27th April 1997

India at 50: lessons from Sri Lanka

If we do not watch out, we are in serious dan ger or committing in the second half-century of our Independence the mistakes that have plagued Sri Lanka in the first half-century of its Independence. In both countries, the core problem of nation-building has been the relationship between ethnicity and nationhood. We found one answer. The Sri Lankans found another. Ours was the right answer: we have survived. Theirs was the wrong answer: their problem has become intractable. What underlines the apprehension of our making their mistakes is that there is an astonishing parallelism in the political history of the two countries, especially in the dimension of ethnicity and nationhood, through the 20th century.

As in India, so in Sri Lanka, till the advent of the Twenties there was a relative absence of communalism, either religious, racial or linguistic, in nationalist politics. The brothers Ponnambalam — Sir Arunachalam and, later, Sir Ramanathan — were not only the unchallenged leaders of the Tamil-speaking community, but also the leaders of the Sri Lankan political class, in easy and comfortable relationship with eminent Sinhalese like F. R. Senanayake and D, B. Jayatilaka.

Divisions

The papering over of communal divisions in Indian politics by the Lucknow Pact of 1916 was paralleled in Sri Lanka by the formation in 1919 of a nationwide, all-ethnic, secular .Ceylon National Congress, under the leadership of Ponnambalam Aruna-chalam. But even as the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League between them communalised Indian politics through the ’20s and ’30s, so in Sri Lanka did the ethnic factor begin rearing its head in all its dimensions — religious, linguistic, racial.

The somewhat unceremonious exit of Arunachalam from the Sri Lankan political scene in 1921 signalled the emergence of ethnicity and nationhood as the leitmotif or politics in the island; the appointment of the Donough-more Commission in 1931 to examine the further evolution of constitutional arrangements for the country further aggravated the communalisation of Sri Lankan politics. It was, in fact, to underline the ethnic divide, rather than find a solution for it, that in 1926 the young SWRD Bandaranaike proposed federalism as the answer to Sri Lanka’s then nascent ethnic problem.

His position was the logical culmination of the philosophy of ethnic separatism underlying the approach to nationhood of the Sinhala Mahajana Sabha, established in the same year as the Ceylon National Congress. Indeed, so consistent was SWRD Bandaranaike in his approach to state structures based on ethnic separateness that as early as 1940, as Minister of Local Government, he proposed Provincial Councils.

Tragically, however, for Sri Lanka they had no Mahatma Gandhi to steer the nationalist movement away from the shoals of narrow ethnic identities and communal politics. Their nationalist leaders like the Senanayake brothers and Jayatilaka were too enmeshed in the ethos of the Sinhala Mahajana Sabha to escape from its sectarian compulsions, however much, in their personal lives and philosophical attitudes, they might have belonged to an eclectic, inclusive, composite tradition.

Hindu Mahasabha

The top rung of the Congress kept itself away from community-based and communal politics and, after 1937, prohibited the participation of Congressmen in the activities of the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS and other such communal organisations. In Sri Lanka, in contrast, the top-rung secular Sinhala leadership was not so careful. The result was that there was not only a growing rift through the 30s and 40s between the Tamils and the Sinhalas, there also developed the rift between the soft Sinhalese nationalism of the Senanayake brand and the harder Sinhala Nationalism of the Bandaranaike brand.

The initiative for mantaining a secular composite all-ethnic Sri Lanka nationhood passed to the Left primarily the remarkable labour leader A. E. Goonesinha and, after his eclipse in the late 30s to the Lanka Sama Samaja Party under N. M. Perera, Phillip Gunawardene and Pieter Keuneman. Alas as in India, so in Sri Lanka, the Left did not indigenise its imported Marxism-Leninism, concentrating too much on the urban prolitariat and organised labour and not enough on the rural masses, with the result that in both countries the Left lost the role which in two such poor countries one would have imagined might well have devolved on them by right.

The Partition of India as the price of Independence, reinforced rather than diminished the impetus in the newly-independent India towards the assertion of a composite nationhood and the establishment of a secular state. In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, the absence of a similar ideological commitment to a composite nationhood brought to the fore, on the very morrow of Independence, the problems of ethnicity and nationhood which have plagued Sri Lanka ever since. To put it aphoristically (and, therefore, somewhat simplistically), whereas India posited a unitary nationhood and a plural state, Sri Lanka posited a plural nationhood and a unitary state. The Indian formula worked because a unitary nationhood permitted of the devolution by the Union of the Union’s powers to the federal units without calling into question the indissolubility of the Union.

In Sri Lanka, the call for federation came to be associated with the apprehension of claims to independence, now or in due course, for the several Srl Lankan ‘nations’ (leading, inter alia - and notoriously - to SWRD Bandaranaike’s rejection of his youthful espousal of ‘federalism’ and ‘Provincial Councils’.) The self-description by the Sinhalese of themselves as the Sinhala nation provoked the backlash of the Tamil describing themselves the Tamil nation. Chelvanayakam, founder of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (which misleadingly but quite deliberately, he translated into English as the ‘Tamil Federal Party’) put this point bluntly in a speech at Jaffna College on August 24 1952: “When I first went to the south of Ceylon in 1915, the Sinhala people there lived as a race: today they have become a nation. We in North and East Ceylon should also achieve national status.

Independence

That was the beginning of the end of G. G. Ponnam-balam’s last-ditch effort to promote Tamil interests within the framework of a composite Sri Lankan nationhood. Sinhala majoritarianism had, in any case, made the Ponnambalam position look unreal, even catatonic. Indeed, not even Chelvanayakam’s stinging remark, “This is your Independence, not ours,” could persuade the Sinhala political leadership to abandon its espousal of a majoritarian nationhood. The rejection of a composite nationhood by both Tamil and Sinhala leaders generated an upward spiral of clashes followed by insincere agreements followed by betrayal, until the Holocaust was unleashed in 1983.

The Sinhala dream of an island which they would rule with the Tamils living on Sinhala sufferance has become a nightmare. On the Tamil side Tamil nationalist politics is so caught in the coils of violence, fratricidal killings and internecine war that a Jaffna University Tamil academic Rajan Hoole, mourns, in the current issue of Counterpoint, Colombo’s thought-provoking political magazine, that “The (Tamil) people have become so disillusioned with the politics of llberation that they expect nothing good from the liberators.” Tamil Eelam, he bemoans, is “neither policy nor a goal”. It is, he says, ‘a slogan’. There seems no way out of this unending tunnel.

If Hindutva either rules or becomes the determining parameter of our conception of ourselves as a nation, all that the Sri Lankans have suffered for the last fifty years would be ours to suffer for the next fifty. Therefore before we begin preening ourselves on India at Fifty being better than Pakistan, we must ask ourselves whether we intend India at Hundred to be worse than Sri Lanka.

–The Hindu

Return to the News/Comment contents page