Hobson’s choice for northerners
July 28, 2013, 8:19 pmDefence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has urged the people of the North to reject, at the upcoming NPC polls, those who backed the LTTE’s terrorism for whatever reason. Ideally, this, they ought to do for their own sake. However, if they were to do so, they might not be able be able to exercise their franchise at all; they might have to walk the streets with lamps in hand during daytime, like Diogenes of Sinope, looking for ‘clean’ candidates to vote for!
In this country, there’s nary a political party that has not either resorted to terrorism or supported it from a safe distance or capitulated to pressure from terrorists. It is the TNA which is usually hauled over the coals for its collaboration with the LTTE. It recognised the LTTE as the sole representative of the Tamil people in spite of the latter’s mindless terrorism and shamelessly functioned as Prabhakaran’s mouthpiece.
The dyed-in-the-wool LTTE sympathisers are of the view the TNA has let the side down by accepting what Prabhakaran rejected lock, stock and barrel way back in the late 1980s—the provincial council system; its critics argue that its decision to settle for devolution under the 13th Amendment is only a feint and the killer hook is bound to come in the form of an internationally backed demand for federalism sooner or later. But, the fact remains that the TNA’s traditional support base has remained virtually intact in spite of its association with the LTTE.
Haven’t other political parties helped further the LTTE’s interests either out of their own volition or under duress? The UNP has a history of not only assisting the LTTE in legitimising its cause through peace accords and talks but also giving it arms, ammunition, money, shelter and building materials. It gave LTTE leaders chopper rides and VIP treatment at the very airport they had partially destroyed and enabled them to consolidate their power in the North and the East on the pretext of talking peace and dong political work. If the northerners were to heed the Defence Secretary’s exhortation, then they cannot vote for the UNP.
What about the holier-than-thou SLFP? True, it is an SLFP-led government which defeated the LTTE and made NPC polls possible. But, there have been instances where it also gave in to Prabhakaran.
In 1994, it may be recalled, President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga went so far as to offer the entire Northern Province to Prabhakaran for a period of ten years without elections in a bid to appease him. Luckily, Prabhakaran was too cocky and intransigent to accept it. President Mahinda Rajapaksa, too, chose to stick to a blatantly lopsided ceasefire which the UNF government had entered into with the LTTE. If Prabhakaran had refrained from closing the Mavil Aru sluice gates and targetting military and police personnel, the uneasy honeymoon between the LTTE and the UPFA would have continued. Today, the SLFP has enlisted the support of former LTTE leaders including Prabhakaran’s chief arms procurer, KP and ex-LTTE women’s wing leader Thamilini for political purposes. Why shouldn’t the northerners reject the SLFP?
Douglas Devananda’s EPDP may claim it stood up to the LTTE fearlessly. Yes, it did and Devananda survived several assassination attempts. But, it has been a constituent of SLFP-led coalitions, the People’s Alliance (PA) and the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), responsible for appeasing the LTTE and securing the support of ex-Tigers for expediency. Guilty by association, eh?
The JVP may not have supported the LTTE direct, but its own terrorism which rendered the southern parts of the country ungovernable stood Prabhakaran in good stead in the late 1980s in that the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa had to appease the LTTE as he could not fight on both northern and southern fronts at the same time. Rathu Sahodarayas also backed a political project calculated to torpedo the country’s war effort while the LTTE was retreating; they supported a move to shoot down the UPFA’s budget, albeit in vain, knowing well that the defeat of the budget vote in Parliament would cause both the government and its military project to collapse and the LTTE would be given a new lease of life. So, the question is whether the northerners could consider the JVP different from others.
In responding to LTTE terrorism, the Old Left notoriously stuck to its appeasement policy, according to which you should keep offering lambs or goats to man eaters in the hope that they might become herbivores one day. It’s difficult to draw the line between appeasement/passivity and tacit collaboration. How could one argue that the northerners should prefer the leftists to others at the upcoming NPC polls?
Northerners like their counterparts elsewhere are without a choice when it comes to electing their representatives. They have to settle for the best out of a bad lot. It’s a case of Hobson’s choice for them!