the wigneswaran factor sampanthan’s master-stroke
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The Wigneswaran Factor: Sampanthan’sMaster-StrokePhoto courtesy Lanka Standard
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Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka-16 Jul, 2013In this country, it is a rarity to witness really smart
politics on strategic issues. We have just done so and got two breakthrough moves on
the same issue. The first was by President Rajapaksa who chose to go ahead with the
election to the Northern Provincial Council and have a meeting with Mr Sampanthan,
the TNA leader. The second was by Mr Sampanthan who worked hard to persuade his
coalition to field Justice Wigneswaran as the Chief Ministerial candidate.
Justice Wigneswaran is a candidate that every Tamil can be proud of to have as his and
her representative, and may make a Chief Minister that most Sri Lankans of whichever
ethnicity or religion can be proud of. In fact he will have the salutary effect of raising
the bar of performance for every chief minister and Sri Lankan politician throughout
the island.
The choice of Justice Wigneswaran illustrates the kind of strategic thinking that is
needed in politics when fundamental issues are at stake; strategic thinking that is
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willing to stand up to and sacrifice more obvious ethno-populist passions and
pressures for the defence of vital interests of the entirety of the people and place one
represents. The choice further shows a capacity on the part of Mr Sampanthan (and his
able young supporter Mr Sumanthiran) to think through those strategic interests in a
manner that transcends baser ethno-populist sentiment. In short, Mr Sampanthan and
Mr Sumanthiran have accurately understood strategic Tamil interests which they have
not confused with the lowest common denominator of Tamil sentiments.
Justice Wigneswaran is a symbol of Tamil ‘soft power’, which is being depleted in the
Sinhala society and most certainly the State. If handled correctly he can become a
symbol of the soft power of Sri Lanka as a society and a country. The Sinhala
Establishment has to get its head around the fact that though the Tigers were utterly
defeated, the Tamil community has not been cowed and has bounced back politically.
One of the reasons for this resilience and recovery is the continued availability of an
educated elite, literate in an international language (English)—a sociological resource
which has been depleted on the Sinhala side by and driven into alienation or exile by
the state of suffocation imposed by the State. On the Tamil side the English educated
elite is still available for politics and public service and is welcomed by Tamil society
while on the Sinhala side, the public welcomes the incorporation of the elite but the
dominant monolingual petty bourgeoisie which monopolises the state apparatus, does
not. The choice of Justice Wigneswaran as Chief Ministerial candidate shows firstly,
that the Tamil professional elite is still intact and willing to engage in politics and
secondly, that the Sinhala state which has shed the equivalent human resources will
find it difficult to compete in the regional and international arena.
It is not however a zero-sum game in which Tamil interests win and Sinhala interests
lose. Indeed the choice they have pushed for, Justice Wigneswaran is the best chance
to make the 13thamendment work and is therefore the best hope for North-South
reintegration on the basis of frankness, dignity and mutual respect.
Whether or not it was intended as such – and I suspect, not—the choices made by
Mahinda Rajapaksa (to hold the election) and R. Sampathan (to field Justice
Wigneswaran) can be considered as complementary, and when taken together, offer
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the best chance for political reconciliation. It could mark the beginning of winning the
peace and building a new Sri Lankan nation.
If both sides get it wrong though, it could mark the end of the road for a united Sri
Lanka.
The single most important factor about the choice of Justice Wigneswaran as Chief
Minister is that by so doing, the TNA has upped the ante and raised the potential cost
to Colombo of any unfair and peremptory dissolution of the Council. In short, by
choosing Justice Wigneswaran, Mr Sampanthan has cleverly installed a deterrent to
arbitrary dissolution of the NPC.
Sri Lanka, it must be recalled, is haunted by the negative experience of the North
Eastern Provincial Council. One of the reasons for its failure was the personality of
Vardarajaperumal who was chosen as Chief Minister (despite my strenuous
representations to the EPRLF leader K Pathmanabha as well as the Indian side).
Perumal’s lack of political maturity and realism in dealing with the Sri Lankan state,
his mercurial populism and alcohol-fuelled adventurism were among the main reasons
for the mishandling of the inevitable contradictions between the periphery and the
centre.
Justice Wigneswaran is hardly a Vardarajaperumal. Educated in Colombo and a
distinguished senior representative of one of the arms of the Sri Lankan state itself, he
has long functioned in a multiethnic social universe. A dignified yet outspoken,
multilingual man, he is in the current circumstances, the best possible bridge between
North and South. He is, in sum, the TNA’s Lakshman Kadirgamar.
If the deep state is hoping to de-stabilise the elected Northern provincial council, the
security managers will have to think again. In the event of a manufactured crisis and a
creeping or dramatic coup by the capital, who would be the better interlocutor with the
world community; who would be better able to convince the world’s capitals? The
national security fundamentalists or an erudite, reasonable, articulate ex-Supreme
Court judge?
With Sampanthan, Sumanthiran and Wigneswaran, the fate of the Tamil community is
in the best possible democratic hands.
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I am especially gratified at the turn of events not only since I have been a supporter of
devolution since 1984 and a Minister in the first North-eastern Provincial Council a
quarter of a century ago, but because it bears out what I told the (then) Archbishop of
Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams in early 2007, when he called on President Rajapaksa.
There were several Cabinet Ministers, senior officials and Church personalities
including Bishop Duleep de Chickera at the meeting. I gave a brief run down on the
war as satisfying the major criteria of Just War theory. The Archbishop of Canterbury
challenged me with a counter question. He had been wrestling with just war theory for
about fifteen years and was concerned about a ‘just outcome’. Did I think that this war
would lead to one and if so why and what were the chances? He queried. I replied that
the military defeat of the LTTE by the armed forces of the state would be accompanied
by the automatic re-enfranchisement of the Tamil people. This inevitable reopening of
electoral space and the re-enfranchisement of the Tamil voter would give the Tamil
people the leverage to re-insert their issues and demands at the very centre of Lankan
politics. The revival of a political process in those areas would enable the criteria of a
‘just outcome’ to be met to some degree while further advance towards that goal was
possible by negotiation between the state and the elected Tamil representatives. That
was my answer, and current dynamics seem to be proving it right.
If a troika can crystallise, comprising the war-winning and pragmatic President
Rajapaksa, the TNA’s R Sampanthan and the Northern provincial council’s
Wigneswaran, Sri Lanka may yet win the peace, 30 years after Black July 1983. With
the forces of ‘radical evil’ (as the great Goethe designated it) defeated in the North and
East but not yet in the South, it will be a harsh and bitter struggle though—and a grim,
emotive, turbulent transition. Living with and accommodating a TNA run Northern
provincial council led by Justice Wigneswaran will require and may generate a
profound shift in the collective psyche.
Justice Wigneswaran is no Alfred Duraiyappa. He will not bend the knee and tug his
forelock before the Sinhala Establishment. He is nobody’s “malli”. An interview given
to Ayesha Zuhair in 2011 reveals him to be a federalist who stands for the right of self-
determination, though he never strays into endorsing secession. What is tricky is not
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the federalism but the fact that in most parts of the world, federalists do not stand for
self –determination, though he belongs to that tendency which does. A Council led by
him will be a counterweight to the dangerous neo-conservative surge which threatens
not merely Northern lands but Southern film making! The Northern Council with him
as Chief Minister will not be the answer to Sri Lanka’s needs but will constitute a
counterpoint which will in turn help us discover a middle path, a golden mean between
the nationalisms of the South and North. He is a challenge but the challenge he will
constitute could be a positive one; just the benign shock therapy that the Sri Lankan
state and Sinhala society need to accommodate and integrate if they are to catch up
with the 21st century world.
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