Sri Lanka’s crisis last year was unprecedented in many respects. But, this was not entirely related to the country’s turbulent past, marked by discriminatory laws and policy targeting the island nation’s minorities, particularly the Malayaha Tamils. Rajan HoleJaffna-based mathematician, known for his human rights activism during the civil war years.
in an email interview with HinduHe talks about his latest book democracy stillbornco-author Kirupaimalar Hole, a retired librarian from Jaffna University. Published by Colombo-based Sailfish, it focuses on the treatment of Sri Lanka’s Malayaha Tamil community, brought from India by the British to work on plantations in the central and southern regions of the island, and links the community’s persistent exploitation and discrimination . Working class for the great discovery of democracy of the country.
After your early years of activism as part of University Teachers for Human Rights-Jaffna [UTHR-J]when you wrote broken palmyra with your partners, and post workWhat inspired you to write, including the Easter Sunday Bombings of 2019 democracy stillborn,
Rajan Hole: Democracy Stillborn was inspired by the filth, ignorance and humiliation to which only plantation Tamils were legally subjected, which I have witnessed since youth. The denial of votes aided by the opportunism of the Tamil Congress, took away vital means of protecting the community, let alone advancement.
broken palmyra Had to grapple with this question in 1987. Coming from Leftist persuasions, co-authored by Rajini Thiranagama, Koplasingham Sreedharan [and Daya Somasundaram] He was most sensitive to political considerations. Rajani wrote, “Most of the left-leaning intellectuals among Tamils were also with the Communist Party (Peking). It was also the first left-wing party to build a solid base among plantation Tamils. Despite all this, it was not completely immune to Sinhalese insurgency either. It failed to recognize the primacy of the national question in island politics and left the fight for the rights of Tamils in the hands of the Tamil bourgeois parties. There was no coherent line connecting the class struggle with the national question.
This applied to the entire Left. During our stay in Hatton, when we had to adopt a low profile, our report The Sullen Hills, The Saga of Up Country Tamils of January 1993 (UTHR Sp. Rep. 4) led.
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Sri Lanka is celebrating its 75th anniversary of independence this year, and the Malaya Tamils, whose ancestors were brought over from British India, are marking 200 years of their arrival in Sri Lanka. Your book spans nearly a century, attempting to link the island’s current challenges to its history of treatment of indentured Indian laborers. How do you see the situation of Malayah Tamils today?
Being an island, migration and assimilation from India and colonial slavery was high. Indians were brought in by the British for civil works, road construction and opening of estates. Their regiment and isolation to advantage in the Sinhalese environment ensured that they remained a group of Tamil speakers. Under the influence of universal adult suffrage, a beneficial introduction by the British in 1929, the Ceylon National Congress was hijacked by a group that fashioned Sinhalese nationalism based on hazy ancient history and modern-day market capitalism. By identifying the plantation workers as an outcast opposition, in 1949 the Sinhalese leaders succeeded in their 20-year effort to deny their existence. Agreements between the colonial governments of India and Ceylon based on the Indian Emigration Act of 1922, along with universal suffrage, ensured that the population growth and mortality of plantation Tamils was at liberty among the Kandyan Sinhalese among whom they lived. After being disenfranchised in 1949, the figures diverged, and in the disastrous decade of the 1970s, in which many Indian Tamils were repatriated, their population growth was negative. This was slavery. Even though the government today claims that everyone has the vote, this community has been left far behind by nearly 40 years of denial.
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When you talk about the political realities then and now, your book places a lot of emphasis on the judiciary. You talk about how key decisions have shaped the political landscape of the country. How do you rate the current legal system in Sri Lanka, especially in terms of protecting the rights of minorities?
Ivor Jennings, author of Ceylon’s independence constitution of 1948, derived Ceylon’s fundamental rights protection (section 29) from section 5(1) of the Northern Ireland Act of 1920 to ‘directly or indirectly’ qualify for a privilege or disadvantage Weakened. Minority. This omission enabled the Ceylon government to indirectly deprive the plantation Tamils of their vote. Six months after independence, the Citizenship Act rejected the vote of Plantation Tamils by a simple majority of 53 against 35. The independence of the judiciary was affected by official interference in the appointment of the Chief Justice. Since independence, no Supreme Court has called the Citizenship Act a play of dishonesty. In fact, the Privy Council, to whom the Court’s decision was appealed, struck it down on the grounds that it was indirect, and mainly because it allowed exactly what the law was enacted to prevent. But then it let the Parliament go, treating it as supreme. However, in 1964 by OL de Kretzer, Sinhala Only was not allowed to violate the protection of fundamental rights in Article 29. We are still under its influence. There was no legal remedy against such supremacy of Parliament.
Given the current political and economic challenges facing the country, what path do you think human rights activism should take?
Despite the end of the war, the total failure to address accountability issues would be the focus of international pressure. The economic downturn exposed the futility of relying on ethnic or religious mobilization to gain power. This made possible the ‘Aragalaya’ mass movement that overthrew the Rajapaksa regime. The absence of a serious transformative process enabled the current regime to use the dictatorial Terrorism Prevention Act to eliminate vacancy and suppress dissent and move towards authoritarianism and austerity. The primary task of the human rights community, therefore, is to integrate strategies to take the socio-economic rights of those marginalized communities who will bear the brunt, and to preserve the democratic space, which is inseparable from combating religious and ethnic extremism. Is.
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More broadly, what are your thoughts on Sri Lanka’s post-independence history and tryst with democracy?
The tradition of Citizenship Act-inspired anarchy is so deep-rooted that anyone advocating for press freedom can be detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act on the vague charge of inciting communal disharmony and held until the police interrogate them can be kept in custody. The Citizenship Act of August 1948 required proof of the father being born in Ceylon, which most residents could not satisfy, but only plantation Tamils were administratively fragmented, who were required to prove the father’s birth in Ceylon. included in the Franchise Act of 1949. They were indirectly put off by the retrospective requirement of proof for a father being born in Ceylon, administratively applied to Indian Tamils alone. The British Privy Council did not accept this, but by allowing (above) bizarrely showed that the law in Britain was an ass. The United Nations Human Rights Declaration protected them by declaring that every person shall have a nationality. But the Ceylon government said without any reason that they are citizens of India. By failing to challenge this, India opened itself up to blackmail, which led to the embarrassing Sirimavo-Shastri pact. There was no attempt with democracy in Ceylon.