Vines and creepers time

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(March 07, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) There is hardly a whimper about the state of Tamil politics after the presidential election where the kingmaker status of the key Tamil politicians turned out to be, well, highly overestimated.

Since then, most Tamil leaders have been gravitating towards the government, splintering the Tamil political project even further.

Well, all this took my mind back to a time when D. B. Wijetunge was the president, and he said that minorities are ‘vines and creepers’ that grow among the shade giving canopy of the majority.

At the time the late president made these pronouncements when he was president, D. B. Wijetunge did not come in for much praise from the Tamil community. In fact, he found himself up against deafening condemnation.

Several Sinhala leaders however, were quoted at that time as saying that president Wijetunge was the first Sri Lankan president to come out with the inconvenient truth.

Well for the short time that Wijetunge was president, he took a position —- a clear in-your- face position ——- which was that the minority are “vines and creepers.’’ But he never did much to show that the minority are in fact privy to that status in reality.
Not so, some might say, Mahinda Rajapaksa.

He didn’t say much, but the president has made the minorities “vines and creepers’’ in fact, and that has been by his political praxis.

Today, whether one likes it or not, he has subordinated Tamil militant politics and Tamil politics per se to the diktat of the majority Sinhala community, and its cohorts.

He has made clear with his pronouncements where he is coming from - - he has said “there cannot be gold for the North East, and copper for the south — if it is gold for the north, it has to be gold for the south.”

He has made it clear that despite the post colonial project of the elite Tamils to occupy a dominant position in the Lankan polity, that the Tamils have to believe they are a minority and accept that fact.

From many points of view this is not so bad —— because this is the same position that obtains for minorities in many of the Western countries that have advocated a ‘political solution’ for Sri Lanka.

Accepted the dominant status

The minorities in those countries have accepted the dominant status of the hegemonic dominant culture - - and that has been the end of that.

In Sri Lanka, that position has for long not been allowed, because the Tamil community, despite its minority status, enjoyed dominance over the Sinhala majority, during British colonial times.

A hangover of that was that they did not want to accept their minority status, which prompted those such as D. B. Wijetunge to come out with the vines and creepers postulate. Tactless of course, given the history of race relations in this country.

Mahinda Rajapaksa did not need any such verbiage. But he has subscribed to the thinking that there is no special place for the Tamils, and that they as a minority have to give way to the majority’s cultural hegemony - - - as it is the way in the dominant cultures of the West,

They had to shut up and put up and even though that has negative connotations, that is the way things happen in the west where the minorities are for all intents and purposes subservient to the dominant cultures, though not necessarily exploited by them....
There has been a rear-guard by the Tamil polity. Most recently this came in the form of the emergence of putative Tamil kingmakers such as Sambanthan whose king-making abilities fell in a heap when their candidate for the presidency fell far short of Mahinda Rajapaksa when the votes came in.

So it seems that the vines and creepers ideology has come to stay. Now, ‘vines and creepers’ have a massive negative connotation — but the idea can also be put diplomatically, and the reality of ‘vines and creepers’ then is not so bad perhaps...

When Mahinda Rajapaksa says that it would be gold for the north and gold for the south and not gold for the north and copper for the south, he articulates the same thinking that D B Wijetunge subscribed to, sans the crude edges.

He is saying in effect that the minorities have to accept the hard reality that there are certain inherent disadvantages by virtue of being minorities — as it is for the minorities in the West.

This after all is the position of the Muslim minority in India for instance, which is why India perhaps has not been overtly critical of the planned Rajapaksa project for the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka.

A J Wilson said that the Sinhalese are a minority with a majority complex but he should have articulated the corollary of that which is that the Tamis are a ‘majority with a superiority complex.’

Without D B Wijetunge’s crude flourish, Mahinda Rajapaksa has made his vines and creepers vision in Sri Lanka a reality.

Separate biological existence

Vines and creepers exist, and have a separate biological existence distinct from the host plant — but the arrangement is symbiotic, a botanist would tell you.

This is what D. B. Wijetunge expected from minorities in Sri Lanka, something that Rajapaksa has now accomplished for them by way of reality.

It is not a great change in a way. After years of colonial dominance, and a hard headed refusal by the Tamil community to accept that they are a minority and not a dominant culture — the pendulum has swung, and the Sinhalese have asserted their majority status.

They say that if the white Anglo Saxon culture predominates in England, then the Sinhala culture would predominate in Sri Lanka, though the Tamil culture can exist symbiotically with the dominant Sinhala culture - side by side.

It’s vines and creepers all over again, but what the bloody hell is wrong with vines and creepers, someone may even ask....?