan Thondaman intervened. And that was the end.
Ideology, like charity, after all, should begin at home. In the absence of Arumugan Thondaman, who had the wonderful knack of making more enemies than friends within the larger Upcountry Tamil country, unlike his grandfather and CWC founder, Saumiamoorthy Thondaman, Mano Ganesan is among the senior leaders of the community. Maybe, he should put his ideas into action, by exhibiting greater grace and leadership qualities that his generation of Upcountry Tamil leadership had missed for decades.
The question is thus before Mano Ganesan, for instance? Can he raise about narrow personal politics and priorities, and put himself a rung above the rest and stay there, letting the next generation of community leaders to find their feet and climb up. It need not be, or need not stop with Arumugan's minister-son, Jeevan Thondaman and nephew, Senthil Thondaman. Truth be told, outside of Mano and a few senior leaders who are there by default, given the number of Parliament members that the community could vote in, there is none from their own respective ranks whose name and face are known outside their limited constituency and constituents.
Debating point, scoring point
How and how far they all can travel together is for they alone to decide, but they should not make the common cause a debating point, or a scoring point. This is already happening in the more vociferous and victimhood-ridden Sri Lankan Tamil (SLT) polity. Justice C V Wigneswaran's call for the 'unity' of all SLT parties at a six-party seminar in Jaffna is a point to ponder over.
It's true that Wigneswaran, who was chosen to unify the multi-party TNA that was not indivisible over ego issues, did precisely that. He created one more faction, walked out of the ITAK mainstay of the TNA the same way he came in – all alone – but only after wreaking havoc, both inside and outside the alliance government that he supposedly headed as the first elected chief minister of the Northern Province, post-war.
For his unity call to bear fruit, Wigneswaran should take the lead, by shedding political leadership role in favour of emerging as the SLT community's 'unity man'. That's saying a lot, first for him to decide that in the December of his life, he could and should attempt to do it. If it's as atonement for the scars he had inflicted on the TNA and ITAK, and the failures he had wrought on the Tamil people who had overwhelmingly voted him in as chief minister, for not doing enough, so be it.
But Wigneswaran is not the only one to blame. What used to be the ITAK monolith – now still so in form, but not in content and spirit – has already played politics with the ideas that were discussed at the Jaffna seminar. After having hijacked the TNA partner TELO's initiative on 13-A recently and imposing its 13-plus will on the expanded or re-discovered TNA one more time, ITAK stayed away from the seminar.
Blessing in disguise?
It will remain unclear if the ITAK's absence – or, boycott – of the Jaffna seminar was a blessing in disguise or not. True, the ITAK could not and did not hijack other parties' agenda and goal – whatever it was, or was not – but it is a blatant truth that for any larger Tamil political initiative to succeed, the ITAK should be there.
The problem is that ITAK continues to think that it alone is the boss and its ideology and policies alone should be the policy of the community. It's the kind of LTTE thinking as the 'sole representative' of the SLT that destroyed the outfit and ruined the community.
But then, going back to Mano Ganesan's idea of unity in diversity, the SLT community has to first acknowledged their own kind of internal differences of the social and sociological kind as much as there are internal dissensions, politically. The mainstay Jaffna crowd should acknowledge that the Eastern Tamils have a right to say and stay, and so do the islanders from within the peninsula. Their DNA does not seem to have acquired that element as yet, for them to think differently.
In all this, the Jaffna leadership of multiple SLT political identities should acknowledge that SJV was an accident but it was only the accident that succeeded. Likewise, LTTE's Velupillai Prabharakan was not one of them, but once he took over and dominated the Tamil psyche, they readily accepted him first, then feared him and for their own lives, and surrendered, too. But then, both SJV and Prabhakaran acted as better unifying forces for the SLT community than any Jaffna Vellalar leader could in decades before and decades after.
Viable second-line
Today, when most SLT leaders are past their prime, they are yet to identify a viable second-line from within their own parties and neighbourhoods. Barring Sumanthiran and Wigneswaran, who were post-war finds, and so also TNA parliamentarian Sanakyan (from the East, however), not one new leader has been able to emerge and stabilise himself.
Sorry, but then, in a matter of years from now, they all would start withering away, one after the other, possibly in quick succession, given their age and lack of age-difference in the case of many. They are not prepared for either. The SLT community and polity are also not prepared for either. Ultimately, the loss would be that of the community and polity, not necessarily in that order.
There won't be these aging leaders around to curse and counter-curse one another. They would then be turning in their grave. Their fate, doings and undoing while on Mother Earth would not allow them to stay there in eternal peace, which is what each one of them otherwise deserve, after all!
(The writer is Distinguished Fellow and Head-Chennai Initiative, Observer Research Foundation, the multi-disciplinary Indian public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi. email: )
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