Decoding the new constitution
It is constitution remaking time. And as in 1987, by foreign connections. In 1987, the massive cross-border terrorism created by India led to a proxy invasion of the country. And later, with the Indian Air Force flying overhead and four Indian gunboats outside the Colombo harbor threatening, a key constitutional change, the 13th Amendment was forced on JR. This was misleadingly called the “Indian Accord”. Today there are no gunboats but, thwarting the democratic will of the country, there is careful manipulation by foreign funded forces. I am jumping the gun, so let us begin before, much before 1987.
By using their diabolical "Divide and Rule" principle, the British introduced communal representation from 1833 - initially only for nominated representatives of the colonials. As these representations changed over time, the arrangement did not reflect the numeral strength of different ethnic groups. The Sinhalese were heavily under- represented. This was because of the fear of the Sinhalese becoming a major threat to the colonials, as Sinhalese had already indulged in armed revolts against British rule.
Such thinking in communal terms, partly engendered by these colonial actions, reached a peak during the 1920s with the constitutional r e f o r ms of the Donoughmore Commission. The latter’s aim was to set the broad agenda for democracy in the country, discarding special representation and abolishing communal representation.
But as early as 1916, Ponnambalam Ramanathan had spoken against the basic principle of an elected majority. Continuing in this vein, Tamil spokesmen made representations for continued communal representation before both the Donoughmore Commission ( 1928) and the Soulbury Commission ( 1944). In 1946, the Tamil Congress wanted the 65% Sinhalese component of the population to be given the same number of seats in parliament, as the Tamils with just one fourth of the population, a flagrant violation of elementary democracy. The Soulbury Commissioners described this as "an attempt by artificial means to convert the majority to a minority”.
This distortion continues today with the racist Northern Province Chief Minister Vigneswaran - significantly a descendant of Ponnambalam Ramanathan - saying that King Devanam Piya Tissa was a Tamil named "Devanai Nampiya Theesan – one who believed in god". Unfortunately, this racist has no idea that the title Devanam Piya is the same as Tissa’s mentor, Emperor Asoka and means "Beloved of the gods" as in the inscriptions of Asoka which were deciphered only after the Mahavamsa was translated into English in 1837.
A variant of these gross distortions was made by Dayan Jayatilleke who was the first Sinhalese to advocate exclusive Tamil homelands as legitimate and separatism desirable. Later he organised a small guerrilla group and fled to India, but returned after India forced JR to bring in the 13th Amendment. Dayan became a minister in the combined North and East Provinces which later declared u n i l at e r a l i n d e pendence. Subsequently using the pseudonym Anurudhdha Tilakasiri , Dayan wrote strongly anti-Sinhalese and anti-Buddhist material every week in the Sunday Observer. These were far more virulent than the then LTTE campaign. JR sued him successfully for Rs.500 million and, irate citizens at a Kanatte funeral stripped Dayan naked. Now he is a key speaker at Gotabhaya aligned meetings. Gotabhaya together with Sarath Fonseka and other commanders defeated the separatism that Dayan had so virulently once promoted.
Even before the signing of the so-called accord, there was apprehension about its contents, exemplified by a Bar Association resolution which “strongly urge( d) the government not to enter any pact or agreement or accord with the government of India...without first obtaining the approval" of the people. (The current Bar Association issued a parallel statement a few days ago not to go with the new proposed amendments).
The major opposition political parties in the South except for the old left, by then politically dead, were against it. And this opposition to the accord led to the “largest large- scale demonstration and uprising in Sri Lanka since Independence” as K. M. Silva, the sympathetic biographer of J. R. Jayewardene recorded. De Silva also authored later a well- documented book which showed that the so-called exclusive traditional homelands of the Tamils referred to in the 13th Amendment as coinciding with the current Northern and Eastern provinces was but a complete fiction.
A “kinglet”, was the term used by the Portuguese to describe the Jaffna Kingdom. As the oldest European map on the country, namely a Dutch map shows, the extent of the Jaffna kingdom was confined to the Jaffna and the Mannar peninsulas.