The Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO), officially founded in 1977, became one of the more organised and effective militant organisations operating in the North. Their growth was hardly meteoric, having first organised itself as early as 1969, committing acts of vandalism and other petty crimes.
Writing in Inside an Elusive Mind, the definitive book about the LTTE leader Prabhakaran, M.R. Narayan Swamy emphasises that LTTE official history refers to their relationship with the TELO as an ‘alliance’. However, TELO leaders Thangadurai and Kuttimani were both from VVT, the same village as Prabhakaran and as per Swamy, it was Thangadurai who brought Prabhakaran into the TELO as the head of their military training organisation in Tamil Nadu when Prabhakaran himself was having doubts about his future in their struggle. Thus, as a 2013 paper from Stanford University confirms, the TELO was one of the first militant groups that developed close ties with Indian intelligence: RAW.
Following Thangdurai’s murder in prison, many hundreds of TELO cadres were trained under RAW patronage and the TELO’s membership doubled between 1984 and 1986 which also saw an escalation in its brand of violence. The Chavakachcheri Police station attack in 1984 left 27 dead and a 1985 ambush of a train travelling from Anuradhapura to Jaffna killed 43.
Federalism and the Sri Lankan psyche
The TELO is a signatory to the December 2021 letter co-authored by several major Sri Lankan Tamil parties, addressed to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, inviting his intervention to urge the GoSL (Government of Sri Lanka) to fully implement the provisions of the 13th Amendment (13A) to the Constitution. It states, unambiguously, that the signatories “remain committed to a political solution based on a federal structure”.
The letter, while meandering, builds a narrative that spells out countless hollow promises from all sides of the political equation. However, as P.K. Balachandran writes in NewsIn.Asia in Jan 2022, the signatories were apparently warned-off demanding a Federal model: “Despite intense debates in which the parties of the Indian Origin Tamils from the Up country and the Western Province maintained that the majority Sinhala community would never envisage a federal setup because it equates federalism with separatism.”
One cannot help but note the spectre of this collective of previously reactionary groups co-signing a letter that explicitly calls for a Federal model, above and beyond 13A, delivered directly to the Indian Embassy for forwarding to PM Modi. Notwithstanding a few technicalities, laid-out by Balachandran in the aforementioned piece, such as the fact that India is far from an ideal Federal structure, a structure which Modi himself has played a key role in weakening throughout his career as PM; there are multiple facets to this letter, its content, current context and recipient.
The content, the exhibition, is self-evidently antagonistic to a large swathe of the Sri Lankan populace that no doubt voted in droves for President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP). The current context, a moment of extreme economic and social turmoil across racial divides affecting the entire working poor and peasantry, is a low point in the President’s popularity, which must have been given at least the slightest of boosts by this plea to Modi. It reminds the ultra-nationalist base why they voted the way they did, hardening and focusing their minds on what they ultimately see as an existential battle for their identity in ‘their motherland’.
In an ideal world, such a letter with ostensibly broad support from the Tamil parties would have included pleas for economic assistance at a time of sheer desperation. A request to intervene in the material conditions of Sri Lankans in the North and East alongside calls for political devolution would have been more appropriate in this current context.
As would have been working with other oppositional forces that share some of the same views on 13A, providing another united oppositional force against a failed administration. Instead the letter sowed further division among oppositional forces while interestingly, challenging the main opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) to reaffirm its own stance on the National Question.
The saffron connection
A quite different spectre unfolded on the opposing side, no less inflammatory. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa met with his Buddhist Advisory Council whose ‘venerable’ members chose to commend his performance and temperament instead of offering words of advice on urgent policy reversals. The President played what seems to be his only trump card, stating that he was elected to ensure the “protection and preservation of the Sinhala-Buddhist heritage and giving that heritage a pre-eminent position which cannot be rolled back”.
The people should take notice; religious leaders on an advisory council were uninterested in deep discussions of the issues faced by Sri Lanka’s poorest communities, who must recognise what is happening in plain sight. A political institution and the religious establishment overtly strategising to sustain and expand their respective positions within the power structure, instead of working to improve the conditions of the people. The religious establishment is propping up a failing administration, not realising that this support will soon diminish the credibility of the Clergy in the political sphere, something that is arguably for the best and long overdue.
Writing on Groundviews.org, Tisaranee Gunasekara analyses the opposition to the Gotabaya Rajapaksa Project and discusses an important facet in politics; the motivations of an electorate. “The racist vote is not a canard. These are ordinary Sinhala-Buddhists who do not necessarily gain anything material from Rajapaksa rule. They still remain loyal to the Rajapaksas, because their true aim is a Sri Lanka where the minorities are kept down, literally. They are the Lankan equivalents of the ‘Make America Great Again’ crowd.”
This proposition is arguably definitive in the process of informing electoral strategy and developing a policy message and narrative. The racist vote is certainly not a canard, not in Sri Lanka and not in the US, it exists, it organises and more recently, it agitates. The crucial question has always been, what percentage of the nationalist base is constituted by this ‘racist vote’?
It might be dangerous to assume that the infamous 6.9 million voter block was largely constituted by this ‘racist vote,’ the sheer size of the block and voter turnout statistics make this a statistical improbability and points to economic considerations.
The proposition that Rajapaksa rule did not materially improve the lives of their base is somewhat questionable. The early MR administration certainly led to economic benefits for vast parts of the country, whether this was by policy design or a post-war bump is a different question. In the current context, many voters perhaps saw no enhancement in their material conditions during the Yahapalanaya regime and thus may have decided that at the very least, with the SLPP and the Rajapaksas, those cornerstone cultural, existential concerns will be allayed. Another interesting point to consider is whether these cultural pointers do in fact represent material gains, for all intents and purposes, for this voter base.
The Obama-MAGA voter
Consider the phenomenon of the Obama-Trump voter. Multiple studies in the US have shown that a significant mass of the electorate voted for Barack Obama either in 2008 or 2012 and subsequently voted for Trump in 2016 AND 2020. The average estimate of the percentage of 2016 Trump voters who voted for Obama was between 11% and 15%.
This suggests the inherent complexity in viewing the Trump base as entirely or even significantly composed of a ‘racist vote’. Another fact that challenges this proposition is that in 2020, Trump actually increased his vote base by around seven million votes, even improving his share among Black and Latino (Hispanic) voters. It seems strange, even unfathomable, given what transpired during the Trump term. Through the prism of expectations of political punditry and the polling industry, Trump’s performance at the 2020 polls was certainly astonishing, yet this might be because the analysis of the Trump voter was, and still is, stuck in a simplistic binary of being either uninformed and undereducated or racist.
While this caricature exists and thrives in large numbers, it does not explain the Trump phenomenon of 2020. One cannot help but recall then candidate Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment in 2016, which must certainly have cost her dearly in the American heartland; it is that type of miscalculation that Sri Lankan commentators must avoid when analysing the motivations of voters.
What we are essentially discussing is the ‘rationality’ of the voter, what is being proposed by many in the media is that voting patterns are defined by either a rational choice related largely to material conditions or result from a moral and intellectual failing.
Nesrine Malik notes what many on the progressive left such as writer Thom Hartmann or political commentator Kyle Kulinski had been saying even in the lead up to the 2020 election; that there is a broad pro-Trump economic rationale that the liberal media establishment, commentators, pundits and pollsters either missed or wilfully ignored.
Malik dissects the Trump constituency, broadly defined to include many on the traditional Republican right; the wealthy and investor classes, those that do profit from stock market gains. It also included many from the entrepreneurial sector, evident from strong gains in 2020 amongst the Cuban population in Florida that are overwhelmingly small-business owners. A core of the Trump constituency in 2016 was also made up of the workers at the lowest end of the income spectrum, the under-employed as well as the unemployed. This constituency has been consistently alienated by the Democratic Party as countless polls have shown.
Another major constituency that perhaps best highlights the misunderstanding of the Trump base is the subsect of Americans that place immigration control and border security at the top of their priorities. No doubt that a portion of this subsect views ‘white’ American culture as under threat from ‘foreigners’, queue Trump and the speech on Mexican “murderers and rapists”. Yet beneath that exists the economic consideration of immigrant communities keeping wages low and thus depriving “real” Americans from working at higher wages.
While the issue of wage stagnation is complex, US right-wing media has successfully ingrained this specific narrative in the psyche of its base. This is helped by some data points such as studies by the Economist magazine and the Brookings Institute. One showed that restricting low skilled migration provided wage gains in certain job sectors, such as housekeeping and dry-walling, which showed specific gains in certain low-skilled sectors. Another article discussed a 5% wage increase in areas where there was a decline in the population of people born overseas.
The perception gap
One year into the Trump presidency, a survey found that 65% of business owners thought the Trump tax regime was the “best thing the Government did for their companies last year”; unemployment fell to the lowest rate in 50 years; unemployment amongst workers without a diploma fell to the lowest level ever recorded. The US also recorded the largest fall in poverty in a single year since 1966, 4.2 million people were lifted off food stamps.
These are all material gains made by individual members of the Trump constituency that almost took him over the line against Biden in 2020. While much of the economic prosperity might be attributed to the pattern of growth that began post-2008, Malik notes that those benefits were associated with the President in office at the time.
The lesson here is that quite often, a vote for Trump was cast while being “fully cognisant of all his flaws, short-comings and dangers”; these are the tradeoffs that voters make at the polls (Malik).
In analysing the political ramifications of the aforementioned letter to PM Modi, oppositional forces must tread carefully. There is certainly precedent for their demands but the political reality is that ultimately, that letter to Modi was also an electoral gift to the SLPP and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. To counter this, as the main opposition party in Parliament, the SJB must take this opportunity to remind voters that these demands, while narrow and communal, culminate from the failure of successive administrations to keep to their promises.
Organising the body-politic
All oppositional forces that are serious about winning a majority in any election must stand firmly against calls for a federal structure, differentiating this from the devolution of power within a unitary State. Any attempts to split the difference between a unitary State and a federal constitution will likely drive voters away and alienate a base that one speculates is ready to rescind their patronage of the Rajapaksa project. The trick is to not treat any portion of the 6.9 million as “deplorables” or beyond salvation, avoiding the voter shaming of the US Democratic elites which mostly complains that voters keep voting the ‘wrong’ way, making little effort to understand their struggles and appreciate their insecurities.
The Sri Lankan body-politic, like others around the world and throughout history, can and must be organised around economic issues and material conditions; whatever the perceptions of their motivations might be, they should be treated as rational actors. While establishment media at home and abroad along with Western liberal elites plus the NGO circuit all seek to paint Sri Lanka as a perpetrator of violence, the psyche of many of what Gunasekera refers to as “ordinary Sinhala-Buddhists” will often view Sri Lanka as a victim of violence and terrorism. Herein lies the perception gap that the reactionary right always seems to take advantage of, often with spectacular results.
The late Author Christopher Hitchens, writing for Slate in the week following the 2009 defeat of the LTTE, states the following: “It’s just not true, as some liberals tend to believe, that insurgencies, once underway, have history on their side. As well as by nations like Britain and Russia, they can be beaten by determined Third World states, such as Algeria in the 1990s and even Iraq in the present decade. Insurgent leaderships often make mistakes on the ‘hearts and minds’ front, just as governments do, and governments are not always stupid to ban the press from the front line, tell the human rights agencies to stay the hell out of the way, and rely on the popular yearning for law and order. It can also be important to bear in mind, as in Sri Lanka became crucial, that majorities have rights, too.”
Sri Lanka, since before Independence, has witnessed a growing, evolving and contentious process of amalgamation and intersection between the Sinhalese culture, the Sinhala language, the Buddhist religion and the Sri Lankan State, to create what constitutes the Sri Lankan Sinhalese psyche. This is an essential facet of a modern Sri Lanka which in order to progress, must first find its foundation, one that is not poisoned by saffron robes and blood-red ‘satakayas’.
Any political party that is serious about challenging the status quo and sustaining a new majority must defend steadfastly the unitary nature of the Sri Lankan State and accept that any compromises to Federalism involves once again leaving open the door for another round of reactionary rule which will further endanger Sri Lanka’s democratic structures and claw at our delicate social fabric.
Source:The Morning.lk
