by DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA
Sri Lanka’s post-war transition has resumed. That transition which was blocked by the neoconservative ‘national security’ fundamentalism has unfrozen with the imminent holding of the Northern Provincial Council election under the 13th amendment as it stands.
If I may immediately qualify that statement, Sri Lanka is undergoing at least two transitions or a transition with two opposite tendencies, which are in a race with each other. One is that towards normalcy and structural reform (which takes the form of the reactivation of the frozen Northern Provincial Council) while the other is a radically conservative counter-reformation which takes the form of cultural and settler-colonial Occupation. The future of Sri Lanka will be determined by which tendency triumphs.
The Northern Provincial Council is an experiment that can go quite well or horribly wrong. It can wrong not only because of the obvious reason of suffocation, sabotage and eventual overthrow by the Sinhala Establishment provoked and supported by the most reactionary currents of Sinhala society, but also because of the decades-long propensity of Tamil nationalism to overshoot the mark of the strategically, structurally and socio-historically realisable.
Consider the Tamil criticisms of the 13th amendment and their implications for the success of the Northern Provincial Council. Instead of the more obviously sensible stance of supporting the 13th amendment and faulting the state and government, if necessary, for non-implementation or tardy implementation, Tamil nationalist discourse takes the a priori view that the 13th amendment is insufficient and therefore unworkable. When one commences with the teleology that the 13th amendment is inherently unworkable and therefore has to be surpassed by a federal solution, then one is hardly likely to strive to make it work or develop the pragmatic patience requisite for that purpose.
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