Opinion: Notes about Puttalam and the 2013 Provincial Elections

by Gogol G.

Three provincial councils of GoSL will have elections in exactly 3 weeks. Much media attention is given to the Northern Provincial Council's elections for various reasons. Those reasons all boil down to the fate of Tamils and "Tamil Eelam" -- the traditional areas of inhabitation, and thus homeland, of Tamil-speaking people. Some have presciently described the fate of Tamil Eelam, but what then of its borders? One answer is the incisive, witty quip from Kittu about painting by colours wherever GoSL has bombed and attacked. Most Western and Indian media describe it in terms of SL's current provincial divisions, namely the Northern and the Eastern ones. But that omits the Puttalam district from the full map of Tamil Eelam. Under current GoSL boundaries, Puttalam is 1 of 2 districts in the North West Province, and the North West Province, just like the Northern Province is 1 of the 3 councils having elections next month.

Whether Puttalam "belongs" in Tamil Eelam is a contested point, and there are good reasons on both sides why the contestation exists. But before delving into history, let's try to see how emerging regional security issues play out into the future.

If the reports are true, India is being infiltrated by Pakistani militants who are using Sri Lanka as a launchpad and entering through Tamil Nadu. There is also the ongoing saga of fisherman from Tamil Nadu being directly punished by the SL Navy, and no real end in sight despite the political hay people make. This makes the narrow waterway separating Tamil Nadu from Sri Lanka an important area in terms of security, and all along the areas of land nearest each other on both sides are Tamils. Puttalam is an important part of this stretch, too, as it faces Thoothukudi (Tuticorin), a developing port, and Kanniyakumari. The best way for the future of the Palk Strait to remain stable and an area of commerce is if Tamils are on both sides of the negotiating table, representing the lands that they administer respectively. And that much is clear given the way water resources in South India -- namely, the rivers -- have been mis-/shared. And, not surprisingly, the non-constructive, negligent attitude that India has maintained towards Tamil grievances over river water vis-a-vis Kerala and Karnataka is the same attitude it applies to Tamil grievances vis-a-vis the SL Navy. When we take the linguistic and ethnic identity issues out of the equation, resolving issues like over-fishing or security can be achieved in constructive ways.

And then there's the environmental issue. If it were up to Southern Lanka, they would drill for oil in the Mannar basin for all it's worth. If there is an oil spill, it's only Tamils who would be directly affected, right? Although India is wary of the oil reserves being sucked dry by China before India has an opportunity to get at them, the concern is not only a hypocritical self-serving one. This is the same sort of cavalier attitude that India maintains to the protests of Tamils in Koodankulam who protest a Russian-built nuclear plant in this coastal town also on the Mannar basin. If the power plant experiences a meltdown, it will only be Tamils who are affected. Both oil drilling and a nuclear reactors are severe natural disasters waiting to happen. Just look at the oil disaster in the US coast around the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. When you factor in the fact that this part of South Asia is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, just like the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the consequences can be severe. Just look at the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, also located on a earthquake fault line and tsunami-prone body of water. Only 2 years later are we hearing news that the disaster is much worse than we thought, and that radioactive particles can reach all the way across the Pacific Ocean as soon as 2014. The coral reefs in the Mannar basin are an important and delicate part of the ecosystem that does not stand a chance to survive against these short-sighted exploitative schemes. So both locally and globally, the environment and the people are severely threatened by the callously negligent decisions of colonial-minded rulers in Delhi and Colombo who don't speak their language nor care about their lives and livelihoods. And when it comes to ideas like the Sethusamudram idea to dredge up the Palk Strait, the benefits are small and the risks are great, for the same reasons as mentioned above. In fact, there is no real trade benefit when you consider the depths required to accommodate the next generation of super-barges plying the seas. The only benefit is slightly easier access of Indian submarines, and that, too, would be mooted if the radars that Pakistan is installing in Jaffna are accompanied by sonar. But ultimately, the Sethusamduram idea should be decided by the people of the Palk Strait, and that is best done when the concerned parties are on the same page, speaking each other's language, so to speak.

So why are Tamils the majority of the people on both sides of the Palk Strait? This is not a coincidence, but it is the legacy of a history of Tamils in these areas for more than 2000 years. We know that there were Tamils in Mannar at least 2000 years ago based on the buried city called Maanthai. The Thiruketheeswaram Temple near Mannar is a remnant of this bustling port city that connected major Indian Ocean trade, from China to the Middle East. It is probably worth repeating that the South Indians who could sail to Australia 4000 years ago, bringing some of their culture and their more advanced technology with them, also had settled Ceylon, since Ceylon was so close and unavoidable on any trip south or east. Throughout time, Puttalam was 1 of 2 capitals of the Jaffna kingdom, the other being Jaffna, of course. What made Puttalam valuable was the pearling industry in the Gulf of Mannar maintained by Tamils for over 3000 years. It is also well known that in those times, for ancient Rome, salt and pepper were so valuable that they were used in lieu of currency to pay their soldiers, or at least the ones "worth their salt", as the phrase originated. The Puttalam Lagoon, between Puttalam town and Kalpitti at the end of the peninsula, is an ideal place for valuable salt pans, and this is perhaps where Puttalam gets its name. (The Dead Sea no doubt also provided a source for salt, but the pepper had to come from present-day Kerala and perhaps SE Asia.)

Despite the passage of a few millennia, Puttalam was still a part of the Jaffna kingdom by the time the first European colonialists arrived. During the British period of colonial rule, Puttalam remained Tamil-speaking. Parts of it were given to Muslims for help with British counter-insurgency, but as the article says, "What remains as territorial demarcation of Muslims which was once ceded a Muslim territory by the Tamils should remain as such and there is no need to reclaim it as Tamil area." In British colonial tradition, provincial lines were drawn to split groups of people so as to weaken them as much as they were to convenience the wealth-extraction part of the colonial apparatus. Despite that, even at the beginning of the 20th century, a majority of Puttalam district was Tamil speaking. Due to conversions by the Portugese of coastal people to Catholicism, coupled with efforts to Sinhalicise the Tamil-speaking Christians during the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist movement spurred by people like Anagarika Dharmapala, Tamils adopted Sinhalese and Sinhalese names. For these people -- "Negombo Tamils" -- language and identity has become a fluid thing in what is a short period of time in the bigger picture. So what used to be a Tamil province in 100 years' time appears as if it is majority Sinhalese.

(Side note: the type of "Buddhist revivalism" espoused by people like Anagarika Dharmapala, considered the father of modern Singala Buddhism nationalism, is really just glorified racism buttressed by the rationale of a parallel universe. Dharmapala was born as Don David Hewavitarne into a Christian family and was influenced by the occultist sect of colonialists, the Theosophical Society, before discovering his new identity.)

(Side note: the question running through Tamils' minds is, with the rapid pace of unabashed and unbridled Sinhalicisation and colonisation happening in the Vanni by GoSL, will the Vanni demographics change so fast that what happened in Puttalam will take only 10 years, not 100 years?)

In the last 20 years, the demographics changes in Puttalam district have come from an influx of Muslims and Tamils from the north during the war. Most notably, the LTTE kicked out Muslims from Jaffna in 1990 overnight, thereby sending them to Puttalam. The formerly displaced Muslims now face a perplexing dilemma, where they feel more settled in Puttalam now than they do to their former home in Jaffna. The government agents in the Northern province, as well as NGOs, prioritise the issues of war-affected Tamil IDPs over those of the Muslims who were kicked out to Puttalam, citing that the Muslims have not experienced the same hardships, destruction, and loss of life. As the Northern Muslims now settle down in Puttalam, there are issues between them and the Muslims of Puttalam who have been there since the times of the British (as the British maps attest). So we can see that in a current map of the demography of Ceylon, the Muslim representation of northern Puttalam surprisingly survives. And we see that southern Puttalam has a noteworthy presence of Christians.

One of the villages in southern Puttalam that has surprisingly retained its Tamil identity is Udappu, which is a destination of Tamil NDPs from the Northern province (to a lesser degree than the Muslim displacement from Jaffna). Udappu residents speak a Tamil Nadu dialect of Tamil (different from Jaffna/Batticaloa Tamil), supposedly from its 400 year history as a settlement of fishermen from Tamil Nadu. And this is reminiscent of the question of the Upcountry Tamils, who are also descendants of Tamils from Tamil Nadu with a history of a couple of centuries -- what & where do they see themselves in a future where political rights are somehow guaranteed for everyone in the island? Surely, they will not live in sub-human closet-sized houses, without education, without citizenship, picking tea leaves as economic slaves. The Upcountry Tamil refugees who fled to India recently were given asylum in camps that were set up by the Indian government in the Nilgiris hills of Tamil Nadu, reminiscent of the landscape they came from. But the living conditions of those asylums in Tamil Nadu by the Indian government were just as bad, if not worse, then what they escaped, if that's possible. So it is not surprising that the affinity of Upcountry Tamils towards India is fading, and for good reason, but they're still Tamil and they need a place to belong to. It is apropos to mention here that one of the districts with a Tamil-speaking majority in the south is Nuwara Eliya, which is contained in the Central Province, and that is, along with the Northern Province and the North West Province, 1 of the 3 provinces going to the polls in 3 weeks' time.

So as CaFFE gets ready to monitor the upcoming elections, and the TNA is hard at work campaigning, and the UN and the world are keenly watching how GoSL behaves throughout the elections, and Mahinda Rajapakse knows he remains the island's potentate regardless of the provincial elections, all eyes will be on how the most brutalised of people in Ceylon register their voice in a secret ballot in the Northern Province. But while that is going on, away from the lights and media attention, Tamil-speaking people in the North West Province and the Central Province, hopefully, will be doing the same.