April, May, June Anniversaries and the NPP's Challenge

Yet there are other anniversaries besides 5th April 1971 and 18th & 19th May 2009. There is a third anniversary in May, viz., 22nd May marking that day in 1972, a year after the insurgency, when Sri Lanka became a Republic, shedding its Dominion status. In contrast to the war anniversaries of May, the Republican anniversary is barely mentioned let alone honoured or commemorated. Dr. Nihal Jayawickrama who might be the only living Sri Lankan with proximate knowledge of the making of the First Republic, has often bemoaned the non- observance of the Republic Day in Sri Lanka, unlike in India where both the Independence Day and the Republic Day are celebrated every year.

- BY RAJAN PHILIPS

The results of the local government elections were a boon to government critics whose primary pre-occupation is nitpicking the NPP government. As the LG elections faded into the background came the month of May anniversaries and with them more ammunition to keep cavilling at the government.

The anniversary focus is on the end-of-the-war in May 2009 and criticisms have been about the government's apparent reluctance to show the same level of enthusiasm in commemorating the war hereos as the Rajapaksa family showed when they were in power, on the one hand; and the government's reported decision not to fuss too much about Tamil observances of the end of the war as Remembrance Day for the victims of war, on the other.

Both observances used to be held on the same day, May 18, until President Maithripala Sirisena separated the two by making May 19 the official Commemoration Day observed by the government and leaving May 18 free of any government events. Perhaps to give Tamil memorialization its own space. That may have been one of the minor symbolic concessions to the TNA's co-habitation in the yahapalana government. But the government of Sri Lanka has no control over the Tamil Diaspora and the diaspora has been able to influence host governments in their new countries to elicit symbolic gestures, such as organizing Tamil Remembrance Day abroad. The Remembrance Day is now variously recognized by governments from New Zealand to Canada, with the added allusions to Tamil genocide, and more recently a remembrance monument has been installed in the City of Brampton in Canada, a South Asian suburb not far from Toronto.

All of this feeds into the simmering political cauldron in Sri Lanka, precipitating ineffectual calls for governmental responses to alleged misrepresentations abroad.