Tamils snub NPP this time, pass on the mantle to GenNext leaders

By?N Sathiya Moorthy

Strategists of the ruling JVP-NPP alliance can defend their relatively poor showing in the nation-wide local government (LG) elections by taunting the ?losers?. Back to 42-per cent votes from the presidential elections and 18 per cent down from the latter-day parliamentary polls, they have even argued that being the single largest party is as good as obtaining an absolute majority in terms of votes, leaving aside the number of seats and / or local government institutions that they have captured. In the past, they have mocked other similarly-placed political parties and claimed that they did not have the support of a majority of the people ? and hence were less legitimate than what you and I thought otherwise.

Be it as it may, the defenders of the JVP-NPP tally in the Sinhala South cannot say the same thing about the combine? performance in the Tamil North and East in the very same LG polls.? In the normal course, the ruling combine?s tally this time would have been considered credible and creditable, also in the North especially, but not after their performance in the parliamentary elections, and the subsequent claims of having become the Tamil people?s main choice.

Yes, in the Tamils cultural capital of Jaffna, too, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake?s alliance had done better than all the Tamil parties in terms of vote-share and seat-share. This is despite the poor Tamil defence that their mainline parties were all divided and that only the votes that traditionally went to Douglas Devananda?s EPDP and those that the SLFP?s lone outgoing parliamentarian Angajan Ramanathan had polled in the earlier round had gone the NPP way.

This time again, the Tamil parties were divided, possibly more than earlier. Their LG poll campaign and strategies had begun from the very day the parliamentary election results came out. Yet, in the fitness of things, ITAK, which was once the leader of the pack and had contested alone this time, regained the top slot.

The combine led by another the Ceylon Tamil Congress (CTC) of Gajendra Kumar Ponnambalam, which has been around since the day of his founder-grandfather, too, did well. It owed to the uni-focussed work put by the alliance leader rather than anything else.

Embarrassing situation

Yet, between the two of them, slotted in the second place still was the JVP-NPP combine. There are those who now argue that if and if only the ITAK and the CTC had come together, even if they had left out a myriad of other Tamil parties, alliances and Independent groups, the ruling combine might have faced an embarrassing situation.

In the past, ITAK leader M A Sumanthiran had claimed that by contesting separately and forming post-poll alliances under the PR scheme of elections made greater sense for them to be able to capture more LG institutions than otherwise. But the kind of sweep that ITAK+CWC could have administered if they had contested together in some of the key institutions like the prestigious Jaffna Municipal Council would have made the NPP?s ?humiliation? taste sweeter for the Tamils.

In the parliamentary elections, the Tamils voted consciously for the NPP if only to teach their own fratricidal parties a lesson, and at the same time give the new kid on the block a ?chance? to try and ?change? the way politicians in the country practised politics. It had some salutary effects on the Tamil polity.

The Tamil polity took the lessons and began behaving better, even if on separate planks, even if for the time being. And the Tamil voters, like their Sinhala, Muslim and Upcountry Tamil brethren registered their disenchantment with the ?conversion rate? of the NPP?s poll promises in particular and decades of past image in general.

In short, the ruling combine?s inherent inadequacies and inexperience showed. If someone out there feels that they have bitten more than what they can chew, he or she may be closer to the truth. It does not mean that they have to give up. It only means they have to accept at long last that sloganeering, electioneering and effective administrations are poles apart.

Negative vote

From among the Tamil parties, the victors, namely, the ITAK and CTC, lost no time in claiming that their victories, though not complete, was a vote for their steadfast adherence to their policies deriving from the ethnic issues and its multiple fall-outs. It is half-truth at best, if not at its best.

Yes, the Tamil voters did push the centre-left ?outsider? in the JVP-NPP combine to the second place across the North but not out of their conscience. That did not happen because there is still a substantial number that is not happy with the way ?Tamil nationalism? is being played out. They lived through the guns and torture of the LTTE, and theirs is still a ?negative vote? for the ?outsider?.

They stay together, and need only a marginal tilt in the behaviour of the ?non-committed voters? who were with them in the parliamentary elections and have gone back to the ?Tamil nationalist? plank this time round. There is a lesson in this and the Tamil nationalist parties need to comprehend it good and proper if they have to sustain their gains this time and build on it, too.

When they first got the electoral mandate to run the Northern Provincial Council, the now-defunct TNA lost sight of what all was in store. Having spent three life-times in the Opposition, they did not know how to govern. They also did not know that they did not know.? Like the ruling combine at the national-level, at present.

It meant that you had a chief minister in a retired judge of the Supreme Court, who behaved as if his word is law and should be law. Justice C V Wigneswaran, too, did not have any administrative experience, and hoped to cover his inadequacies by swearing by ?Tamil nationalist? slogans that he could not shout either when in office or after attaining superannuation. Simply put, they failed themselves and the Tamil people.

Today, just after the LG poll results, ITAK?s current president, octogenarian ex-bureaucrat, C V K Sivagnanam, has given a call for the revival of the Tamil Nationalist Alliance (TNA), which the party had killed ahead of the ?mock LG polls? two years back. In the original TNA, you also had the CTC working with the rest, but then Gajan Ponnambalam decided one day that for retaining the party?s limited hold over the masses, he had to revive the demand for ?federalism?. The rest, including the ITAK leader of the alliance, swore by 13-A, still.

Today, for reasons best known to them, each one of the rest, including those that were abandoned by the ITAK, leading to the sudden collapse of the TNA, too, want ?federalism?. One policy issue settled, they need to work on the leadership equations. It is not going to be easy. It is not going to be viable.

Enough deadwood

There are enough deadwood in the Tamil polity who can?t win elections but who are allowed to loiter around on election-eve, whenever and whatever, to remind the new generation voters about their forgotten and often forgettable past. Some of them remain relevant even as a news filler, not because of what they are, or what they used to be. Instead, they are identified with the parties that they claim to represent, the founding leaders now dead and gone ? mostly at the hands of the murderous LTTE.

The Tamil voter?s message is clear. They have voted for a new ITAK, identified with Sumanthiran, and a new-old CTC of Gajan Ponnambalam. Age-wise, both are young compared to those others that are at the helm in some of the other parties. They are definitely much younger than Sampanthan and Maavai Senathirajah, who passed away in a gap of a few months.

The LG vote is for the next generation Tamil leadership to take over and prove themselves. Between the two, Gajan has a longer political history than Sumanthiran, and has a family story to narrate ? though, thankfully, he does not always rest on old laurels, which of course is a mixed bag.

However, an image has been built around the truthless claim that the ITAK is the oldest of the Tamil parties. The CTC, instead, is, though on matters of policies they had differences in a bygone era. That is a different matter that is not relevant to the present generation, especially the new-generation Tamil voter.

Whenever the talk of bringing together all Tamil parties under the same umbrella, the ITAK has initiated the process and also stalled the same. They would want to be recognised as the leader and want the party?s ?The House? symbol as the common symbol. In short, ITAK leaders, whether it was the late Amirthalingam, Sampanthan or now Sumanthiran, they want to be the boss, and want others to accept them as unchallengeable bosses.

Politics does not work that way, not in a democracy, certainly. Those days of bossing over the masses and leaders are gone with the LTTE. It will do them all a lot of good, through the short, medium and long terms, if the ITAK becomes less bossy and more accommodative. The same arguments hold good for the CTC and more so for Gajan Ponnambalam.

At the end of the day, if the current efforts at Tamil political unity did not succeed, it would owe most probably to personality clashes, this time between Gajan and Sumanthiran, or Sumanthiran and Gajan. Of course, there are others like Kilinochchi ITAK parliamentarian Srithatharan, who had once defeated Sumanthiran in organisational elections for finding a new party president.

Sumanthiran still cannot wish away the likes of Sritharan from the inside, and all those who had left the ITAK, blaming him for it, on the very eve of the LG polls, especially to join hands with Gajan. True to his nature, when Gajan began taking an interest in bringing together all parties at the end of the disastrous parliamentary polls last year, he left out Sumanthiran for such one-to-one confabulations. He alone would know the reasons, though it is not too far to second-guess the same.

That is to say, all attempts at Tamil political unity ahead of the much-anticipated provincial council polls, possibly later this year, will have to begin here ? and may also have to end here. It is another matter if after the LG poll results from the South, the Dissanayake leadership would want to face the electorate one more time, in the form of the long-delayed PC polls, unless the higher Judiciary intervenes, as in the case of the LG elections ? with little or no success at the time.

(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)