How not to get anything on a platter
Exemplars of democracy should be able to handle any situation democratically. Therefore the fighting between Karuna's troops and Prabhakaran's troops should be converted into a ballot rather than a bullet affair.

Then the winner will be rightly able to say "we are the sole representatives of the Tamil people'' as they always intone after an election. And, for Prabhakaran who told Anita Pratap once that he is not willing to accept Eelam on a platter, isn't the ballot the more heroic than the bullet?

Everyone knows, stuffing a ballot box requires more zeal than firing an AK 47 -- not to mention more training. Giving ballots to children getting off a bus, is also infinitely more subversive that giving mere grenades to seven eleven year olds. It is more subversive, hence a better way to get Eelam without having it on a platter, what?

There they were the other day, the Tigers, exhorting the virtues of press freedom. They were saying that Karuna is stifling the freedom of expression.

That's true. Karuna burnt newspapers which were not favorable to him it was reported. It would have not been so bad perhaps if he had stacked those newspapers together and strung them up on a lamppost. But you don't hang newspaper stacks on lamp posts; that's treatment reserved only for bumped-off humans in the Wanni. Besides, newspapers are certainly not for the burning….

Thamilchelvam said it is a tragedy that the Karuna group is not adhering to democratic norms. A lot of democratic norms we are told were on display in the North last week, and in the Wanni, but none of these democratic norms such as giving ballot papers to children getting off the bus, impersonating dead men and stuffing boxes bothered anyone back here in the South.

None of them were saying "they are doing better at our own game'. Instead, everybody was so keen to marry off the UNP to the TNA. The LTTE may claim that stuffing a ballot box is also a democratic right. But, listen to them in the South, and there is a whole industry which is claiming that the LTTE which is elected on a platform of representing the Tamil people should be considered an equal stakeholder in forming a government in Sri Lanka. After monitoring the elections, they should know eh what?

But the NGO types say that the danger to the Sri Lankan state is coming from the shortsighted Sri Lankans. We can almost imagine this coming from Dr Uyadeva Jayangoda at the next seminar in Colombo. He will slide his left hand over his balding pate as if to touch some imaginary hairy tuft, and then he will deliver appropriately that imaginary platitude. "The Sri Lankan ruling elite has been unable to offer any response to the LTTE's clear signal that they too can be equal participants in the democratic process.''

Exit from the Foundation Institute 40 crestfallen people, now feeling guilty as hell. But he is incremental, this man. It is only at the next seminar when the election is old and dead and strung up on a lamp post that he will say close to 100 per cent voted for the Tigers to be the sole representative of the Tamil people, and "the recalcitrant Sinhala elite doesn't recognize this.'' Exit 100 guilty people.

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