Tamil people take part in a commemoration ceremony in Mullivaikkal village in the Mullaitivu district in northern Sri Lanka on May 18, 2024, to remember victims of the civil war.
| Photo Credit: AFP

India’s move to name the Jaffna Cultural Centre after the Tamil poet-philosopher, Thiruvalluvar, is a symbolic gesture by New Delhi to reinforce the unbreakable bond with Sri Lanka. When sections of Sri Lankan Tamils were agitated originally over the omission of ‘Jaffna’ in the Centre’s nomenclature, the Indian authorities were swift in their course correction. It is now called the “Jaffna Thiruvalluvar Cultural Centre”, a recent landmark, built by the Indian government. No one needs to emphasise the significance of bilateral ties between the two south Asian neighbours, which have a shared history and culture.

In the last 40-odd years, the nature of political relations has undergone significant changes ever since the 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom in Sri Lanka drew India in to play the role of a mediator, initially, and that of an active player, later, in the attempt to resolve the vexatious ethnic problem. It was such a complex relationship that led to the signing of the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 and the consequent 13th Amendment (13A) to Sri Lanka’s Constitution, creating a new layer of government — Provincial Councils — and granting it limited autonomy. At that time, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) — the party to which Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake belongs — was among those which opposed the Accord and the Amendment. According to critics, the two were considered to be impositions of India on Sri Lanka.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which was another critic and then the most important Tamil force, was not happy with the settlement formula. The LTTE was for the division of Sri Lanka and the creation of a Tamil Eelam (encompassing the Tamil-majority Northern and Eastern provinces), an idea that India can never agree with.

India’s nudges on 13A

Despite the passage of over 35 years, the crucial Amendment has not yet been given a fair trial, especially in the Tamil-speaking areas of Sri Lanka, even though the Provincial Councils, there in most parts of the country, functioned between 1988 and 2019.

Successive Indian leaders have been urging their Sri Lankan counterparts for the “early, full or effective implementation” of 13A. In fact, when India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar met Mr. Dissanayake in Colombo in early October 2024 to invite him formally to visit India, he too referred to this much-used phrase.

But, the absence of any explicit reference to the Amendment in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public remarks during Mr. Dissanayake’s state visit to New Delhi in December 2024 has raised the question whether India has begun distancing itself from the issue of the implementation of 13A. Even though it is too early to arrive at any conclusion, as Mr. Modi did call for “fully implementing the Constitution of Sri Lanka and conducting the Provincial Council elections”, one is tempted to recall the suggestion made by Mr. Jaishankar, in his capacity as Foreign Secretary, in February 2017, to the now-defunct Tamil National Alliance to move beyond the merger issue. The Northern and Eastern provinces had remained together nearly for 20 years till the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka annulled such an arrangement in October 2006.

Mr. Modi’s silence is to be viewed against the backdrop of the JVP’s traditional position on the Amendment. It is not yet clear whether Sri Lanka’s ruling coalition of the JVP-led National People’s Power (NPP) still favours the repeal of the Amendment.

While Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya told The Island in February 2023 that “we [NPP] believe that it [13A] should be implemented but we have a debate whether it could be a tenable solution for the national problem”, Mr. Dissanayake, in his campaign in Jaffna a few months ago for the parliamentary polls, did not touch upon the issues of greater power devolution and a political settlement to the ethnic question. The only reference to devolution was found in the NPP manifesto during the September 2024 presidential poll, wherein the coalition had assured people that there would be a new constitution “that strengthens democracy and ensures equality of all citizens”.

Local bodies are no substitute

While pointing out that the incomplete constitutional reform process, which began in 2015, would be built upon, the manifesto talked of a “devolution of political and administrative power to every local government, district and province” and holding elections “within a year” to provincial councils and local bodies “which are currently postponed indefinitely”. If the political discourse in Sri Lanka is any indication, elections to the local authorities may take place sooner rather than later.

There is nothing wrong in holding the elections to the local bodies, which have a much longer history in Sri Lanka than the provincial councils. However, the rulers should be under no illusion that however efficient they may be, local bodies are no substitutes for the provincial councils. As in many other countries, the local self governments in Sri Lanka too are hardly equipped to solve all the problems being thrown up by growing urbanisation on the one hand and other issues such as limited sources of own revenue and high dependence on fiscal transfers on the other. This is why the layer of provincial councils becomes essential to address many of the issues.

It was not without reason that the interim report of the Steering Committee of the Constitutional Assembly, in September 2017, pointed to the wide consensus among Chief Ministers, Provincial Councils, and various panels of the Assembly, that provinces be recognised as the primary unit of devolution.

The people and a deal

It is time that the JVP’s leaders stop viewing the Provincial Councils as a creation of India, as, after all, any constitutional concept, in the contemporary period, is an outcome of palimpsest. This holds good for the Accord and 13A too, which were produced through an evolutionary process that involved the scrutiny of a number of proposals at different levels in the two countries during 1983-87. Also, Sri Lanka’s three Constitutions — the Soulbury Constitution of 1948 and two Republican Constitutions of 1972 and 1978 — were drafted, based on the British, American and French systems of government. The ruling coalition would do well to keep in mind that the people of Sri Lanka, known for their democratic spirit and effecting the transition of power mostly through the ballot box, deserve a deal that is in tune with their character.

The NPP, which commands a two-thirds majority in Parliament with an extremely popular President, has the golden opportunity now to find a durable solution to the ethnic problem, which is an offshoot of a combination of economic and political factors.

ramakrishnan.t@thehindu.co.in

Colombo:

Labelling it as a “major scam”, the extended family of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) chief Velupillai Prabhakaran has urged all Tamils in India and around the world not to fall into the trap laid out by certain elements in the diaspora fraternity who have been collecting millions of dollars by saying that the slain Tamil leader is still alive.

Karthic Manoharan, the son of Prabhakaran’s elder brother Velupillai Manoharan, told IANS that a “mafia gang” which wants to use Prabhakaran as a “brand name” and collects funds from Tamils living around the world is operating at a major scale.

V. Prabhakaran was killed during the final stages of Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long bloody war against the LTTE, which was crushed by the Lankan security forces in May 2009.

“Give due respect to the dead. Not a penny given to the gang of fraudsters, who had been claiming that Prabhakran is alive, will go to the family or the poor and suffering Tamils in war-ravaged Sri Lanka, and instead end up in their pockets,” said Karthic, the 43-year-old nephew of the late LTTE supreme leader.

Branding the alleged fraudsters as “liars”, Karthic named some Indian Tamil leaders and Lankan-born Tamil Eelam campaigners for running a campaign to resurrect his dead uncle Prabhakaran and his only daughter Dwaraka Prabhakaran.

Manoharan’s family has maintained an extremely low profile since they left Sri Lanka in 1983. They finally broke their silence after some diaspora groups in Switzerland enacted a fake drama with an AI-manipulated video speech of Dwaraka Prabhakaran on ‘Maaveerar Naal’ or ‘Great Heroes Day’ on November 27, 2023.

“We need to put an end to this nonsense. My uncle with his entire family died during the last stages of the war. This had been confirmed and if any of them were alive, they would have contacted us as we all were quite close and he used to call us from Sri Lanka,” the nephew said.

He added that the final conversation his family had with Prabhakaran was in 2008, a year before the war came to an end.

“My uncle, in what turned out to be his last call, said that the situation was really bad in Sri Lanka,” Karthic said.

Prabhakaran’s parents were taken to India by Karthic’s father Manoharan in 1983 along with the rest of the family after the ethnic war broke out in Sri Lanka, with the military hunting for the LTTE leader.

The family lived in Tamil Nadu for 13 years till 1998 and then migrated to Denmark through a UN agency.

“My father was planning to start a business in India but then Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination happened and my uncle was the suspect. So, my dad was asked to leave India,” the Tamil rebel leader’s nephew told IANS.

The family later approached the UNHCR and moved to the Scandinavian country in 1996 which accepted their plea first.

However, Karthic said that because the family was related to the LTTE leader, they received “ill-treatment” from some diaspora groups in Denmark who had been amassing money in the name of the rebel movement.

“Having travelled from India, we were also branded as RAW agents,” said Karthic, who expressed gratitude to the Indian government for allowing the family to stay in the country for more than a decade.

Karthic initially believed that his grandparents were also killed during the last days of the war in May 2009. The family later came to know that they were alive and had been kept in an army camp until his grandfather’s death was announced in 2010. Prabhakaran’s mother also died later.

One of Karthic’s aunts (sister of Prabhakaran) still lives in India with her family while another resides in Canada.

However, he said, the extended family still cannot meet each other or travel due to many visa issues and fear of not being able to return.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Commemorating Tamil victims of Sri Lanka’s civil war has remained a sensitive issue. A solidarity remembrance event held in May 2023 in Colombo was disrupted by a Sinhala nationalist group. 
| Photo Credit: File Photo

The recent arrest of four Tamils in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province — when they commemorated their loved ones killed in the final phases of the civil war in 2009 — has put Tamils’ right to memorialise in sharp focus yet again.

Also read: 40 years since ‘Black July’, little space in Sri Lanka to remember the dead

The police said the arrests were based on magistrate court orders that ruled against holding such commemorative events, citing reasons of “public health” and “attempts to revive” the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that the Sri Lankan military eliminated.

According to local Tamil media reports, three women, including a university student, and a man were arrested by the police in Sampur, located in the eastern Trincomalee district late on Sunday. Video footage widely shared on social media showed the police dragging a woman from her home.  

Another court in the Eastern Province on Tuesday issued an order observing that commemorating members of the LTTE may lead to a “revival of terrorist activities” in the country, and “disrupt people’s everyday lives”.  Further, media reports said the police disrupted events held in the Batticaloa and Ampara districts of the Province, where participants prepared and served kanji (porridge) in a symbolic act to remember the gruesome final days of the battle when tens of thousands of civilians were killed in the shelling by state armed forces.  

The Police Media Division in Colombo said in a statement that the arrests were made as the suspects “disobeyed” a court order and one of them allegedly attacked a police officer with a knife.

When contacted, a senior police official from the Eastern Province told The Hindu that the arrests were “preventive”. “The Eastern Province is multi-ethnic, with Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims living peacefully. If some Tamils commemorate members of the LTTE, it may trigger anger among others who faced losses owing to the LTTE’s actions. This is to ensure there is no communal disharmony,” the senior official said, asking not to be named.  

Fifteen years since the end of Sri Lanka’s protracted war, its gory end invokes contrasting narratives and sentiments in the Tamil-majority north and east, and the Sinhala-majority south.  Tamils mark May 18 as a day of grief and mourning, paying homage to their relatives, while much of the Sinhala-majority south celebrates May 19 as “victory day”, and soldiers as “war heroes”.

Amid the two strikingly different narratives, Sri Lanka has made little progress on truth, accountability, and justice that Tamils are demanding. A political solution, too, remains elusive.

“This is an emotional time for Tamils,” noted Rt. Rev. Noel Emmauel, Bishop of Trincomalee. “People struggle during this time, remembering their loved ones from those very traumatic times,” he told The Hindu.  

Government records showed 1,46,679 people went missing, he said, adding that just like justice and reconciliation, grieving too, is an important element of the healing process.

Observing that a space for such commemorations opened up during President Maithripala Sirisena’s term in office, Bishop Emmanuel said: “In those years, people held similar commemorations and it caused no disharmony or disruption in the community.  My urgent appeal to authorities is just let people do that. Harassing people for remembering their loved ones goes against their basic human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

“I would also like to say that we remember with respect the lives lost from the majority Sinhalese community during the war, including soldiers,” he added.