Sathyam Commentary
2 July 1999
Appapillai
Amirthalingam
[see also One Hundred Tamils of 20th
Century - Appapillai Amirthalingam]
Two visitors to tamilnation.org
(in May and June) one from Canada
and the other from U.S.A
nominated Appapillai
Amirthalingam for inclusion as one of the Hundred Tamils of the 20th
Century.
"...It may, perhaps, be said for
Amirthalingam, that his lasting political contribution
was to clarify for many Tamils (who may have thought
otherwise) that 'effective leadership of an
armed....struggle requires a new style of leadership'
and that guerrilla warfare cannot be directed from
outside but only from within, by a leadership which
accepts 'its full share of the risks
involved.' .."
 The question
deserves consideration...
Chelvanayagam's
resignation and Amirthalingam's total support for the
demand for Tamil Eelam...
It was
no accident that the First National Convention of the
TULF was held in Amirthalingam's electorate...
If Amirthalingam had passed away in 1977, few may have
questioned his inclusion in the Hundred Tamils list,
but today it is necessary to turn to the events after
1977...
States are rarely
created by pleading and petitioning...
In
attempting to 'rein in and direct' the militant
movement from outside, Amirthalingam failed to
understand the nature of an armed struggle...
Amirthalingam failed to recognise that guerrilla
warfare cannot be directed from outside, that it can
only be directed from within, by a leadership which
accepts its full share of the risks involved...
The
final humiliation - the TULF accepted the 6th Amendment
oath, which it had spurned in 1983 - and it was
rejected by the Tamil people at 1989
elections...
 The question deserves
consideration...
The question whether the late Appapillai
Amirthalingam should be included in a list of 100
Tamils of the 20th Century deserves consideration.
Amirthalingam was a member of the original group of
Tamils who founded the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK)
in 1949 with S.J.V.Chelvanayagam
as the Founder President and Dr. E.M.V.Naganathan and Mr.
V. Navaratnam as Joint General Secretaries. Amirthalingam
was a young law student at the Ceylon Law College at that
time.
At the General Elections in 1952, Amirthalingam sought
election to the Ceylon House of Representatives (as it
was known then). He contested the Vaddukodai seat in the
Jaffna Peninsula but lost. Four years later at the 1956
General Election, he won the seat and thereafter served
in the House of Representatives for an unbroken period of
14 years until 1970.
On the 5th of June 1956, when the Sinhala Only Bill was
introduced in the House of Representatives, Amirthalingam
was one of the satyagrahis who demonstrated near
Parliament House.
"A. Amirthalingam M.P. for Vaddukodai, was struck on
the head by one of the stones thrown by the (Sinhala)
mob. At 2 p.m. C.Suntharalingam M.P. for Vavuniya, took
him with his bleeding head and entered the chamber of
the House of Representatives where the official
Language Bill was being introduced. They were greeted
with derisive laughter and cries of 'wounds of war'..."
(The Fall
and Rise of the Tamil Nation - V.Navaratnam, The
Tamilian Library, Montreal and Toronto)
In the subsequent years he participated in several
civil disobedience movements, and was imprisoned in 1958
and again in 1961 by the Sinhala dominated government. In
the course of time, he emerged as Chelvanayagam's second
in command. Amirthalingam, unlike some of the earlier
Tamil Parliamentary leaders, resided in the Tamil
homeland in the North and even as a lawyer, his court
appearances were largely within the Jaffna peninsula. It
is perhaps fair to say that Amirthalingam's appearance
on the political scene coincided with a shift in the
power centre of Tamil politics from Colombo to the Tamil
homeland.
Amirthalingam lost his parliamentary seat at the 1970
General Election and he remained outside Parliament for
the next 7 years - until the General Election of 1977.
These seven years were significant years for the Tamil
people.
In 1970, the newly elected, Sinhala dominated House of
Representatives assembled outside the precincts of the
Parliament buildings, in Navrangahala, constituted
themselves as a Constituent Assembly and proceeded to
give themselves a new republican Constitution which
severed the constitutional links with the past, gave a
dominant place to Buddhism, renamed Ceylon as Sri Lanka
and repealed even
the meagre protection given to minorities by Section
29 of the earlier Soulbury Constitution.
Chelvanayagam's
resignation and Amirthalingam's total support for the
demand for Tamil Eelam...
The Sinhala dominated Constituent Assembly rejected
the proposal put forward by ITAK for a federal
constitution and its leader S.J.V.Chelvanayagam
resigned from the Constituent Assembly and the House of
Representatives in 1972, declaring his decision to
contest the ensuing bye election to obtain a mandate from
his people for the establishment of a separate state for
the people of Tamil Eelam.
The Sri Lanka government (headed by Mrs. Srimavo
Bandaranaike) delayed holding the bye election for a
period of two years. When the bye election was eventually
held in 1975, S.J.V. Chelvanayagam won an overwhelming
victory and the statement that he made on that occasion
remains, even today, as a definitive declaration of Tamil
aspirations. He said:
"Throughout the ages the Sinhalese and Tamils in the
country lived as distinct sovereign people till they
were brought under foreign domination. It should be
remembered that the Tamils were in the vanguard of the
struggle for independence in the full confidence that
they also will regain their freedom. We have for the
last 25 years made every effort to secure our political
rights on the basis of equality with the Sinhalese in a
united Ceylon."
"It is a regrettable fact that successive Sinhalese
governments have used the power that flows from
independence to deny us our fundamental rights and
reduce us to the position of a subject people. These
governments have been able to do so only by using
against the Tamils the sovereignty common to the
Sinhalese and the Tamils."
"I wish to announce to my people and to the country
that I consider the verdict at this election as a
mandate that the Tamil Eelam nation should exercise the
sovereignty already vested in the Tamil people and
become free."
The stand taken by S.J.V. Chelvanayagam and the ITAK
had the total backing of Amirthalingam. Though
Amirthalingam was out of Parliament (or perhaps,
because he was out Parliament)
he played an important and significant extra
parliamentary role in nurturing Tamil togetherness during
the period 1970 to 1977. Unquestionably, during this
period Amirthalingam enjoyed considerable grass roots
support amongst the people of Tamil Eelam. It was period
which also saw the rise of Tamil Eelam militancy - a
militancy which was fuelled by the standardisation of
admissions to the University. Walter Schwarz was to
remark later:
"...Nothing aroused deeper despair among Tamils than
the feeling that they are being systematically squeezed
out of higher education. They have complained
particularly of the system of 'standardisation' in
force after 1972, in which marks obtained by candidates
for university admission are weighted by giving
advantage to certain linguistic groups and/or certain
districts..." - Walter Schwarz: Tamils of Sri Lanka
- Minority Rights Group Report, 1983
It was no
accident that the First National Convention of the
TULF was held in Amirthalingam's
electorate...
Amirthalingam was now the General Secretary of ITAK.
His views were respected by the young militants. They
referred to him as the Thalapathy, the Tamil word for a
General. It appeared to many militants that Amirthalingam
reflected their own aspirations more closely than many
other Tamils who were members of Parliament. It was no
accident that the Tamil United Liberation Front, which
included the ITAK, the Tamil Congress and other Tamil
parties, held its first National Convention (in early
1976) in Amirthalingam's Vaddukodai electorate. The
Vaddukodai
resolution declared unambiguously, that the
"restoration and reconstitution of the Free,
Sovereign, Secular Socialist State of Tamil Eelam based
on the right of self determination inherent to every
nation has become inevitable
in order to safeguard the very existence of the Tamil
Nation in this Country."
After Chelvanayagam's death in 1976, Amirthalingam
became the undisputed leader of the Tamil United
Liberation Front (TULF) and was one of the architects of
the 1977
TULF General Election manifesto which declared:
"What is the alternative now left to the nation that
has lost its rights to its
language, rights to its
citizenship, rights to its religions and continues
day by day to lose its traditional homeland to Sinhalese
colonisation? What is the alternative now left to a
nation that has lost its opportunities to higher
education through "standardisation" and
its equality in opportunities in the sphere of
employment?"
"What is the alternative to a nation that lies
helpless as it is being assaulted, looted and killed by
hooligans instigated by the ruling race and
by the security
forces of the state? Where else is an alternative
to the Tamil nation that gropes in the dark for its
identity and finds itself driven to the brink of
devastation?
"There is only one alternative and that is to
proclaim with the stamp of finality and fortitude that
we alone shall rule over our land our forefathers
ruled. Sinhalese imperialism shall quit our Homeland.
The Tamil United Liberation Front regards the general
election of 1977 as a means of proclaiming to the
Sinhalese Government this resolve of the Tamil nation
...
"The Tamil-speaking representatives who get elected
through these votes while being members of the National
State Assembly of Ceylon, will also form themselves
into the National Assembly of Tamil Eelam which will
draft a constitution for the state of Tamil Eelam and
establish the independence of Tamil Eelam by bringing
that constitution into operation either by peaceful
means or by direct action or struggle."
The TULF won a resounding victory in the Northern
Electorates but the results in the Eastern Province were
mixed. Nevertheless, the 1977 General Election result was
a victory for the TULF led by Amirthalingam and for all
that both he and the TULF stood for.
If
Amirthalingam had passed away in 1977, few may have
questioned his inclusion in the Hundred Tamils list, but
today it is necessary to turn to the events after
1977...
Indeed, if Amirthalingam had passed away in 1977,
perhaps, few would have questioned his inclusion in a
list of hundred Tamils of the 20th century who had
contributed significantly to a growing Tamil
togetherness.
But, today, it is necessary to turn to the events
after 1977.
After the 1977 General Election, the TULF M.P.s took
their oaths in the National State Assembly as indeed they had said they would in the Election
Manifesto. The TULF was the largest single
opposition party, and Amirthalingam also accepted office
as the Leader of Opposition. Some have criticised this
and have suggested that Amirthalingam was lured by the
trappings of office and it was this that led him, step by
step, to compromise on the demand for Tamil Eelam. In
addition, they point out to Amirthalingam's failure to
honour the manifesto promise of forming the National
Assembly of Tamil Eelam.
The matter, however, may not have been as simple as
that. For, one thing, Amirthalingam may have recognised
that if a National Assembly of Tamil Eelam had been
formed, as promised in the Election Manifesto, by 'the
Tamil speaking representatives who had got elected', the
representation from the Eastern Province would have been
minimal, and this may have undermined the legitimacy of
the process. He may have felt that it was more politic to
engage President Jayawardene in a talking process and
build platforms on which the struggle for Tamil Eelam may
be progressed in a more orderly fashion. Amirthalingam
may have also taken the view that the office of Leader of
the Opposition may be useful in furthering the Tamil
cause in the international arena.
Further and more importantly, Amirthalingam may have
been concerned as to what to do after the National
Assembly of Tamil Eelam was convened and proclaimed Tamil
Eelam. What then? And, herein lies, perhaps, a central
failure of not only Amirthalingam, but the TULF and even,
perhaps, Chelvanayagam as well.
In 1986, one of the leaders of the TULF (not
Amirthalingam) was in London to participate, inter alia,
in a phone-in programme at the London Broadcasting
Corporation. Before the phone-in programme, a discussion
was held at the Tamil Information Centre in London,
amongst the Tamil participants, to agree on responses and
strategy. One of the participants asked the TULF leader:
"Tell me, when you passed the Vaddukodai resolution, what
were your plans about how you were going to achieve Tamil
Eelam". The response of the TULF leader was spontaneous
and in Tamil: "Thamby, who ever thought about all that at
that time!". It was a response which left an indelible
mark on the participant who had asked the question.
States are rarely created
by pleading and petitioning...
States are rarely created by pleading and
petitioning.
One option that Amirthalingam may have taken after the
General Election victory in 1977, would have been to
require that all the elected TULF MPs resign and engage
in an extra parliamentary struggle on the lines that
Gandhi had advocated. If the
TULF was concerned that other Tamils supportive of the
Sinhala government may fill the seats that were so
vacated, the TULF under the 1978 Sri Lanka constitution,
could have nominated its own junior members to those
seats - and released the senior leadership to work
amongst the people. In fact, such suggestions were made
by concerned Tamils to Amirthalingam in 1979, but he was
not persuaded.
The other option would have been for Amirthalingam to
integrate himself fully with the armed resistance
movement, function as its political wing but at the same
time accept that the leadership of an armed resistance
must emerge from within the
armed struggle and cannot come from outside.
In retrospect, it remains a measure of Amirthalingam's
failure that he adopted neither option.
On the one hand, he failed to recognise the political
reality that Aurobindo had
recognised in 1907:
"Petitioning which we have so long followed, we
reject as impossible - the dream of timid experience,
the teaching of false friends who hope to keep us in
perpetual subjection, foolish to reason, false to
experience.... the policy of organised resistance
forms the old traditional way of nations which we must
also tread. It is a vain dream to suppose that what
other nations have won by struggle and battle, by
suffering and tears of blood, we shall be allowed to
accomplish easily, without terrible sacrifices, merely
by spending the ink of the journalist and petition
framer and the breath of the orator..."
The path of petitioning and pleading continued during
those fateful years from 1977 to 1983. The TULF which
had proudly declared in its election manifesto:
"...Where else is an alternative to the Tamil nation
that gropes in the dark for its identity and finds
itself driven to the brink of devastation? There is
only one alternative and that is to proclaim with the
stamp of finality and fortitude that we alone shall
rule over our land our forefathers ruled..."
now appeared content with
District Development Councils.
In attempting to
'rein in and direct' the militant movement from
outside Amirthalingam failed to understand the nature of
an armed struggle...
At the same time, Amirthalingam continued with his
efforts to 'rein in and direct' the militant movement
from the outside. Here he failed to understand the nature
of an armed struggle. And that was his second failure. To
say that is not to be patronising. Admittedly, the whole
question of the role of the 'politician' vis a vis the
'guerrilla army' has attracted some controversy. Regis Debray in his classic
'Revolution in a Revolution' examined some of the
issues:
"The phrase 'armed struggle' is brandished, repeated
endlessly on paper, in programmes, but the use of the
phrase cannot conceal the fact that in many places the
determination to carry out the armed struggle and the
positive definition of a corresponding strategy are
still lacking.
What do we mean by strategy? The differentiation
between the primary and the secondary, from which comes
a clear priority of tasks and functions. A happy
pragmatism will permit all forms of struggle to drag on
together, will let them come to an understanding among
themselves.
At one point, however, the negative definition of
strategy may appear, in the form of a refusal: to the
idea that under certain conditions peaceful forms of
mass struggle must be subordinate to armed mass struggle has
sometimes been opposed the idea that such a
subordination would be equivalent to making the
political line of the vanguard party dependent on
military strategy, on the party's armed apparatus, and
would subordinate party leadership to military
leadership. In reality this is not the case.
Once more it has been forgotten, in spite of
verbal acquiescence, that guerrilla warfare is
essentially political, and that for this reason the
political cannot be counterposed to the
military...
Effective leadership of an armed revolutionary
struggle requires a new style of leadership, a new
method of organisation, and new physical and
ideological responses.. It has been widely demonstrated
that guerrilla warfare is directed not from outside but from within, with the
leadership accepting its full share of the risks
involved. In a country where such a war is
developing, most of the organisation's leaders must
leave the cities and join the guerrilla army. This is,
first of all, a security measure, assuring the survival
of the political leaders.
.... there is a close tie between biology and
ideology. However absurd or shocking this relationship
may seem, it is none the less a decisive one. An
elderly mans accustomed to city rising, moulded by
other circumstances and goals, will not easily adjust
himself to the mountain nor - though this is less so -
to underground activity in the cities. In addition to
the moral factor - conviction - physical fitness is the
most basic of all skills needed for waging guerrilla
war; the two factors go hand in hand.
.... That an elderly man should be proven militant -
and possess a revolutionary training - is not, alas,
sufficient for coping with guerrilla existence,
especially in the early stages. Physical aptitude is
the prerequisite for all other aptitudes; a minor point
of limited theoretical appeal, but
the armed struggle appears to have a rationale of which
theory knows nothing."
It was Amirthalingam's failure that he continued to
see himself and the TULF playing the lead political role in relation to the
'military activity of the boys'. He failed to recognise
that guerrilla warfare is essentially political, and that
for this reason the political cannot be
counterposed to the military.
It may, perhaps, be said for Amirthalingam, that his
lasting political contribution was to clarify for many
Tamils (who may have thought otherwise) that 'effective
leadership of an armed....struggle requires a new style
of leadership' and that guerrilla warfare cannot be
directed from outside but only from within, by a
leadership which accepts 'its full
share of the risks involved.'
Amirthalingam's dialogue with President
J.R.Jayawardene during the period 1977 to 1983 was a
process which alienated Amirthalingam from increasingly
large sections of his own people - and from the armed
struggle. In the end, even that 'dialogue' was terminated
by the genocidal attacks of
1983.
The 6th
Amendment to the Sri Lanka Constitution, compelled
the TULF to forfeit its seats in Parliament -
compelled, because a party which
had won its seats by declaring that there was no
alternative but 'to proclaim with the stamp of finality
and fortitude that we alone shall rule over our land our
forefathers ruled', could not have clung to its
Parliamentary seats by taking an oath against the
division of the country, without losing all credibility.
It was one thing to try to persuade the Tamil people
that the District Development Councils Act was somehow a
step towards Tamil Eelam - it
was another thing to persuade them that taking an oath
against the establishment of Tamil Eelam, was also such a
step.
Amirthalingam failed to recognise that guerrilla
warfare cannot be directed from outside, it can only
be directed from within, by a leadership which accepts
its full share of the risks involved...
But, even in 1983, having forfeited their seats in
Parliament, Amirthalingam and the TULF could have openly
accepted the lead role of the armed struggle.
It is true that the armed resistance itself was
divided. But, the way out was not to function as a
mediator between the different groups and in this way
seek to ensure the lead role of the TULF, but to openly
accept that whatever role that the TULF had to play in
the context of an armed struggle, must be subordinate to
a leadership which must emerge from those within the
guerrilla movement. To paraphrase, yet again, the words
of Regis Debray, guerrilla warfare cannot be directed
from outside. It can be directed only from within, by a
leadership which accepts its full share
of the risks involved.
The path that Amirthalingam and the TULF adopted, led
them, in the years after 1983, to rely almost exclusively
on the support of the Indian government to further the
Tamil cause. In the result, they acted within the
political frame set for them by India - an India where
they resided as guests of the Indian Government.
Amirthalingam could not have been unaware that
India's support for the 'Tamil cause' was
of a limited nature and that New Delhi had its own
geo political objectives. Amirthalingam was right to
address the question as to whether Tamil Eelam was
attainable without New Delhi's acquiescence. But, he
was wrong to do so by isolating himself and the TULF from
those who were leading the struggle on the ground.
In 1985, at Bhutan, the TULF subscribed to the
Joint Statement made by the Tamil delegation before the
walk out, walked out of the Thimpu
Talks together with all the other Tamil groups, but
then stayed behind in India to continue discussions with
Indian representatives and embark on 'indirect'
negotiations with Sri Lanka. These 'discussions'
eventually resulted in the fiasco of the Draft
Framework of Accord and Understanding of 30 August
1985 which was rejected by the militant groups.
Again, in 1987, Amirthalingam accepted the Indo Sri
Lanka Accord and the comic
opera of the 13th Amendment to the Sri Lanka
Constitution. He continued to defend India's stand even
after the offensive
launched by the so called Indian Peace Keeping Force in
the Tamil homeland in October 1987. Amirthalingam's
support of the actions of the IPKF and
his refusal to condemn them, set
perhaps the final seal on his separation from the Tamil
people. But, the final humiliation was yet to come.
The
final humiliation - the TULF accepted the 6th
Amendment oath which it had spurned in 1983 - and it was
rejected by the Tamil people at 1989
elections...
At the elections held in 1989 after the enactment of
the 13th
Amendment to the Sri Lanka Constitution, the TULF
which had won a resounding victory at the 1977 General
Elections for Tamil Eelam, went down to an equally
resounding defeat. Amirthalingam was rejected by the
Tamil people and that too, at an election conducted with
the active presence of the Indian Peace Keeping Force.
India, by this time had begun to rely on the armed EPRLF
and Varadarajaperumal as its ally to progess its policy
objectives.
Significantly, the TULF whose Members of Parliament
had, in 1983, refused to take their oaths under the
6th
Amendment to the Sri Lanka Constitution were, six
years later, willing to contest elections on the basis of
taking that oath. Those who had declared in 1977 that
there was no alternative but 'to proclaim with the stamp
of finality and fortitude that we alone shall rule over
our land our forefathers ruled' were willing to declare
on oath that they will secure the territorial integrity
of the Sri Lankan state. The ringing tones of the
1977 General Election manifesto now rang somewhat
hollow. It was the end of the road to Tamil Eelam, so far
as the TULF and Amirthalingam were concerned, though the
TULF continued to call itself the Tamil United
Liberation Front.
The question that Tamils will ask is whether, on a
fair assessment of the totality of Appapillai
Amirthalingam's contributions during a political career
spanning four decades, he merits a place as one of the
Hundred Tamils of
the 20th Century, who has 'made significant
contributions to the world and to Tamil togetherness -
whether such contributions be in scientific thought,
literature, political action, personal sacrifice and
example, spirituality or any other area.' Many may
answer, perhaps with much regret - No. And that will be
understandable.
|
