If the global media coverage is to be believed, Sri Lanka has just had a socialist revolution. While the newly elected President Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD henceforth) and his party, the JVP, claim to focus on ”corruption, social justice, and economic inequality,” addressing human rights abuses committed by the now unpopular Rajapaksas, including serious war crimes, has not been at the forefront of their platform.
The JVP has also had a complex history itself, having been involved in two insurgencies in the past, which may influence their stance on transitional justice for Tamils. For all its claims to being a progressive vanguard, the party’s membership has almost no significant Tamil presence despite Tamils being the most prominent and highly persecuted minority population.
But what is even more interesting is that Sinhalese ‘leftist’ intellectuals and politicians who took part in the 2022 ‘aragalaya’ protests are by and large deeply critical of Mahinda Rajapaksa (Sinhalese Netanyahu) for the corruption and the economic collapse, but do not consider his genocidal crimes against humanity in 2009 something to worry about. There is no political pressure for war crimes tribunals for Mullivaikkal (Sri Lanka’s Gaza), where anywhere between 40 to 70 thousand Tamil civilians were butchered by the Sri Lankan army under Mahinda Rajapaksa’s orders between February 06 to May 18, 2009 and systematic mass rape of Tamils was carried out as a matter of explicit military doctrine- this carried on till 2012, as per many human rights organisations. Such objections do not register even among the ‘anti-imperialist’ Sinhalese left, many of whom are strongly against Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza (and now, Lebanon) without seeing the obvious parallels. The justifications put forth by Sinhala nationalists are strikingly similar to those of Israel- human shields, war on terror, ‘Tamils have their own country, we have nowhere else to go,’ LTTE atrocities (Tamil ‘Hamas’/’October 07’), and so on.
AKD’s campaign for ‘anti-imperialism’ and ‘social justice’ has largely dismissed the Tamil question as being of less importance than ‘draining the swamp,’ in rhetoric bearing an eerie parallel to Trump’s 2016 and Modi’s 2014 campaigns.
Just like in Israel, there is this fascist false consciousness where IDF soldiers can be vegan and feminist and pro-LGBTQ+ and might even support high corporate taxation and universal healthcare, yet be just as brutal and genocidal as their Kahanist counterparts. Just like in Israel, alas, a just solution has to be imposed from without, because there is no constituency for justice within Sinhalese society, except for expat intellectuals like Dr. Brian Seneviratne (think of him as Sri Lanka’s Ilan Pappe).
Given India’s Tamil external affairs minister (S Jaishankar) and America’s possible next president being half-Tamil (Kamala Harris), the financial leverage of the IMF bailout package and India’s own $4 billion assistance (and prospective MoUs on trade) could be wielded to ensure full implementation of the 13th Amendment (devolution of power to the provinces, in terms of land and policing rights) and ensuring proportional Tamil representation in the Sri Lankan treasury benches. To be fair, AKD’s foreign policy adviser Harini Amarasuriya has made some positive noises in this regard (but so did Ranil Wickeremesinghe, to no avail).
AKD must be prevailed upon to set up an independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate war crimes, human rights abuses, and other atrocities committed during the civil war, particularly in the final stages of the conflict (including Mullivaikkal). The Commission must include members from all ethnic groups, including prominent Tamil, Sinhala, and Muslim intellectuals and civil society members, to ensure it is seen as impartial and credible. There has to be phased (but transparent and time-bound) demilitarisation of the North and the East, providing full access to journalists and independent investigators. Supporting the creation of memorials for Tamil war victims in the North and East, which have often been suppressed by the state, could be another step in healing the historical wounds. Ensuring punishment for war criminals in the military would be next to impossible, however, given the ferocity of Sinhala chauvinism it would unleash, so it would probably not be wise to push Colombo too hard on this issue.
Ideally, Sri Lanka could be persuaded to shelve the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act, but given that both Washington (Guantanamo) and New Delhi (UAPA) themselves go too far in the name of counterterrorism, this might be far too hypocritical to gain much traction. India’s earlier mishandling of the Sri Lankan crisis with a botched peacekeeping operation in the 1980s ended up exacerbating the problem and even led to the assassination of the former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, India stayed mostly silent and did not take the activist position against the genocide that it should have, perhaps along the lines of South Africa’s legal action against the state of Israel. New Delhi should see this as now a chance to rectify its past mistakes and be a genuine agent of postwar justice on the island.
The JVP government could also be encouraged to take stronger steps to enforce the constitutional guarantee of Tamil as an official language, ensuring that government services, schools, and legal proceedings are accessible in Tamil, particularly in Tamil-majority areas. The public sector, at the very least, needs to become bilingual. Promoting education in both Sinhala and Tamil could also be a way to build bridges between the communities, starting at the school level. Educational reforms must also include teaching a slightly more balanced view on the history of post-independent Sri Lanka, in particular the years 1983-2009. An honest appraisal is also needed of Solomon Bandaranaike’s active stoking of Sinhala ethnonationalism that laid the ground for decades of internecine bloodletting, and of the 1981 torching of Jaffna Public Library.
But at the end of the day, the most effective way to ensure peace and security for Sri Lankan Tamils is economic integration with Tamil Nadu, India’s second richest state after Maharashtra. Tamil Nadu is a manufacturing powerhouse in automobiles, electronics and textiles (and of late, semiconductors), has top notch IT hubs like Coimbatore and world class universities like IIT Madras, NIT Trichy, Loyola College, SRM, VIT and Anna University. Tamil Nadu alone has a GDP of $350 billion, compared to Sri Lanka’s $84 billion (and a higher GDP per capita too, since Sri Lankans often bring this up). After two successive years of economic recession, tethering itself to Tamil Nadu’s high growth engine could help revive the Sri Lankan economy on a much shorter timeline than envisaged by any of its creditors. This would also create a lasting constituency against anti-Tamil activity within the island nation. Better connectivity with India overall- not just Tamil Nadu- could vastly boost tourist revenue, one of the mainstays of the Sri Lankan economy, and attract positive spillovers such as a growth in IT services and improving Sri Lanka’s digital and physical infrastructure.
Last but not least, Sri Lanka is one of the most beautiful tourist destinations on earth and has human capital indices that should have made it one of the most developed and affluent places in Asia. It is a crying shame that it lost so many decades to civil war and to obscenely corrupt politicians (the Bandaranaikes and Rajapaksas above all) who fed Lankans Sinhala Buddhist fascism in exchange for picking their pockets. In fact, the effect has been regional: Myanmar’s equally genocidal and kleptocratic armed forces are backed by fascist monks like Ashin Wirathu and Sitagu Sayadaw that draw inspiration from Sri Lanka’s neo-Nazi Bodu Bala Sena.
However, to come out of their longstanding crisis, Sri Lankans will have to do more than have Dissanayake quote Marx and Engels to IMF officials or arrest a few politicians from the ancien regime on charges of corruption. For there can be no such thing as an ethnonationalist left: it is a contradiction in terms.
Perhaps the Booker Prize-winning Shehan Karunatilaka put it best: ‘Which side are we on? And what do we do with the inheritance of war? What do we do with a genocide on our hands – when we know some of us looked away and did nothing to stop it; when some of us can frequent the roulette every Friday and have the scintillating company of high-rise Colombo with a dry martini and be oblivious to the terrors unfolding in a Jaffna or an Akkaraipattu?’
