As Sri Lanka moves from a situation of war to no-war with the silencing of
the big guns, the question of a peace with justice and democracy looms
large. The first few months of this year culminating in the final
offensive of in May saw horrendous suffering for the population of the
Vanni region, held hostage by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)
and subject to the indiscriminate fire from the security forces. Even
with the brutal termination of the LTTE, a fighting force of immense
resources, the civilian suffering and deaths of this civil war are likely
to leave deep scars that must be addressed in any process of
reconciliation.

The armed conflict and its attendant repression have determined and indeed
constituted “politics” in Sri Lanka over the last three decades. Tamil
nationalist mobilizations in opposition to Sinhala Buddhist nationalist
repression led to the emergence of this armed conflict. It is important
to note however that the question of the minorities, historically framed
as the ’national question’, precedes the armed conflict and was a result
of the politics of majoritarian democracy beginning in late colonial times
and entrenched with the formation of the post-colonial state. The current
situation, with the end of armed conflict, offers an opportunity to
re-engage with these historical grievances. Furthermore, an analysis
grounded in a political economy of the state is needed to understand how
state-society relations have been affected by the intervening period of
conflict and the future possibilities for state reform and
democratization.

 The LTTE and the Tamil diaspora

The current moment is undeniably historic, marking the exit of the LTTE
after twenty five years. The LTTE often unilaterally determined the
course of events in Sri Lanka and pushed the State into either making war
or negotiating exclusively with it. However, following the final phase of
the war, the LTTE has been decimated and its resurrection is not possible.
The LTTE in reality only had a military structure centred on its
leadership and particularly the personality cult of Prabhakaran. The
LTTE’s political wing primarily functioned to spin messages from its
military leadership and its fighting cadres’ politics was limited to
absolute loyalty to their leader. With the decimation of its military
structure and the elimination of its entire leadership, the LTTE has been
buried once and for all.

The future of Tamil nationalism, on the other hand, remains uncertain;
after all the LTTE was the militarized expression consolidated through a
fascist political culture of the most extreme form of Tamil nationalism.
Indeed, the political and economic base for the LTTE’s separatist project
was not the Tamil people of the North and East, whom it cynically used as
cannon fodder and as a population to prop up the LTTE’s interests, but
rather, the mobilized section of the Tamil diaspora in the West which
extended the LTTE unconditional support. While Tamil nationalist
sentiments are likely to continue as long as the political rights of the
Tamils are not addressed and Sinhala Buddhist nationalism continues to
predominate, it is also important to note that the stronger current of
Tamil nationalism exists only in the Tamil Diaspora. The bulk of the
Tamil population living in the North and East have lost faith in Tamil
nationalism as a consequence of their untold suffering over twenty five
years of war. For many ordinary Tamils in these areas, the politics of
everyday life and survival now overshadow the agendas of political
parties, which they see as cynical manipulators of their fate.

The final months preceding the LTTE’s defeat saw large sections of the
Tamil diaspora mount massive protests in Western capitals. Indeed, the
diaspora had not only become the LTTE’s base but also the core of this
extreme form of Tamil nationalism. While the call for a separate Tamil
state may survive in the diaspora, the potential for nationalist
mobilization and action is likely to reduce drastically in the months and
years ahead for two reasons. First, diaspora support for Tamil
nationalist politics depended on a powerful actor inside Sri Lanka. For
example, in the 1980s there was considerable Tamil diaspora support for
other militant movements, but all that support quickly shifted to the LTTE
following its emergence as the only Tamil military force inside Sri Lanka
having decimated all the other militant groups. Second, minus the clear
control of the LTTE the mobilized Tamil diaspora could not have
constituted such a coherent and powerful political force. Over the last
two decades, while claiming the sole leadership of Tamil nationalist
movement, the LTTE exerted a mafia-type control over most social and
economic institutions in the Tamil diaspora. By building enterprises as
if it were a multi-national corporation, the LTTE built an international
infrastructure that transformed the diaspora into an effective political
and economic base. In the vacuum left by the LTTE, the Tamil diaspora
already shows sings of disarray; infighting for leadership of pro-LTTE
forums and enterprises are likely to continue to weaken the diaspora’s
coherence and power.

Over the past few years, there was increasing discussion of a larger
political role for the Tamil diaspora in the political process. However,
the irresponsible manner in which pro-LTTE sections of the diaspora
mobilized around the humanitarian crisis in the Vanni early this year has
excluded such a role. Indeed, the massive protests in capitals around the
world were hijacked by the LTTE lobby and its cult-like iconography of
Tiger flags and Prabhakaran’s pictures. These protests and mobilizations
lost credibility as it became increasingly clear that their objective was
more to save the LTTE leadership than the civilians held hostage by the
LTTE; the criticism was clearly one sided and did not condemn the LTTE for
shooting civilians attempting to flee its territory. With the military
defeat of the LTTE, these mobilizations also suffered a political defeat.
Indeed these pro-LTTE mobilizations, calls for a separate state and the
demonization of the Sinhalese by these sections of the Tamil diaspora have
only served to polarize Sri Lankan communities further and helped
reinforce Sinhala Buddhist nationalism inside Sri Lanka. If the Tamil
diaspora is to play any kind of a constructive role going forward, it will
first need to engage in deep reflection and self-criticism and show a
willingness to work with sections of the Sinhala community in pushing for
reform of the State.

The LTTE’s politics can be characterized as suicidal, not only in terms of
its cadres’ practice of carrying cyanide capsules, but also in the
political extremes issuing from its all or nothing gamble for a separate
state. The LTTE was built around protecting the figure of Prabhakaran,
who alone it claimed could deliver a separate Tamil state. It is hardly
surprising therefore that the LTTE would first have to be decimated,
before Prabhakaran was killed. Furthermore, the LTTE’s variety of Tamil
nationalism has also suffered an irreversible setback with the defeat of
the LTTE. This is perhaps the logic of organizations built around a
fascist political culture: their seemingly invincible power collapses when
the leadership is eliminated.

Despite the end of the LTTE, however, the political problems of the Tamil
community remain, and it is those problems that have to be addressed even
as we continue to mourn for the estimated one hundred thousand lives lost
in the course of this brutal war. Amongst those dead are scores of Tamil
democracy activists; both thousands of less known activists and those
prominent figures such as Rajani Thiranagama, Neelan Tiruchelvam, T.
Subathiran and Kethesh Loganathan. Sadly, of these activists, many of
whom were systematically assassinated by the LTTE, only their vision and
inspiration for a just and democratic society remain.

 Tamil democracy and a ’minorities consensus’

Over the last twenty-five years, the LTTE not only scuttled every effort
with the political process, it also eliminated other Tamil voices capable
of taking that process forward. The LTTE also isolated the Tamil
community from other communities, particularly the Muslim community
through ethnic cleansing of the entire Northern Muslim population in 1990
and repeated massacres and violence against the Muslims in the East. The
post-LTTE era then calls for different kinds of Tamil voices, democratic
voices that take the political process within a united Sri Lanka seriously
all the while mending relations between the Tamil community and other
communities. Here again, the Tamil diaspora, which for the most part has
been frozen in a particular mindset following the horrendous riots of July
1983, has its limitations; large sections of the diaspora are unaware of
the changes inside the country from the developments with the political
process and the devolution debate to the emergence of other political
actors. Indeed, the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress itself was formed in the
late 1980s and the prominence gained by Muslims political actors with
their claim to a separate ethnic identity beyond their religious identity
rarely figures in political discussions in diaspora forums.

The emergence of a genuinely democratic Tamil politics is bound to take
time, given that much Tamil opposition to the LTTE within Sri Lanka was
also armed and has not completely come out of the militant movement
mindset. While it may require the emergence of a new generation from
within Sri Lanka to change the course of Tamil politics, there is an
urgent need for a Tamil democratic voice from a range of actors to
articulate the immediate concerns of the war ravaged population. Such a
voice might incorporate the clergy, academics, professionals and community
activists involved in humanitarian work. The greater the space accorded
to such actors, the greater the chance of a democratic transformation in
the Tamil community.

Now more than ever, the Tamil community also needs to establish stronger
links with the other minorities, particularly Muslims and Up-Country
Tamils. The days of the Jaffna Tamil community’s hegemony over the other
minorities is long over and now the survival of Tamil politics itself may
be contingent on developing a ’minorities consensus’ through which all the
minority communities can agree on a set of principles to address their
collective grievances against the discriminatory State. The Lankan Tamil
community may now need the support and leadership of the other minorities
rather than the other way around. Minorities can find much common cause
on a range of issues. In fact, one major contradiction even in relation
to devolution of power to the North and East was the concerns of the
Muslim community, particularly, its perceptions and fears of being
oppressed by the Tamils backed by the military might of the LTTE. Other
issues beyond devolution, including the political rights of minorities
living in the South are also important. Currently, there are discussions
about forms of power-sharing at the centre, with for example greater
representation in a bicameral legislature, greater access to education and
state sector employment, implementation of bi-lingual language policy, and
protection of fundamental rights and an end to discrimination. These are
all concerns that minorities share.

This framing of the problem of Sri Lanka as one of a question of the
minorities differs significantly from a nationalist framing as a
Sinhala-Tamil problem; as a conflict between two nations. The alternative
framing looks at the problem as the legacy of a majoritarian democracy
which has marginalized minorities. In other words, it is a history of
regimes constituted by elite Sinhalese who have mobilized Sinhala Buddhist
nationalism in order to control the State to the detriment of the
minorities. Crucial in this analysis is the distinction between state and
regime and the fact that this mobilization has not necessarily benefited
the larger Sinhalese population. Rather conflict, war and the broader
politics of the regimes have also negatively impacted the Sinhalese
community as a whole. In this context, any serious challenge to
majoritarian democracy might have to begin with a ’minorities consensus’,
paving the way to forge links between the minorities and progressive
Sinhalese actors towards state reform. Such reform should ensure an end
to manipulation of state institutions and state policies for narrow
partisan interests and usher in broader democratization.

 Elections and the government’s blueprint

In the context of this majoritarian democracy and with insufficient checks
on the centralized structure of the State, electoral democracy has in fact
been more a problem than a solution. The two major political parties, the
UNP and the SLFP, have used electoral politics cynically to advance their
own partisan interests, often to the detriment of minority communities,
resulting in many missed opportunities to address the conflict. This
manipulation of electoral politics towards the dominant political parties’
interests has also not addressed the long-term concerns of the larger
Sinhalese community, particularly the rural communities as evident from
the two very costly insurrections in the early 1970s and the late 1980s.
Thus the shedding of majoritarian politics, state reform and a deeper
democratization in the country is in the interests of all the communities.

This point about electoral politics and its relationship to state reform
is also important in the current context. The Rajapaska government’s
strategy for the North is likely to replicate its course of action in the
Eastern Province when, following the 2007 defeat of the LTTE there, local
government and then Provincial Council elections were hastily called.
Rushing into elections in the North could have very negative implications
for the emergence of Tamil democratic politics. First, it could entrench
armed actors, particularly remnants of the militant groups aligned with
the government in its war against the LTTE. Second, both the militarized
situation and a population that has been repeatedly displaced do not bode
well for an environment supportive of peoples’ democratic expression.
Third, without structures that address the problems of the 13^th Amendment
which underlies the Provincial Councils, including contentious issues
surrounding devolved powers, any elected Provincial Council, as with the
one in the Eastern Province, is likely to be manipulated by the Centre
using the powers of the Governor. Thus moving forward with the elections
– which may well be in the interest of the Rajapaksa government - could
further exacerbate the parlous situation of the Tamil community in the
North.

It is notable that elections following military operations were not always
the stated objective of this government. As early as June 2006 when the
war escalated following repeated provocations by the LTTE, the President
appointed an All Party Conference to come up with a far reaching political
solution. However, by January 2008 the President himself had undermined
this very process in favour of the Eastern blueprint discussed above. The
last two years saw the undermining of the political process as the
military approach and objectives became the government’s sole imperative,
while the Rajapaksa regime consolidated its political power in the context
of the war. Finally, over the next year, the Rajapaksa regime is likely
to entrench its power further by moving on early Presidential followed by
parliamentary elections, cashing in on the euphoria surrounding the war
victory.

 Militarization and the Rajapaksa regime

Given the history of the last thirty years, the Rajapaksa regime enjoys
the unique position of having crushed a protracted armed struggle and
civil war. The war and war politics have also done much to entrench the
regime’s power, and with that, its authoritarian and oligarchic
tendencies.

Its success at war has not only come at great civilian cost, but also at
the expense of the lost lives of security forces personnel and through the
mobilization of the Southern population around war propaganda and support
for the military. The military was given both an important role and
afforded great amount of immunity to achieve the Rajapaksa regime’s single
objective of achieving the military victory. Thus one important question
is the future role of the military and militarization more broadly in the
politics of the country.

Here demilitarization would mean: disarming all armed groups and
paramilitaries, downsizing the military and reducing the large swaths of
land taken over by the State and designated as High Security Zones. An
end to constant harassment and lack of free movement for Tamil civilians,
as well as curfews in the North and the culture of human rights abuses and
impunity that have characterized the warring years should be a priority.
Resettlement of the peoples displaced both in the recent war and over the
decades is another priority. The long interment of the population
displaced from the Vanni over the last six months - which the government
claims is to screen for LTTE cadres - can lead to further bitterness among
the population. The government’s stated commitment to allow the
resettlement of most displaced people over the next six months is an
important test of its commitment to its Tamil citizens who had until
recently lived under the jackboot of the LTTE. Finally, demilitarization
should mean repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act brought about in
1979 and an end to the state of emergency which has given successive
regimes immense draconian powers.

The war politics of the Rajapaksa regime also gave centre stage to Sinhala
Buddhist nationalism and labelling all those opposed to the war as
“traitors”. The regime’s mobilization around militarized nationalism also
led to unprecedented support from the Sinhalese population which wanted to
see an end to the LTTE once and for all. One of the LTTE’s colossal
mistakes was to target hundreds of Sinhalese civilians in 2006 and 2007
through the use of landmines and massacres. Next, the war propaganda was
also sustained through the brutal disciplining of the media and dissent
and the constriction of the democratic space in the country.

It is in that context that the 17^th amendment to the Constitution, which
stipulates democratic governance by constituting a Constitutional Council
to appoint independent commissions such as the Judicial Services
Commission and the Human Rights Commission, is important. The
deterioration of democratic governance in Sri Lanka has been
characteristic of not only the war politics, but also the centralization
of power and political interference and manipulation leading to the
deterioration of state institutions. The non-implementation of the
Constitutional Council brought about in 2001 to check the powers of
Executive Presidency which came with the 1978 constitution, has now led to
Presidential interference in various independent bodies. The office of
the Executive Presidency is an institution that has assisted the
entrenchment and consolidation of regimes.

With the end of the war and attenuation of war politics, questions emerge
about the sustainability of the current political order and the
overwhelming support for the Rajapaksa regime. The latter’s oligarchic
aspirations have been consolidated through war politics, a highly
centralized administration and populist economic policies centred on
foreign aid and infrastructure development. Three factors are favourable
towards a continuation of the regime’s continued consolidation. First,
the main political opposition consisting of the United National Party
(UNP) is in a very weak state and continues to be fronted by former Prime
Minister Wickramasinghe who has led his party to a string of election
defeats. Second, the politics of patronage that has become common place
means that the ruling regime can buy over both the members of opposition
as well as the numerous and fragmented political parties in the country.
Third, given the war euphoria, the Rajapaksa regime is likely to sweep
both the Presidential and Parliamentary elections over the next year,
limiting any serious electoral challenge in the near term.

Over the next year, two scenarios are possible; either there will be a
greater opening including the space for dissent and democratization, or
there will be greater repression particularly in the South. Nationalist
mobilization and support for the Rajapaksa regime cannot continue in the
same vein as during the war and there is bound to be social and political
pressures towards greater opening. If the regime desires to maintain the
current political order, increased repression in the South will be
necessary, but that will have significant risks for any ruling regime in
the absence of strong support from a powerful external actor.
Furthermore, in the post-Cold War age, Sri Lanka lacks the geopolitical
significance for such external support for any overtly repressive regime.
In any event, while both scenarios are possible, significant changes in
state-society relations are unavoidable with the shift from war to no-war.

 The political economy of the question of minorities

While politics in the South is going to shape politics in the entire
country, the political parties are not necessarily going to lead political
change. Rather, it is economic developments within the country aggravated
by the global economic crisis that may well become the significant factor
shaping politics over the next few years. The two years from 2007 to
2008, saw very high levels of inflation leading to a dramatic increase in
the cost of living mainly propelled by the rapid increase in global oil
and commodity prices. The deflationary fall in global oil prices over the
last year have led to a significant fall in inflation, with inflation now
in the single digits, but the country is nevertheless facing a serious
balance of payments problem. During the last two years of war the broader
population was asked to tighten its belt, justified as the cost for
winning the war; but such bottled up economic pressures are now likely to
come to the fore. In the next few years, the Rajapaksa regime will have
to address the economic discontent in the country. Here, reconstruction
efforts centred on the North, particularly infrastructure projects as was
the case with the post-Tsunami reconstruction and with the economic blue
print of the Rajapaksa regime, may provide some economic relief. While
investment in the form of foreign aid and foreign direct investment are
likely to increase, trade and particularly exports are likely to fall
significantly over the next few years.

Many of the issues relating to the political economy of Sri Lanka were
over-determined by the politics of war and the ethnic conflict. Issues of
the rural poor, uneven development characterized by the rural-urban
divide, high levels of unemployment, including disguised unemployment, the
suppressed wages of workers many of whom are state sector employees and
cuts in social welfare are now likely to surface with some force over the
next few years. Populist politics and the politics of patronage will not
be able to address such pressures. The conjunction of problems triggered
by the global economic downturn with political economic questions long
suppressed by the war could shift politics in a dramatic manner. It could
provide room for new forms of opposition, political mobilization, social
movements, a loosening of the political grip of the Rajapaksa regime, and
ultimately democratization.

The social, economic and political contradictions likely to come to the
fore in the ensuing years find their roots in two manœuvres by different
regimes in the late 1950s and late 1970s. Both these manœuvres are
essentially symptomatic of how the structure of majoritarian democracy and
the corresponding limitations of the post-colonial state have historically
vitiated the equitable treatment of minorities’ issues by successive
regimes. Indeed both instances had significant deleterious consequences
for the national question in Sri Lanka, creating new conditions that
amplified the predicament of its minorities. In both instances therefore,
it important to note how regimes responded to issues arising from the
political economy of the postcolonial state by disempowering the
minorities.

The manœuvre by the rightist UNP Jayawardena regime elected in 1977 in
the aftermath of the import substitution experiment of the left-leaning
United Front government was to push for an open economy through massive
restructuring of the economic sector. The Jayawardena regime’s move
established the essential terms for Sri Lanka’s economic course for the
next thirty years, as Sri Lanka became one of the first Third World
countries to embrace liberalization, well ahead of the global regime of
the Washington Consensus articulated a number of years later in the
mid-1980s. A precondition for this manœuvre was a massive extension of
the Jayawardena regime’s control over the state apparatus and it is no
coincidence that the autocratic Executive Presidency and the entrenchment
of the unitary state were part of the 1978 constitution that provided the
legal underpinning for the new political economic order. The repression
of the Tamil minority assisted by the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) of
1979 and the wide powers of Emergency were also used at that time to crush
organized labour in the country. This legal architecture of emergency,
PTA, Executive Presidency and state impunity with the effective
undermining of Parliament as an effective body, has formed the structure
of national security within which subsequent regimes have governed. It is
important to note here that more recently with the Rajapkase regime, the
approach to the question of minorities has been reduced to an issue of
national security and state-led reconstruction of the war affected
regions. It remains to be seen how the destruction of the LTTE will
impact the continuation of this national security state.

The second, earlier manœuvre in the late 1950s was by the Bandaranaike
regime which brought to the fore nationalist politics through the
implementation of the Sinhala Only Act of 1956. That discriminatory
language policy mobilized the Sinhala community fresh with anti-colonial
sentiments by channelling the disaffection against the English speaking
elite against the Tamil community as a whole. The Bandaranaike regime’s
manœuvre was necessitated by the intrinsic weakness of a postcolonial
ruling elite, dependent on alliances with subordinate and “intermediate”
classes to govern. Here, the lack of economic opportunities for segments
of the Sinhala rural population in particular was a vital condition for
the regime’s mobilization of class alliances through the manœuvre of
’Sinhala Only’ that promised greater employment in the state sector for
these classes. Tragically, the opportunism of the Left parties also
became manifest as they shifted from a principled position of parity of
status on language policy to aligning themselves with Sinhala Buddhist
nationalism by the late sixties and early seventies. However, the
essential instability of the Bandaranaike manœuvre and the precarious
ability of the state to guarantee Sinhala social mobility was evident from
the JVP insurrection of the early 1970s when thousands of Sinhalese youth
took up arms against the State. For the purposes of this discussion, the
importance of Bandaranaike’s manœuvre lies in the creation the Sri Lanka
Freedom Party (SLFP), as the second major political party next to the UNP
which dominated politics at independence. Regimes emerging from both the
UNP and the SLFP have over the last fifty years sought to secure support
from key segments of the majority population through a variety of populist
measures. However, none of the successive regimes have been able to make
a serious dent on the economic problems affecting the population. Ethnic
politics and eventually the escalation into civil war became the most
important factor deflecting attention away from the economic
contradictions that should have posed a serious threat to the ruling
regimes and the Lankan elite.

The legacy of the civil war and nationalist politics is also the legacy of
the failure of the Sri Lankan elite. And here the elite from both
communities, Sinhalese and Tamil alike could not put forward and sustain a
vision for building a post-colonial state and a liberal democracy that
could avoid the ravages of conflict and war. Left politics since the
1960s also has to share the blame for this tragedy that has led to the
immense suffering and the loss of lives that have come about with the two
insurrections in the South and the civil war. The inability of the elite
to politically resolve the conflicts and the question of minorities is
also symptomatic of the limitations of bourgeois class power and its
contingent claims on state power in Sri Lanka.

 Future possibilities

The end of the war and the decimation of the LTTE and Tamil nationalist
politics may well be the beginning of the unravelling of nationalist
politics more broadly in Sri Lanka. The consequences of the two
historical manœuvres mentioned above may now reach closure if nationalist
politics in the South also loses its rationale following weakening of the
Tamil community and its construction by Sinhala Buddhist nationalism as
the cause of the problems facing the Sinhalese. Over the decades,
attempts to bring about an agreement between the two main political
parties the UNP and SLFP towards an elusive ’Southern Consensus’ have
failed due to ethnic politics. We must add to this the diminishing
possibility of appeasing the Sinhalese communities with state patronage,
the termination of the over determination of economic contradictions
through ethnic politics and an end to the two party system of politics
which provided room for competing regimes.

While the economic contradictions may now come to the fore, the end of the
war and the Rajapaksa regime’s moves have also placed the various
political formations in a precarious situation. The UNP led by Ranil
Wickramasinghe, is in a very weak state after its failed lead in the
Norwegian peace process that was characterized by conflict resolution with
the LTTE coupled with a neoliberal economic agenda. The JVP, the third
largest party, which opposed the Norwegian process and supported the war
along Sinhala nationalist lines was hamstrung by its support for the war
and outflanked by the Rajapaksa regime, leading to an unprecedented split
in what was hitherto perceived to be a monolithic party structure. The
Rajapaksa regime continues to hold its parliamentary majority with a weak
coalition consisting of a range of parties from the Sinhala nationalists
to the minority parties to remnants of the Left. The Rajapaksa Presidency
itself would not have come about if not for the LTTE’s assistance through
a forced boycott of the elections in the North, as the LTTE wanted a
nationalist regime in the South to aggravate the conflict. The tenuous
hold the Rajapaksa regime has in parliament is reflected by the politics
of patronage that provided over a hundred ministries, with
parliamentarians from a variety of fragmented political parties including
those who split from the UNP and JVP. Finally, further repression in the
interests of the consolidation of class power is unlikely given that the
capitalist class will only advance cautious support for the Rajapaksa
regime, which in the interest of its broad and populist platform cannot
align within any single class.

With possibilities for the fuller emergence of contradictions in
state-society relations in the South, the weak state of oppositional
political parties means that it will be difficult for the UNP or for that
matter the JVP, both of which continue to follow the lead of the Rajapaksa
regime in ethnic politics, to exploit the opportunity afforded by these
contradictions. The political ground is open for a third force to emerge,
even if it may begin in the realm of social and political movements and
lack the coherence of a political party. This is not new, as 1994 was a
similar moment when for the first time the South was won on a peace
platform by President Chandrika Kumaratunga; a victory contingent on
tremendous support from a range of social movements; of constituencies
both opposed to the war and others mobilizing on economic issues. The
possibilities and success of any new third force may well be contingent
upon addressing two problems that have plagued post-colonial Sri Lanka;
the question of minorities and the contradictions inherent in the
political economy of the country. The resolution of both problems will
require state reform and democratization leading to changes with the
unitary and centralized power of the state. It is such politics
characterized by democratic struggle around the political rights of
minorities that may challenge the authoritarian and oligarchic aspirations
of the Rajapaksa regime.

The question of minorities can not be solved by external actors, whether
it is the broader international community or for that matter the powerful
neighbour India. One of the lessons of the much internationalized peace
process and subsequent war over the last eight years are the limitations
of international engagement. While such engagement can be constructive or
destructive, given the geopolitical insignificance of Sri Lanka,
international actors may only tip the scales in the context of competing
regimes conditioned by an internationalized political economy. The
important lesson of the longer cycle of Sri Lankan history is that the
exclusivist politics of the nationalism cannot address the question of
minorities. The Tamil nationalists including those from the Federal Party
and the TULF made the mistake in not recognizing that the Tamil question
was tied to the question of minorities more broadly and a deeper
democratization of the entire country. The ethnic minorities forming only
a quarter of the population will necessarily have to make common cause
with sections of the Sinhalese community in order to struggle for a share
of state power and to bring about changes to the majoritarian democracy
and the centralized unitary state. There is an older tradition of
progressive and Left politics in the Tamil community which saw the
’national question’ as inextricably linked with class politics and
democratization in the entire country. That tradition which also
struggled with issues such as caste within the Tamil community lost ground
in seventies with the escalation of nationalist mobilization and armed
struggle. It is such politics grounded in political rights of minorities,
social justice and democratization that can now move on reconciliation and
sustainable peace.