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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modiarriving in Sri Lanka last morning – Pic by Romesh Danushka Silva
From Prime Minister Modi through Secretary of State Kerry to Prime Minister Cameron—in that order of significance—the emphasis with regard to Sri Lanka is the need for ethnic reconciliation. The search for a solution must be preceded by the identification of the problem or problems. Currently the effort at ethnic reconciliation runs up against the following problems.
Firstly, unrealistic expectations and lack of consensus about the contours of the solution. While hardly any serious Sinhala politicians expect to roll-back the 13th Amendment, their Tamil counterparts expect to go beyond it.
The 13th Amendment was the product of the Indo-Lanka Accord which was itself the outcome of a confluence of three factors: a strong Tamil insurgency with cross-border covert support; robust, coercive even interventionist Indian diplomacy; a strong presidency with an artificially frozen five-sixth majority in the Legislature. None of those factors obtain today, still less the confluence.
However, the Chief Minister of the Northern Provincial Council who is hardly a wild-eyed radical, expresses the long-held view of the ‘moderate’Tamil nationalists, that the 13th Amendment is no solution and indeed the unitary state formis no solution as well.
Some crucial insights
The transcript of correspondent Meera Srinivasan’s interview with Chief Minister Wigneswaran as published in The Hindu, yields some crucial insights. The Chief Minister opines that “…Thirteenth Amendment can never be the final solution...We would recommend to him that it is time to reconsider the 13th Amendment, which was a fall out from the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987 and to replace it with a more dynamic system, which would ensure maximum power sharing for the North and East…Under our unitary constitution there is no chance of our performing the way Hon’ Modi performed…Especially the inadequacies of the Thirteenth Amendment would no doubt be understood by him. His visit and understanding would be very vital in the ultimate finalisation of our constitutional problems.”
Wigneswaran attempts to turn the issue of devolution into a trilateral negotiation between New Delhi, Colombo and Jaffna, which is precisely the mistake that fuelled the backlash in the Southand catalysed the dissolution of the Northern Council by President Premadasa in 1990. He urges that “…There should be talks among the Indian Government, Sri Lankan Government and the NPC, without taking refuge under protocols…”
For a former member of Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court, the Chief Minister shows a disconcerting capacity for contradicting himself—and advancing contradictory arguments—within a single paragraph when he says that:
“…We expect him to take cognisance of the evolution and changing contexts since the signing of the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 particularly taking into consideration the historic communication late TULF Leaders Amirthalingam and Sivasithambaram and present TNA Leader Sampanthan had addressed to the then Indian Prime Minister, late Shri Rajiv Gandhi on 28 October 1987, pointing out how hollow and inadequate the 13th Amendment promulgated by the former Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayewardene had been and sought the then Indian Government’s intervention on behalf of the Tamils of North East Province of Sri Lanka…In my opinion, the situation prevailing in North-East Provinces in SL today is almost akin to the context that prevailed then, meaning July 1987!”
Hyperinflation of Tamil expectations
So is the context changed or is it “almost akin” to the context that prevailed in July 1987? If it is the former, then there is little chance of qualitatively enhanced devolution and if the perception is the latter, there is a serious lack of grasp of manifest reality.
Whichever it is, the Chief Minister recalls a quintessential continuity of the stance of moderate Tamil nationalism, namely that the 13th Amendment, which was inpoint of fact the best deal that Delhi could secure for the Tamils of Sri Lanka under conditions far more favourable to the latter, was simply not enough even at the get go. What we have therefore is a permanent political condition and mindset, that of hyperinflation of Tamil expectations.
This alone makes it difficult for India or anyone else to operate on the basis of a strategy of the full implementation of the 13th Amendment, not least since the Sinhala politicians will have obvious doubts as to what lies down the road if the 13th Amendment is fully implemented.
In a more substantive sense, what are the factors which can push beyond the 13th Amendment when even those factors which made for that amendment are no longer in operation? The Tamil insurgency has been soundly defeated; India will not blot its copybook in the region by returning to openly coercive diplomacy in relation to a neighbour and India does not have an entrenched local supporter such as President Jayewardene, his large Parliamentary majority and his political will to face down Southern discontent.
Given the balance of factors, the full implementation of the 13th Amendment would itself be a tall order and could be made to stick only if it were graduated – with a moratorium on transfer of ‘police powers’—andcame with an Indianor Indo-US guarantee that it constituted the cap or ceiling of reform.
The discussion on ethnic reconciliation also takes place in a multiple context which is unpropitious to a change. The 13th Amendment pivoted on the presidential system and the confidence that it contained a plenitude of power that could deal with any centrifugal temptation. Today that presidential system is on the cusp of dismantling or downsizing. Without that lynchpin, just how much devolution is permissible?
To put it differently, the two moves that are being canvassed by the reformists, Tamil and Sinhala, are in utterly contradictory directions: on the one hand the enhancement of the 13th Amendment or a shift beyond it, and on the other, the downsizing or dismantling of the pivot of the powerful elected presidency that makes devolution safe and therefore feasible.
PatronisingWestern pressure
The second dimension of the emerging context is the patronising Western pressure on accountability for acts committed during the war against the Tigers. This is a practice that is not part of Asia’s political culture and with good reason because the socially lacerating and politically polarising consequences are rightly perceived in Asia as dangerously destabilising of democratic transitions. The pressure on accountability will retard, not advance the prospects on national consensus on devolution.
The unpropitious Sri Lankan context has a third dimension, namely the inevitability, perhaps imminence, of a parliamentary election. In which ever sequence, it is only the completion of the political process with its two stages, the Constitutional change and the parliamentary election, that will yield a new balance of political forces that makes a serious national deliberation on devolution at all possible.
