A thousand questions on Tamil-Singhalese relations

The 140 character Twitter mindset of today means that people often do not have the time or the patience or the enthusiasm to ask a thousand questions. Here, I start with a small set of questions on the Tamil-Singhalese relations. Of course, I do not know the answer to them all, nor do I have the time to address what I do know. May be, if and when time allows me (a big fat yawn!). But asking the relevant questions is an important task, and much more important than providing answers. So here they are.

Understanding the Tamil-Singhalese relations today cannot be ignorant or unmindful of history, a bad word for many people with an agenda that is uncorrelated with truth-seeking.

0) The very early immigrants from South India to Sri Lanka - now called the indigenous people (Yakkas/Veddas), even before the Singhalese and Tamilians migrated to the island.

1) Setting the stage -- Tamil migration patterns, Portuguese Inquisitions and the conversion of the Jaffna kingdom, Tamil-Singhalese commingling, formation of the Lankan identity

2) British era -- Impact of the British Rule on Tamil and Singhalese societies, The role of the Donoughmore and Soulbury Constitutions on Lankan identity and future makeup, Reforms in the Tamil Hindu and Singhalese societies, Cross-pollination of ideas between the Then Indhiya Saiva Siddhantha Sanmaarga Sangham and Lankan Tamil society, Flow of ideas from the Theosophical Movement to the Mahabodhi Society and the resurgence of Buddhism, Profile of elites in the Tamil, Singhalese, Burgher and Muslim sections of Lanka

3) Plantation Tamils and their travails in the context of Tamil and Indian migration to such places as Malaysia, Burma, Singapore, Guyana and the Caribbean, Fiji, South Africa, Kenya, and Mauritius. The similarities and differences with respect to hard labor, profile of societies migrating, etc.

4) Why did SL not join the Indian Union in 1948? There are good explanations why Nepal, Burma and Sri Lanka not join India upon independence, not all of which have to do with Nehru bashing. There was a good reason why the Burmans wanted to be out of British India in the late-20s to mid-30s. There was a good reason why the Tamils favored a Union with India after 1948, but the Singhalese did not. There was a good reason why the Kathmandu Valley based elite did not want a Union with India. There was a very good reason why Patel and Nehru did not force these neighbors to join India. There was a very good reason why Indira Gandhi annexed Sikkim. Some of these facts are to be understood in context of the information that India had at that point in history, not based on what we know now. Reshaping history based on future information is not only non-causal, but only ammo for rhetoric warfare with little meanings to reality.

5) Why was Katchhathheevu handed over to Sri Lanka? What was Sri Lanka's role in the 1971 war with Pakistan? How did the Soviets help India on the one hand and hurt India on the other? Who was responsible for the non-war on the West Pakistan side? And in this task how were they similar to the other superpower of that era? What were the commonalities between Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mauritius and Sri Lanka as virtual carrier fleets in the Indian Ocean? What did the Singhalese do to force the hands of the British and the Americans in taking over Diego Garcia, esp with respect to the Kankesanthurai port and Tirikonamalai air base?

6) G. Ponnambalam and S. V. Chelvanayakam -- their similarities and differences, their travails and their stories, their promises and their hopes for different sections of Tamils, and why these all got dashed by the Singhala Only act of the Sri Lankan Constitution.

7) Rise of YMBA and JVP -- Who was Rohana Wijeweera? Why was he allowed to run riot in Sri Lanka? What was the role of LSSP in the travails that led to the first JVP uprising? What was the Soviet role in this melee, particularly the Stalinists at the Patrice Lumumba University? How did Nehru react? How did SWRD Bandaranaike react? How did the Indian foreign policy change in response to the JVP threat? Why did the TULF constitute itself? What was the reaction in Tamil society at large?

8) Where did the TULF fail? Why did splinter groupings come up? PLOTE, EPDP, EPRLF, TELO, LTTE -- who supported them in TN and India? Why did MGR take a soft spot for the Kandy boys? Why did Indira Gandhi take a soft spot for LTTE initially? Why did the LTTE come up front and decimate everyone else? Who were Amirthalingham, Douglas Devananda, Mahathiya, etc.? What did the Vaddukkodai resolution promise? What was the impact of the Jaffna library burning in 1981 on support to the LTTE? What was the impact of the riots in 1983? Why did India help SL attain respectable cricketing status in 1983? What happened to the MJ Gopalan trophy between TN and Sri Lanka?

9) Why did Indira Gandhi go against the LTTE over time? What did Rajiv Gandhi take away from Indira Gandhi's tenure? How did Rajiv's tenure differ from Indira's? What led to the IPKF pact? What are the commonalities between the accords that Rajiv signed with AGP, Punjab, Mizoram and SL? What role did the air lifting of soldiers to the Maldives coup have on SL? Why was J.N. Dixit unsuccessful? What was the agenda behind IPKF? Why did the IPKF fail badly? Was the Tamil accusation that the IPKF soldiers commited rapes and brutalities right or wrong, fact or fiction? If it was fact, were such acts justified or not? Were the IPKF misunderstood saints or well-meaning soldiers or was the grayness somewhere in between? How did Indians react to stories of rape and brutalities on civilians unconnected with guerrilla warfare? How did the Sri Lankan Tamil society react?

10) How did the LTTE rise as a terrorist group? What were its strong points? What were its weak points in hindsight? What made LTTE what it was -- a fearful, loathsome, powerful outfit bonded by people with a need to free themselves from a fubar Singhalese society? What did India get right in its dealings with the GoSL and the LTTE? What did it get badly wrong? What was the role of Tamil "civil society" in TN on this issue? Who were TNRT and TNLA? What was the connection between Veerappan and VP? Why did Vai Ko rise in the DMK? What about Kolathur Mani and Pazha Nedumaran? What was Ramadoss' role in the SL issue? Where do all the politicians in TN fall in line vis-a-vis Sri Lanka? Where do they differ? What was Sivanthi Adithhanar's Naam Tamizhar Party's role in the SL crisis? What was the role of the erstwhile Raja of Ramnad? What was the role of Velankanni Church? What is the caste profile of the LTTE? Why did LTTE split not once, but twice? What was the role of conversion of a certain segment of Tamils to Christianity? Why did/do the LTTE and the Tamil Hindus share a painful relationship with the Tamil Muslims? Why was the LTTE still a rank-and-file Hindu dominated terrorist entity? How did Anton Balasingham become its advisor-cum-ideologue? Who was Adele?

11) Op. Oyaadha Alaigal -- the meaning of the idea and its ruminations in TN, the key players involved, the attack strategies, the Elephant Pass victory, the Palaly air base bombings, the Sea Tigers, the Air Tigers, Indian Coast Guard's role in coralling LTTE assets and how it failed miserably, military lessons to be learned, what lessons do they have for counterinsurgency operations in the Maoist heartland in India today, in India's extended neighborhood, for COIN against supposedly ethnic/political/azaadi-seeking terrorist outfits as against Leftist or anarchist terrorist outfits 

12) Political lessons for GoI, for GoTN, for SL society, for Tamil society, for Indians, for people at large. How will this issue end? Will it end? What can GoI do today? Why the past is a circle just like what the Buddhism's kaalachakra says about life? How the SL brand of Buddhism and the nonsense taught in Indian textbooks about Buddhism are not the same? Why some of the non-violence preaching societies such as Burma, Tibet, SL, Cambodia, Thailand, etc. are the most violent today, not only against other ethnicities of the same country, but also against neighbors? What lessons do Indians need to take from their surface level understanding of the conflict in SL? And finally, was Ambedkar correct in marshalling the SCs toward Indian Buddhism? What is the way forward for Indian Buddhists if that route was wrong? What would result in closure for everyone involved?

A Model for Violence

There are many models in the literature for violence, terrorism, militancy, and insurgency -- even for those specializing on India-centric matters. I am not the first person to deal with these things, nor am I well versed with the inter-disciplinary literature in this arena. Having read a bit, however, I do have my hypotheses and claims. I believe it would be a good idea to jot down these ideas before refining them into something that is useable in some form.

My brief claim is that while religion or language or ethnicity could be a source of many problems in India, just the fact that someone is from a religion/language/ethnicity that is different from the numerically majority/preponderant one cannot (ideally!) cause problems. What could cause problems though is a contestation in the name of religion, language or ethnicity. In fact, a contestation of any type (including caste, socio-economic, supposed grievances from a bygone era, a steady isolation in terms of belonging, etc.) that creates and propagates a sense of alienation (which I like to term as the "Otherness" factor) of the minority community(ies) from the majority, and the majority from the minority, and the back and forth between these two interdependencies is more likely to be a source for insurgency.

Violence comes from being cornered or perceptions of being cornered in one's own imagined homeland, not from just merely existing. This kind of contestation would probably be able to explain better the recent Bodo-Bengali-Bangladeshi violence in Assam as it seemed to suggest a zero-sum game fight for resources, animated by contested identities that go a long time in the past. In more detail, if you asked me what factors could be associated with a higher likelihood of violence, I would pick five:
1) A certain "Otherness" factor that makes a subset of the people alienate themselves from the mainstream. Day-to-day transactions between the mainstream and the subset can both aid in reinforcement of the "Otherness" factor as well as embrace and co-opt the community by making them feel comfortable with the mainstream. Such a factor could be linguistic, religious, cultural, socio-economic, regional, [whatever]. But one definitely needs a difference in terms of outlook before such differences can be exploited.

2) Differences alone are not sufficient. Such differences have to find an outlet via some ideology. The ideology could be as good as the Justice Party-Self Respect Movement-Dravida Kazhagam which became co-opted over time into the mainstream, or it could be exclusive religious, socialist, or different hues of theoretical communist egalitarianism. In short, the Intentions of the sub-group make a big difference in channelizing their anger. If the Intention is to just attain political mobility (like the Yadavs of Uttar Pradesh or the Scheduled Castes of Uttar Pradesh or the non-Brahmin vs. Brahmin struggle for limited resources in the then Madras state) rather than avenge the wrongs of past deeds (Bhumihars vs. Thakurs in Bihar), the whole setup could be different.

3) What aids revolutionary Intentions to form is a differential literacy rate between males and females. There is a high correlation between a big gap in the male to female literacy differential and violence. For whatever good or bad reason, the southern states of India have by chance or pure luck reduced this differential. It is catching up in the North, albeit slowly for my comfort. While I have not collected enough data to feel comfortable with my hypothesis, here are my first observations: (http://dharma-yuddham.blogspot.com/2012/04/two-education-related-statistics.html. See also two related posts connected from this post with a bit more data.). 

4) Again, Intentions need to be channelized. That is when a community arms itself to the teeth and develops Capabilities that can seriously harm the State/establishment. Capabilities do not stand alone, they go with other factors that mutually reinforce each other.

5) To sustain the Capabilities, a group needs Finances. This could be sourced from outside or from hooking up to the usual drug trade/hawala/charity networks.

I am pretty sure I am missing many other attributes that determine violence. But a general model that flows like "Otherness --> Formation of Contested Identity --> Intentions to Hurt --> Capabilities to Harm --> Sustaining Capabilities" looks like a natural model for how terrorism/violence happens than by any other justification. I am not saying that other factors such as geography or isolation of terrain have no correlation to all this, geography indeed is responsible for some sort of Indivisible Otherness, but geography alone is not sufficient. We need so many other factors to form a feared terrorist/insurgent/violent outfit (especially in India) that needs careful study.

PS: On that count, the situation is ripe in TN for the Otherness factor, which has already been firmly ensconced in the mindset of the polity, to take a dramatic shift. Propaganda movies about alienation do not help this matter either. There are many situations in India where violence is avoided by pure luck or by accidents of history. Why does one need an accident of history when a reality-based nuanced understanding of the landscape is sufficient? For the policy wonks at the South Block, I would appeal to put their ears firmly to the ground and hear the churnings. Of course, such churnings are not exclusive to TN, but a need for those churnings in TN today are a bit groundless and a small shift can make giant differences. In other places, a small shift often means a small change in reality.

On Balachandran Prabhakaran

A cliche to begin: if you are late in social media, you are a nobody. If you are early in research, even if not fundamentally deep, you are somebody. The point of the cliche being, I am always late: at work, at the blog, at life, yada yada, not that it matters to me, but it probably does in the grand scheme of things.

Much has been said in Tamil Nadu about the murder of the LTTE supremo's other son with widespread condemnation on the inhuman manner in which a 12-13 year old boy was murdered by the Sri Lankan army, possibly on orders from the high command at the Government of Sri Lanka. There are clearly many ways to dice and slice this scenario: from a human rights perspective, from a cold-hearted military perspective, from a realpolitik perspective, via a post-facto rationalization spree, and so on. Neither perspective can fully justify any action either way. While noone made a big fuss when pictures of Charles Anthony's bullet ridden body or that of Prabhakaran's blasted head were released by the Sri Lankan army, not much has been said about the bullet wounds to the heads of Dwaraka and Mathivathani --- the latter who happens to still have extended family in Tamil Nadu which I personally know of and hear from often enough. Not much has been said on why these two females were culpable in the orgy of crime instigated by the LTTE that necessitated their murders too. Not much has been said about the fact that Prabhakaran, Charles Anthony and Balachandran are/were all obese for their age --- a sad reflection of how a once-feared guerrilla army had come down to in its last ride to hell.

Not much has been said about the timing of this expose, coming from the stables of The Hindu and Channel 4. Was it intended to create a sympathy wave that could reflect positively on commuting the life sentence of the LTTE members who were actively involved in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case? Or was it intended to force the Government of India to vote against Sri Lanka when the UN vote comes to the picture again in mid-March? Should we expect pictures of sexually abused family members of the LTTE supremo's family in the next expose? Not much has been said about the fact that whatever may be one's opinion on this matter, the verdict as seen from the "Comments" section of The Hindu (which reflects the comments one hears in the news media in TN) is overwhelmingly clear that TN does not see this murder in a positive light. That alone is sufficient to sustain this religious fistfight between the Tamils and the Sinhalese for the next few decades.

For people directly connected to the Indian armed forces and the sad IPKF wounds of the past, none of these would of course matter. The LTTE deserved to die and anyone frontally or peripherally or tangentially associated with that entity should pay the big price for the necklace bombs and the coffins that returned from Sri Lanka. Yes, they should pay the price. But how does that square with the fact that the war in Sri Lanka is a pure religious war? How does that square with the fact that the overwhelming majority of Tamils in Sri Lanka, most of whom are still Hindus, see this as a religious war even if most of their extended Hindu neighbors in India or TN do not/cannot/will not want to see it as?

A recent report by the International Policy Digest had these facts to note:

This paper will show that the concept of Sinhalization extends well beyond the subjects of strategic state-planned settlements, land, military intrusion, boundary changes and the renaming of villages. Sinhalization has made its way into Tamil cultural events, religious life, economic activity, public sector recruitment and even the Sri Lankan education system. Since the Tamil community is attempting to recover from the devastating impact of the civil war and rebuild social networks and community structures, attempts to control and demolish socio-cultural aspects of their lives, such as the take over and destruction of temples, inhibit their attempts to engage in emotional healing and community regeneration even minimally.  

Land schemes began in earnest after Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948 with D.S. Senanayake, the Minister of Agriculture and Lands from 1931-1947, leading the way. Land located near Pattipalai, Kaluwanchchikudy, Batticaloa was renamed as "Gal Oya." At least as it relates to land, this constitutes the formal beginning of State-sponsored Sinhalization in the country's eastern province. In the post-independence era, one of the first development projects inaugurated by the Government of Sri Lanka was the development of Gal Oya Valley, a part of Gal Oya basin. At its inception, the Gal Oya project was the "largest settlement and resettlement" program that had ever been attempted in Sri Lanka. Under this project, more than 80,000 Sinhalese people settled into predominantly Tamil areas from 1949 to 1952 and Sinhalese settlement continued in the 1960s. 

The "Mahaweli plan" set the tone for the highly exclusionary development policies that continue today. Though initially designed as a thirty-year year plan, President Jayawardene announced the state's intention to "accelerate" the plan to a five-year project. The "irrigation plan" was supposed to settle over 700,000 people within six years. Two thirds of Mahaweli plan was situated in the country's North and East and sought to give the Sinhalese-dominated State the chance to take "advantage of land and water resoirces which exist in these areas." The implementation of this project did two things. First, donors benefited from the plan's economic success (the project's cost-benefit ratio was 1.57), thus enabling certain debts to be repaid. Second, and more importantly, the plan drastically altered the ethnic composition of the country's North and East, giving the Sri Lankan State more authority to arbitrarily redraw provincial and district boundary lines.

Fast forwarding to the post-LTTE era, here are some anecdotes from the pdf:

1) Since 2006, nearly 100 village names have been changed from a Tamil name to Sinhalese ones. While it is not possible to obtain more precise numbers, much of this renaming has occurred since the end of the civil war. 

2) The expansion of the military's presence in predominantly Tamil areas has done little to quell the anxieties of ethnic Tamils. Some people fear even greater military expansion in certain areas, including the building of new bases. The State's defense budget will exceed $2 billion (USD) this year, a nearly seven percent increase from the previous year. 

3) The State also recently announced that security forces and the police who have a third child would be paid a 100,000 rupee incentive, thereby cementing the special position enjoyed by the military in post-war Sri Lanka. Since the military is almost exclusively Sinhalese, this is disturbing and discriminatory. It is worth noting that while members of the armed forces are being provided a financial incentive to expand their families, Tamil women in the Hill County are being paid 500 rupees to undergo an irreversible sterilization procedure. 

4) During the civil war more than 350 Hindu Temples in the country's North and East were demolished. The actual number of Hindu Temples destroyed in, almost certainly, much greater than list provided in this monograph. In other cases, army personnel continue to occupy Hindu temples, some of which are located in de facto HSZs. Relatedly, the State has been building Buddhist shrines and other religious monuments where some of these Hindu temples existed.

In the Hill Country there is a historical Tamil site in Ratnapura called Sivanolipathamalai (Adam's Peak). This is a famous holy site for Hindus and many used to engage in religious rituals there every year. Since 1900, the site has welcomed people who spoke English, Sinhala and Tamil. However, in the 1970s, the site was given an exclusively Sinhalese name and is now called "Sri Pada." Right now, importance is only given to Buddhism and the location has been officially denoted as a Buddhist holy site by the State. The administration of this site is managed by Buddhist monks and Hindu rituals are no longer permitted in Sri Pada.

5) And more on the military takeover of economics in the pdf

The bottomline is simple. Realpolitik dictates that demography is destiny and the Sinhalese government is pursuing the grand strategy of demographically manipulating Sri Lanka's destiny as a Sinhala state, in name, spirit and action. In this sarukku maram game, Sri Lanka unfortunately perceives TN as a grand enemy and the Tamils as people belonging to TN and not to Sri Lanka. This is how it has been for a looong time and this is how it remains today. While the Tamils (in Sri Lanka and TN) do not perceive themselves to be a part of such a game theorizing, perceptions can lead to realities and the Tamils in TN will be forced to play the game in bigger numbers (they have already been playing this game for a while now, but only a small part of TN). It is only a playback of the past 60 years of TN-Sri Lanka history. The strategic depth that Sri Lanka fears, which is almost absent in real-life except for a microscopic minority (that may or may not matter much), will over time become more dominant and a bipartisan support to a neo-LTTE-type organization by the political parties of TN cannot be wished away. Sadly, that day is closer to today than I would like it to be. And even more sadly, it is hard to not look the other side when such a support cast develops because even if you are an atheist, your religion is still your bloody religion, even if practiced and followed by a hundred buffoons of hundred types.

Vishwaroopam and aftermath

It is more than a week since I watched Vishwaroopam and I think I have given myself enough time to sit back and ponder at what it is all supposed to mean.

Having made my penchant to dislike Kamal Hassan and his social messaging very clear, nevertheless, I must admit that Vishwaroopam is a brilliant movie with a deep sense of story-telling in multiple layers. Unfortunately it is too brilliant a movie for a vast majority of the Tamil/Indian audience, especially the ones who come to watch the movie. The movie, from the start to the finish, caters primarily to the middle-class and even if that segment has grown in Tamland and India quite rapidly over the last two decades, the messages are too complicated to be grasped in one sitting. After having watched the movie, it appears to be a perfect movie to have been taken DTH as its intended audience (the middle-class) is the one that could have most benefited by seeing it at home rather than at the theaters. 

The topic it handles, terrorism, to be quite honest, is something that a common man hardly, if ever, encounters in real life. Given that I do work on terrorism models and read enough banalities on terrorism matters, the above cannot be but a most severe short-selling on one's own source of paycheck. But, facts are indeed facts. The number of terrorism incidents in India (or for that matter even the most violent country in the world, however one benchmarks it: level of violence, number of fatalities or injuries, economic damage, psychological hold of fear and terror, loss of hold of the State suzerainty, nexus on criminality of society, etc.,) still borders on a few thousands of attacks (I extract them from different databases and impute for missing data, so I do have some confidence on the guesstimates), a few thousands dead/injured/maimed, a few hundreds of crores INR in economic damage, and loss of State suzerainty in a small geographical territory relative to the size of India. Even aberrational examples such as Peru, Colombia or Sri Lanka have shown that when it comes to the war on terror, the State holds a completely asymmetric advantage to kill a terrorist outfit(s) as it emboldens itself (with finances and weaponry, global support or otherwise, and more importantly, the ability and capability to take endless damages) to stage the final battle. And the most successful of terrorist outfits in history are political parties today (ANC, DMK, Akali Dal, Shiv Sena, Communist parties of various stripes that have come to terms with democratic ideals, etc.) which goes to the grain of the idea of what defines a successful terrorist outfit: usurp power, prestige, wealth, control (real and imagined) and sustenance in an as least resistant and least compromised path as possible. 

Of course, a relative comparison with other issues such as accidental deaths, environmental damage, corruption losses, etc., are meaningless and rhetorical point-scoring used by peace-niks and pro-establishmentists to piss wide and far on matters that do not affect them in reality. And while one would love to be in a scenario where terrorism damages are completely wiped out, it must also be pointed that the power of terrorism lies primarily in its power to terrorize people disproportionate to its real connect to day-to-day living. In some sense, the power of terrorism is like a High Voltage transmission line, both are visible gargantuan leviathans, when in reality the ideal response is to not play a mind game that is skewed to one side (the terrorist's). To cut down the moral pontification (aka semantics and rhetorical gymnastics), one suffers the pain of terrorism if one has been a victim or knows a near and dear one who is. For much of middle-class India, the power of terrorism is not immediate and it comes from watching media stories unfolding essentially live, and from reading newspapers and social media. For much of rural and left-behind India, the power of terrorism is more immediate but not commonly attributed to the outfits classified as terrorist by the Government of India. Much of the terror in rural India is systemic terror of various socio-economic and often identity clashes. While Vishwaroopam tries to portray a continuing battle between a rational terrorist and an intelligent and rooted spook, both matched only in their superhuman-ness and endless ability to continue the battle, and in that sense is perhaps a closer portrayal to reality (minus the theatrical liberties) than much else of the Indian fare, it still explores a topic that is too far from reality. 

But more to my sociological interest, Vishwaroopam continues the trend of Tamil cinema evolving into more and more intelligent themes that are primarily targeted at the middle-class than at rural and left-behind India. Note that Tamil cinema has continually evolved from the mythological musical fare of Ellis R. Dungan to pure ideologicals aimed at social change in the 40s to the "Sirippom Sindhippom" fare of ideology seamlessly infused amidst entertainment in the 50s to early middle-class family and social dramas of the 60s and 70s to the angry young man/masala era of the late-70s and 80s to the inward looking 90s followed by the outward looking today. The outward looking-ness that is more or less common today does not shy away from naming Pakistan or China or the white man or terrorism as enemies and in that sense, is a remarkable transformation that TMMK and other ideological neanderthals would best notice. If the protesting TMMK intended to make their point across that terrorism has no religion, their actions are most likely to be perceived by much of middle-class India to be much ado about nothing, of sound and fury that symbolized the sorpozhivus of DMK in the late 50s and 60s. In short, the TMMK have scored an own goal and must be congratulated on that. As must be Kamal Hassan in his ability to indulge in selective hypocrisies and in that sense, he is not in a league of his own. He has the unmatched support of much of India, and the political mainstream, where hypocrisy and "do as I say, not as I do" are the norms. 

Of course, Kamal Hassan could have shortcutted all this drama and just handed over the local TV rights to Jaya TV or whoever that had approached him. Hindsight, as everyone knows, is 400% perfect, but life aint.