Opposite Editorial

Will the ban solve the problem?  - Point of view

An open letter to Mullah Omar
 

Point of view

Will the ban solve the problem? 

By Rajiva Wijesinha

So the British government has banned the LTTE, at last, at last, as Trollope described the conclusion of an especially romantic love affair. That affair was unusual, because it was the lady who made the running, proving her devotion by rescuing the man she loved from a murder charge. Now I don't quite see Tony Blair as the innocent and idealistic Phineas Finn, but Chandrika is certainly recognisable as the resourceful older woman who finally got her way through a mixture of shrewdness and sultry charm.

That lady however was immensely energetic, both before and after achieving her aim. In Chandrika's case however one worries about the energy levels. When she has to, she can certainly do her stuff, but whether she can be consistent and thorough in carrying out any particular programme is another question.

And what programme should she carry out now? The trouble with the whole LTTE question is that it has taken attention away from the real problem, namely the situation of the Tamils within Sri Lanka. The Tamil question arose primarily because, for over 30 years, the majority parties had hijacked the state, effectively turning it into an instrument of Sinhala rather than Sri Lankan government. Government ceased to concern itself equally with all the people of the country but rather privileged only a section, in terms of a particular language and a particular religion.

And unfortunately there was no alternative, given the extreme statism of the dispensation, for those left out. When the state controlled so much of the economy, if you could not get state employment, you were out in the cold. When the state had a monopoly over education, if you were discriminated against, you had no alternative. And so thorough a mess did the state make of education and the economy that, even though things have begun to change, there seems to be no escape route for those at the periphery in particular.

And part of the statist mindset was to destroy all alternatives. So you now have the strange situation of the other Tamil political parties shedding tears for the LTTE, even though almost all of them have been victims of LTTE terrorism themselves. The cynical would say those Tamil parties need the LTTE so that they themselves can continue to be taken seriously. 

The more sympathetic would note that it was governments as much as the LTTE that emasculated them so thoroughly that, on their own, they can achieve nothing for the people they claim to represent.

The ironies of the situation came home to me forcefully last week, when I was talking to an Indian journalist about a seminar he had attended in London some years back. He had thought it would be about the Tamil situation, but he found it was nothing but an LTTE propaganda exercise. More astonishingly, he found that one of the star performers was A. J. Wilson.

Now I know that in Sri Lanka one is supposed to engage in nothing but hagiography about the dead. But, even if one should be sympathetic about someone as ultimately tragic as A. J. Wilson, it will not help to forget what happened during the Jayewardene regime to leave the Tigers in their awesome present position as apparently the only representatives of the Tamils.

For it was Wilson who occupied that exalted position in the seventies, negotiating on behalf of the TULF instead of their parliamentary leader Amirthalingam. Perhaps it was assumed that he commanded Jayewardene's confidence. Certainly he deserved to, in that he produced a sycophantic and unscholarly work entitled the 'Gaullist Constitution' which suggested that Jayewardene needed and deserved extravagant powers so that he could save Sri Lanka.

Wilson's adoration survived even the 1981 DDC election and the burning of the Jaffna Public Library. Though based in Canada from the seventies, he was back in Sri Lanka in July 1983, when the TULF finally called Jayewardene's bluff by refusing to attend the All Party Conference that had been summoned (at last, at last), six years after it was promised. 

With that refusal the pogramme of 1983 was unleashed, I myself believe, in order to bring the Tamils to heel though of course it backfired in a way that Jayewardene and his instruments had failed to anticipate. Jayewardene himself kindly remembered to call up Wilson and offer him safe conduct out of the country.

Wilson accepted. Although he continued to be involved in various negotiations after that, he was no longer really a player. Indians and militants became far more important. When despite this the TULF still did relatively well in the 1989 election, the LTTE decided it was time to consolidate. Amirthalingam was killed, and Sam Tambimuttu too, and though Neelan Tiruchelvam tried to maintain some sort of independent identity, the Tigers were able to present themselves as the only organisation that had to be taken seriously. Not surprisingly Wilson, like so many others in the diaspora, whether influenced by guilt or despair, played along with them.

What else could he have done? Had he stuck to being a political scientist, instead of trying to be a politician, he could have diagnosed more forcefully the causes of Tamil militancy, and urged that the problems be solved, not merely their symptoms. But, unfortunately, we do not have think tanks in this country divorced from active politics. So we continue with seeking a package that will satisfy all the politicians, without concentrating on the issues that gave those politicians their platforms.

So the trouble now is that, with the LTTE proscribed in Britain, our politicians will begin to think that they have won the battle. The knights in shining armour, Blair and Straw and Duffield, have vanquished the dragon. But the fact is, the problems still remain - the lack of opportunities for Tamils, disproportionately desperate in a context in which we all lack opportunities; and the sense of grievance that needs to be dispelled. And one has to wonder whether Chandrika, as she enthusiastically plans her next westward trip, has the energy to deal with all this.
 

An open letter to Mullah Omar 

By Shamsul Islam 

Great Chief, you must also be feeling bad that some commentators are targeting you and your holy crusaders for indulging in medieval vandalism, when, in fact, you are committed to a kind of civilisational cleansing which has no parallels in the known history of humankind. In ancient, medieval and modern times we had barbarians who brought death and destruction to people and objects which belonged to the realm of aliens. However, Exalted Mullah, the Taliban under your leadership represents an exceptional case in history, destroying its own civilisation that too in toto. No one should accuse you of being sectarian or narrow-minded. You are not blasting only what the world believes to be a magnificent cultural heritage of Buddhist civilisation; you have also turned the great land of Afghanistan into rubble and converted the energetic, beautiful and sturdy Afghans into beggars and orphans. Thus equating your kind of religious/cultural cleansing to medieval vandalism does not do justice to your kind of heroics. 

Great Defender of the Faith, you must also prove the pseudo- Muslims wrong when they talk of the medieval age as a period of great resurgence of Islamic arts, architecture, literature and other creative activities. You must come out with more religious decrees to censure all references of tolerance in the life of Prophet Mohammed. The tribe of pseudo-Muslims keeps telling us stories like the one in which the Prophet was invited to a non- Muslim's house and when time for namaaz came, he came out of the house to say prayers. This pained the host as he thought that the Prophet did not find the place good enough to say prayers. The Prophet explained that he did not pray in the house so that some day some fanatic Muslim might not claim it as a holy place of Islam arguing that he had prayed there. Another story is that the Kaaba, the holiest place of Islam, existed as a holy place before the arrival of Islam too. All such information and incidents of co-existence must be kept under wraps. The Muslim Ummah or community should not be weakened by the circulation of such stories. Muslims must be forced to learn that any kind of tolerance or co-existence is sheer weakness. 

Your Highness, we feel that only the destruction of statues of the Buddha (like the ones at Bamiyan) will not erase evil history. You have rightly declared that, "Afghan history was secondary to the history of Islam". In order to accomplish this task fully, you may please also ban all languages of Afghanistan as pre-Islamic people might have been speaking some or all of these. Moreover, we beg you to immediately issue a fatwa asking all Afghans to disown their forefathers who lived in the pre- Islamic period. 

Sir, once the idols have been turned into sand you must also order the blasting of the Hindukush range of mountains in Afghanistan as the infidels had used these mountains too. 

Respected Mullah Sir, you should rest assured that at present you are the leader in this great task of demolition of civilisations. We have always been grateful to the greatest democracy of the world, the U.S., and its intelligence agency, the CIA, which leave no stone unturned in making this world secure for democracy and their small-time fixers such as Pakistan (not in their good books at present) for making you appear on the world scene. Their concoction of narcotics and religion, in your case Islam, has done wonders, first, to fill the coffers of the western arms suppliers and, second, secure Afghanistan for you. You should not get too agitated over criticism that the acts of destroying statues of great historical and artistic importance are, "barbaric and anti- civilisational". Thanks to our above godfathers every country and every corner of the world has its own Taliban. 

Moreover, we want to stress that our country requires your urgent help to boost this industry here. Despite demolition of the Babri mosque and burning of missionaries such as Graham Staines and support of the state to organisations like your own, our Talibans have little public support. But we hope, with a little help from you, they too can reap the harvest. In this regard, we welcome the statement of your spokesperson in the U.S. that the statues in Afghanistan were being destroyed in retaliation for the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992. It is a great development to be welcomed. The cultural demolition squads of our two countries must work in tandem and help each other to grow. In fact, the demolition plans of the Taliban of Afghanistan vis-a- vis the Buddhist heritage, Sir, have rejuvenated different outfits of the RSS here. They have already declared their intentions of destroying a few more religious places of Muslims. This is a healthy development. Please keep it up. Congratulations for the news that Sri Lanka which has no history of Muslim- Buddhist clashes is soon going to have these. Thus Sri Lanka becomes the newest beneficiary of your wisdom. Amen! Great Crusader of the Faith, we want to congratulate you for being a great politician with a perfect sense of time. It has generally been believed that mullahs know nothing of worldly affairs. The enemies of the Taliban regime of Afghanistan had been criticising your leadership (which was unfortunately believed by a substantial section of the Afghan population) for destroying the whole of Afghanistan and turning the population into beggars. With one master stroke (your fatwa for immediate destruction of the Buddhist heritage), your Exalted Self has changed the whole agenda. Now no one is talking of small and mean things such as jobs, food, health and shelter in Afghanistan. (Great Mullah, please do tell us whether you run some coaching classes for imparting this kind of strategy. In our country, we find dedicated followers of your wisdom resurrecting the Ram Temple agenda whenever elections are due.) Islam must be saved and that can be done only by destroying a few evil objects of the remote past. You should not fall into the trap of the enemies of Islam by entering into any kind of debate on why suddenly these statues have become dangerous. Such debate is bound to divert your holy attention from the real task of destroying the idols in order to save the Faith. 

Mullah Omar, we do not want to take more of your time as we know that you are absolutely busy in dictating more fatwas for cleansing Afghanistan of its dirt and dust. We envy you as you have to take care of the non-living only as the living have already gone to Paradise courtesy the Taliban regime. Keep this up. Khuda Hafiz! 

- Hindu, Chennai

(The writer is attached to the Department of Political Science, Delhi University.)

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