From V.Anandasangaree to V.Prabhakaran

From V.Anandasangaree to V.Prabhakaran

@ Gamini Viyangoda

[03-11-2007]

Certain Tamil political leaders, who in the past did their politics on behalf of Tamil people while living with them have now for some time started playing a new role. Unlike in the past, when they represented their people from among themselves and in direct association with them, these leaders now have come to the midst of the Sinhalese, addressing their own Tamil brethren of the North East from the Sinhala South, resulting in permanently making their political headquarters in Colombo. There was a time that some of them, like Douglas Devananda and Karuna Amman who did their politics through the barrel of the gun. Today they profess they are against terrorism and claim that they no longer believe in violence as a viable means to the national question. Nevertheless, when it comes to personal grudges and factional disputes, internecine fratricide has become the modus operandi that they still cherish. This fact became abundantly evident when a series of bloody clashes erupted recently between Karuna and his deputy on one hand and with the EPDP on the other, resulting in numerous abductions and killings. Therefore it is clear that their apparent revulsion to terrorism as a strategy is comically limited only to Prabhakaran’s variety of violence.

None of them are democrats, anyway. That is not their fault either. Recently, during a live televised discussion between the President, assisted by a group of Ministers and some senior government officials, and a group of journalists from the print as well as electronic media, President Rajapaksa at one stage pointing to the Minister Douglas Devananda said, “look here, this is the representative of Tamil people’. The mere fact that there was no one among the media group to remind the President about the utterly insignificant number of votes Devanada managed to muster at the last Parliamentary election does not at all make Devanada a people’s or democratic representative as President Rajapaksa sought to make.

In any case, it is essential to bear in mind that the difference between a terrorist and an ex-terrorist in the Sri Lankan context is, in the final analysis, determined solely by where and to what extent that person is placed and connected to the existing state structure of the South. Devananda being a Minister of the Rajapakse government and Karuna being a cog in the newly greased wheel of the Southern military machine, naturally entitles them to be considered anti-terrorists in the eyes of the popular Southern spectacle. On the other hand, Prabhakaran, not being content until a national self-rule not yoked to the central government’s trappings is permanently established, makes himself an easy terrorist by common definition. Therefore, in ideological terms, the terrorist and the democrat in Sri Lanka is defined not by whether he is resorting to weapons or presents himself as a candidate for democratic elections, but whether he insists on a radical alteration of the existing state system. That is why the phenomenon called terrorism which we talk about today is, in essence, not about a brutish nature of a wayward person or two, but a core political issue. If politics is one way of making war from the point of view of the Southern polity, then war is another way of doing politics from the point of view of the Vanni.

In this backdrop, the Tamil politician called Ananda Sangaree who has never taken up arms against the state but who was a party to the Vadukkodai Resolution which paved way for the right to resort to arms in an indirect way (based on the notion of the right to secede) has become a joke. Though he used to be a leader of a main, or rather the main Tamil party at the time, his sole role today has been so degraded as to be a mere scribe, a petition-writer. At one time he writes to the ruling party leaders imploring them to be a bit more sane, at another time to Sinhala chauvinistic pseudo-Marxist JVP leaders to be a bit more reasonable, and then to Prabhakaran Thambi (younger brother) to be a bit more flexible, while his latest writing is addressed to ‘My dear’ Prabhakaran. Though none of these addressees has ever bothered respond to any of those letters, he goes on writing with no stopping. For this is the only remaining means, the increasingly failing lifeline in which he assures himself that he still exists, though flickeringly, as a key figure in the Sri Lankan political landscape. As the father of modern philosophy René Descarte has famously said, “I think, therefore I am”, our near extinct politician/scribe/petition-writer seems to be feeling, “I write, therefore I exist”.

This is evident by the way he presently writes to Prabhakaran. Giving advice to a person like Prabhakaran, he says, is like “blowing a conch into the ears of a deaf person”, as is said in a Tamil proverb. In that case, he should explain as to how a writing akin to a murmur of a mosquito could be of any use to a deaf- as he says, a deaf even to a conch. Well, for the unbiased reader, the matter is crystal clear: though the letter is formally addressed to “The President, LTTE- V.Prabhakaran”, whom he addresses in reality is the Sinhala polity in the South that physically protects him and emotionally cheers him.

In general, the professional comedian makes the audience that is in front of him laugh. Those who are behind the stage are normally immune to his humor. But Ananda Sangaree is uniquely capable of entertaining not only the audience in front but also those at the backstage. While emphasizing in his letter addressed to Prabhakaran, titled “Please Stop Your Killings and Go for Talks”, that under no circumstances he would condone violence, he forgets that he has written just above a few lines in the same letter that he would have hailed Prabhakaran as a brave man had all the persons in the photograph believed to have been taken before departing for the Anuradhapura suicide mission, died. What he maliciously means here is that Prabhakaran too should have perished with the other 21 cadres who are “innocent children of poor parents”. This reminds me of an ancient Sinhala prince called Sirisangabo who voluntarily cut his own head with his own hand and sent it to his brother power-greedy Gotabhaya so that Gotabhaya could be at rest in his throne. Sangaree earnestly wished Prabhakaran to be a modern Sirisangabo!

Apart from this puerile sentiment for a childish bravery and his ulterior wish to see Prabhakaran physically vanished, we have to enlighten Sangaree to the fact that no army commander in the modern world is foolish enough to go to a conventional battlefield, leave alone taking part in a suicide attack. Furthermore, he says that, “after being the cause for the loss of 70-80 thousand lives..” Prabhakaran is now back to square one. Here I would not venture into analyzing the veracity of his numbers or the verdict that he extravagantly passes on Prabhakaran’s presumed failure, but the wording “the cause” is noteworthy. Instead of using ‘a cause”, when he uses “the cause”, his manifest intention is to put the sole culpability on one person alone. In that case, why he is writing to others like the government and the JVP etc, becomes absurdly redundant. If Prabhakaran is the absolute culprit as Sangaree portrays him to be, then all patriotic forces in the South as well as in the North should come together to annihilate Prabhakaran. Then Sri Lanka will again become the old paradise it used to be!

There is one thing that Ananda Sangaree, at least as a scribe, should bear in mind. This is not an epoch where there is any space or meaning for isolated letters, or a crisis in which there is any possibility of resolution by addressing political leaders individually by way of letter writing. If there is a must for a letter of appeal, then there is only one letter to be written. If forced to limit the number of accused collectively as addressees in this letter, my suggestions are as follows:

Imperial rulers before Independence, all Sinhala Governments after Independence, reformist and collaborationist, at times opportunist Tamil leadership, Southern political culture where democracy was erroneously defined as a rule by the majority, failed traditional Left Movement and the Sinhala-Tamil racism..

Dear Mr. Ananda Sangaree, Prabhakaran is not the cause but the consequence of all those above mentioned

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