Not-doing-stupid-stuff governance

FATHIMA Rashla's family was expelled from Jaffna by the LTTE in 1990. She was born in a Puttalam refugee settlement five years later and returned to Jaffna in 2004. Last month, the ITAK made the momentous decision to award a bonus seat in the Jaffna Municipal Council to Rashla, a primary school teacher. She is the first Muslim woman to become a member of a local government authority in Jaffna.

- BY TISARANEE GUNASEKARA

Rashla's history-making appointment wasn't the only sign indicating a much welcome shift towards moderation and intelligence in the political landscape of Jaffna. Mohamad Abdullah, who contested on the ITAK ticket, was elected to the Jaffna Municipal Council. In 1990, his family too was expelled from Jaffna by the Tigers. He too was born as an internally displaced person in Puttalam and returned to Jaffna with his parents in 2004.

The LTTE's decision to expel all Muslims from the North was morally execrable and politically stupid. As veteran Tiger-watcher and Indian journalist MR Narayan Swamy writes in his new book The Rout of Prabhakaran, “Like zombies, the bewildered Muslims, with no one to protect them, began to walk out of Jaffna en masse, past the many barriers the LTTE had set up to see that they took away nothing with them except what they had been allowed to. For good measure, LTTE cadres armed to the teeth went to Muslim areas and houses to ensure that no dissenter remained... The Tigers also did away with many of their Muslim members; the others justly deserted.”

Evil; and stupid. Knowingly or not, the LTTE was doing what its Sinhala enemy had done decades ago, though on a worse scale antagonising the minorities.

At the 1952 parliamentary election, S. Natesan, scholar, historian, and politician, won the Kankasanturai electorate on the UNP ticket, defeating the giant of Tamil politics S.J.V. Chelvanayakam. Then came Sinhala Only. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike brought the toxin into politics. Sir John Kotelawala’s UNP playing catch-up abandoned language parity. That nauseating display of political opportunism didn’t help the UNP to win Sinhala votes. It merely made the United National Party less united and less national; Natesan and other Tamil leaders resigned from the party in protest. At the 1956 election, Chelvanayakam won the Kankasanturai electorate. It would remain a bastion of Tamil nationalism until November 2024.