The national question in focus again – Mahinda and Bahu in London

Kumar David

It was a week of contrasts. President Rajapakse was turned away by the Oxford Union because the organisers feared protests would get out of control. Channel-4 TV made matters worse by panning naked bodies on the ground and airing fresh footage of Sri Lankan soldiers allegedly tying-up and shooting Tamil youth of both sexes. The programme said it could not broadcast other images in its possession because they were lurid and horrific and soldiers’ chatter suggested females had been sexually abused before murder. Then came another bombshell; Wikileaks released a cable from the American Ambassador in Colombo to Washington which opines, echoing many at home and abroad, that thousands of Tamil
civilians were killed in the last stages of the war and that the “civilian and military leadership including President Mahninda Rajapakse, his brother and opposition candidate General Fonseka” were
responsible.

NSSP Secretary Vickremabahu was in London at the end of November and it was a contrast. From the web and reports of friends and comrades I have learnt that he was well received by the Tamil diaspora and spoke at a gathering of several thousand on Heroes Day. The NSSP London Branch also organised four meetings, well attended by Sinhalese, Tamils and locals. It has been reported that the British Tamil Forum,
an umbrella organisation with large participation, and the NSSP reached agreement to resist dictatorship and support human and democratic rights in all parts of Lanka. The receptions accorded to Bahu and Mahinda were a study in contrasts; even Sinhalese in the UK did not rally around Mahinda, perhaps because of the persecution of General Fonseka.

[After this article was submitted Bahu and Jayalath Jayasuriya have come under physical assault and political intimidation by government goons and politicians. All democrats must condemn these fascistic acts and rally to their defence].

Marxists and the Tamil question

This is as good an occasion as any to revisit the stand of the NSSP on the national question in so far as it concerns the ‘Ceylon’ Tamils (I am not referring to the Upcountry Tamils today). My association with
Bahu on the national question goes back a long way, forty years, to the early 1970s when we were working away as the Vama Tendency inside the LSSP which, almost ten years later, surfaced as the NSSP. To the
best of my recollection Bahu and I had no disagreements on this issue (but not some others) in those years. I was Secretary for the National Question, responsible for developing theoretical and practical aspects and Bahu was not only General Secretary but also deeply involved in the topic. It was at this time that we rediscovered, re-learnt and I dare say made some contribution to the crucial factor on the global
political landscape in the second half of the Twentieth Century, ethnicity.

It was in the course of these internal discussions that we came to reject the LSSP’s bourgeois democratic thesis on the national question as falling short of a Marxist paradigm and restored the right to
self-determination as our point of departure. It was also at this time that we grasped that Rosa Luxemburg, for all her scintillating brilliance, was wrong and Lenin wholly right on the national question. The key task was to fight majority nation chauvinism, in Lenin’s case Great Russian chauvinism; combating the defensive nationalism of frightened minorities had to take second place. The slogan of an alliance of the working class and minority nations (which even Mao grasped but the JVP has not to this day) was forged by Lenin in the crucible of two Russian Revolutions, 1905 and 1917.

Marx’s admonition resonates to this day: “The English working class will never accomplish anything” until it first solves the Irish question; “reaction in England has its roots in Ireland”. The Sinhalese working people will never free themselves from the apron strings that bind them to reaction, backwardness and chauvinism – Mahinda worship for example – until they first free themselves of anti-Tamil prejudice. The JVP will never liberate itself of petty-bourgeoisie limitations until it cuts its umbilical cord to remnants of Sinhala chauvinism.

Intellectually, Vasu was a follower on the national question; he would not dare voice anything different from the party position; but he was weak. Not that Vasu is a chauvinist, absolutely not; there is not a drop of chauvinism in him, but weak in the sense that he could be pushed to compromise. The weakness surfaced after Bahu and Vasu split (for which I blame Bahu more than Vasu but that is another topic for another time). I witnessed the slide at close quarters since I stayed in his faction and then joined his DLF. (Actually I would have liked to associate with both NSSP and LSSP in those intermediate years when Vasu was in the LSSP, but this was not practicable). Vasu’s lack of intellectual depth and strength on the national question became explicit in 2000 when, to UNP cheers, he broke with the LSSP and opposed Chandrika’s constitutional proposal in a great carnival of fanfare. Drafted by Jayampathy Wickremeratne and Neelan Thiruchelvam, this constitutional proposal remains to date the most progressive ever presented in the country. Vasu’s further decline and complete capitulation to Mahinda’s chauvinism was easy; he refused to support my demand that the DLF should call for a ceasefire in 2008 and refused to condemn the war; he felt sorry for the Tamils but was impotent.

Bahu and the LTTE

In the 1990s differences surfaced between my attitude to the LTTE and Bahu’s position. These are variations among cognoscenti and I have refrained from blowing them up in public; it is foolish to let Sinhala chauvinists and reactionary Tamil nationalists drive a wedge between Marxists. Now the LTTE is gone and the discourse on the national question has reopened at a new level; it is productive to explore
these nuances.

I recognise the LTTE led the armed struggle of the Tamil nation against linguistic discrimination, racial pogroms and military oppression by the state. But I was also critical of LTTE militarization, use of terrorism against civilians, curtailment of Tamil freedoms, murder of political leaders even Tamils (including our
own Annamalai), and idiotic attitude to India and the international community. Bahu however has been much more forgiving. His explanation has been that while Trotsky, a Jew, was harsh in his criticism of the
Jewish Bund (a petty bourgeois outfit struggling to salvage Russian Jews), Lenin as a Russian was far more accommodating. This is understandable as psychology, but I don’t think it is good Marxism.

A critique of the LTTE is of even greater importance today when the Tamil community at home and abroad has begun a search for new directions in a post-LTTE world. Far more important than acknowledging
the military heroism of the LTTE as a fighting outfit, the Tamils need to understand and digest where it went wrong politically. I have written about this numerous times in these columns; Bahu is not contributing to this discourse.

Self-determination revisited

Theoretically, the point of departure for Marxists on the Tamil question is the concept of self-determination. Neither the nature of the state, nor the objective circumstances of the community have changed so much that the fundamental socio-economic and political terrain has transformed. There have been substantial demographic transformations of the Tamil community – about three-quarter million in the diaspora and it is said nearly half those in Lanka live outside the North and East – but it is not yet certain that these material
changes vitiate the right to self-determination including the right to succeed. But self-determination is not a fetish; nothing is lost in revisiting theory.

What we recognised was the democratic right to succeed if the people so wished. This distinguishes Marxists from the intellectually flabby soft-left and from the LTTE; the former dared not stand for the right
to secede and the latter thought that the right was vested in itself, not the people. The former could not surmount middle class intellectual blinkers, the latter exercised dictatorship over the Tamils.

There is however a difference between recognising a right and advocating and encouraging secession. Whether one proactively calls upon a minority nation to secede, in its own and greater interests,
differs case by case and depends on the particular circumstances. Arundhathi Roy seems to imply both the Kashmiri people and India may be better off if a united greater-Kashmir secedes from both India and
Pakistan as a separate nation state; my inclination is to agree. In the case of Lanka, while recognising the right of the Tamil nation to do so, we advised the Tamils against secession in the interests of the
Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim people. Why? That would be another long and dated story.

But why dated? When the LTTE was at full throttle the question of Thamil Eelam was relevant and arguably represented the will of the Tamils, though in my view no more than about a third of the Tamils supported secession even at peak; but democracy demanded it be put to the test. Now after the war, Tamils in-country are unmoved by Eelam or secessionist proposals. It is different in the diaspora, but this is not a matter on which the diaspora can be allowed to dictate terms. Go a step further; hypothetically, imagine a referendum on the secession issue in the North and the East. There is not a shadow of doubt that the Eastern Province with a non-Tamil majority will reject it by a landslide. Then what, if at all is the North going to go it alone?
Politically, self-determination becomes passé if the people themselves lose interest.

The time has come to revisit the self-determination/secession issue both as theoretical concept (Is it still objectively relevant to Lanka, given demographic changes?) and political theme (Are the Tamils still interested?). Why not some forum or NGO arrange a symposium; aren’t we all bored with the repetitive menu of low-level stuff they keep inviting us to? Or are they all shit-scared of JR’s Sixth Amendment?