Vijaya Kumara(ya) and Sri Lanka

by Nalin de Silva

(September 08, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) According to a news item published in The Sunday Island of Sept. 05 the Indian Army Chief General Vijay Kumar Singh has said that ‘the Sinhalese should be "more large-hearted" and help the Tamils in Sri Lanka’s North East provinces to quickly rebuild their lives, shattered by the three-decade-long bloody civil war that ended in May last year’. The General has said, "I feel that all Sri Lankans should move on by burying all the bitterness and antagonism that existed all these years because of the civil war. The Sinhalese should become more large-hearted and help their Tamil brethren to quickly rebuild their civil-war-shattered lives." This statement by the Indian Army Chief is very mischievous to say the least. It implies that the Sinhalas are not large-hearted enough and it is an accusation against the Sinhalas. The Indian Army chief like many other Indians and some locals as well still live in the past and refers to a North-East that is neither a province nor a district of Sri Lanka. The Indian Army Chief as well as the others have to be educated on this and have to be reminded that though there is a North Western province there is no North-East or North Eastern province in Sri Lanka. It is true that the Tamil leaders, of course with the help from Indian leaders, in the past propagated not only the myth of a North-West but even a Tamil homeland in that so-called part of the country. The infamous Indo-Lanka accord referred to the combined area of the Northern and Eastern provinces demarcated by the colonialist English as late as 1889, as the traditional inhabitants of the Tamils, though Tamil Nadu qualified for that term, and the Indian Army Chief may be still under the illusion that such homeland exists.

General Vijay Kumar Singh is certainly not the first Vijay to come to this country from India or its predecessors Bharath and Dambadiva and we welcome him though he will be going back to India very soon unlike the first Vijay, who is supposed to have founded the Sinhala nation with his seven hundred men according to legend as well the great chronicle. Even the first Vijay was referred to as Vijay Kumar or Vijaya Kumara(ya) in Sinhala and moreover he belonged to the Sinha dynasty. Thus in a way we could have called the first Vijay or the accepted great- great ancestor of the Sinhalas as Vijay Kumar Singh or Vijaya Kumara Sinha and we have more reason to welcome the Indian Army Chief into our midst. However, when the present Vijay Kumar Singh accuses the nation supposed to have been founded by the first Vijay Kumar Singh we are more than perplexed.

The Sinhalas, especially the Sinhala Buddhists, have been accused of treating the Tamils as second class citizens, but the Indian General may not know that when challenged to mention the grievances or the injustices of the Tamils their leaders have no answer. The so-called grievances are nothing but the privileges lost by the English educated Tamils enjoyed over their counterparts among the Sinhalas. The English governors were behind these privileges granted to the Tamil elite and the latter were able to project the loss of their privileges as injustices to the Tamils in general.

The general wants the Sinhalas to be more large-hearted and wants them to "help their Tamil brethren to quickly rebuild their civil-war-shattered lives". I am not an expert on military affairs but as far as we are concerned there was no civil war in this country during the last three decades or so. If there was a civil war what were the two groups involved in it? Certainly, there was no civil war between the Sinhalas and the Tamils. Would the general say that there is a civil war in Kashmir or against the Maoists in the eastern and north eastern parts or shall we say the Northeast of India? Why use terminology with respect to Sri Lanka that is not used in India or in the other countries.

There was a terrorist group among the Tamils and they had been brainwashed to believe that there were injustices against the Tamils by the elite Tamil leaders and who were driven to the arms by the elite. Some if not most of the weapons and ammunition, including Theoretical ammunition came from the west and the state had to defeat the terrorist outfit that was hell bent on establishing a separate state in the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka. The operations by the armed forces against the terrorists cannot be called a civil war and if that was the case one could ask whether the so-called civil war started after the IPKF came to Sri Lanka. If there had been a civil war even before the IPKF came to Sri Lanka how does one define the role of the IPKF? What peace did they keep in Sri Lanka and why were the LTTE as well as the Sinhala majority opinion opposed to the IPKF? If the General Vijay Kumar Singh wants to call the operations by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces against the terrorists a civil war then he should answer the above questions first and also we would like to find out from him whether there were civil wars in Sri Lanka in 1971 and from 1987 to 1991 when the JVP was active with their weapons though not sophisticated as those used by the LTTE.

The General must have red on Uthuru Vasanthaya and Nagenahira Udanaya and together with Hambantota District it is the northern and eastern provinces that are developed at an accelerated phase. The Sinhala people are large-hearted and are happy to see that the government spends so much money on developing those two provinces. The Tamils who were displaced internally during the operations have been already resettled in the areas they lived and the rehabilitation programme has been very successful.

The General could compare that situation with the underdevelopment of the Sinhalas in the up country even after more than sixty years of independence. The land that was taken over by the English has not been given back to the people but the English had displaced them internally of course in order to settle down Tamils who were brought from South India by the English. It was a case of externally displaced Tamils displacing Sinhala people internally under the auspices of the English and nothing has been done to rectify that situation. Then we have the case of Sinhalas and Muslims displaced from Jaffna by the LTTE and they have still not gone back to Jaffna. It is in Sri Lanka where Tamil is an official language and students can read for a degree in the Tamil medium. The students in Sri Lanka can submit theses for their postgraduate degrees in the Tamil medium and I am not sure whether this could be done in any other country. I do not want to remind the General the conditions of the Buddhists in India the land where Prince Siddhartha was born and attained Buddhahood.