Non Violent Tamil Revolution
Bizarro Mahinda, in Jaffna
This is a take on an earlier idea published in The Sunday Leader
In 1956, Tamil leaders gathered on Galle Face Green in peaceful protest. They were broken up by violence and thugs. This was attributed to Sinhala chauvinism. Perhaps it was just because there was no Al Jazeera.
Mediated and socially networked people from Tunisia to Yemen have been able to mount serious challenges to oppressive governments and win. This is largely because nations are more connected globally and people are more connected to each other. This begs the question, how would non-violence have affected the Tamil struggle in the past, and how could it affect it today?
How Non-Violence Works
According to Wesleyan Professor Erica Chenoweth non-violence is successful “not because of the “moral high ground,” but rather because their reliance on nonviolent resistance confounds their opponents, whose usual response to internal challenge is to use force.” Most regimes simply don’t see it coming. They also have something to lose, both in terms of internal and external support.
Most importantly, a non-violent movement is able to split the military from the regime. Any large, professional military is unlikely to fire on unarmed civilians, but they will definitely fight an armed insurgency. By not taking the military head on, non-violent movements seem able to neutralize or subvert it to their ends.
Less importantly, any globally integrated state has money and prestige to lose. If they rely on western military aid, like Egypt did, then they will lose that. If they rely on international trade, then they will lose that to sanctions. If they try to silence the mainstream media, they will lose the narrative completely to social media. Of course, this only applies to countries that have gained something in the first place, but most modern strongmen have.
This is the modern paradigm of resistance. It exists within a media and technological ecosystem of course. Burmese generals were able to crush people power, as were the election-riggers in Iran. In Libya things have not gone as smoothly as in Egypt and Tunisia. It seems that these resistance movements succeed best in countries which are oppressive internally but still engaged with the world through trade, media and telecommunications. The tools that the regime uses to enrich itself become their undoing.
The Sri Lankan Case
So, as a thought experiment, how would non-violence work in Sri Lanka, specifically regarding Tamil grievances? Would it work in the past and would it work now?
In the 1980s, the answer is probably not well. The Sri Lankan conflict was about dividing a country, not overthrowing a regime. As such, the mostly Sinhala military was not disinclined to use force. In those days there was no satellite TV, no Facebook and no Twitter and ten thousand people could be killed without making much of a sound. DBS Jeyaraj has recently been writing of a 1961 Satyagraha which was crushed by force. The result would probably be the same, or worse.
After the 1980s, of course, the die was effectively cast by the LTTE taking up arms. Thus, non-violent resistance probably wouldn’t work today. There simply aren’t that many Tamil youth left and the separatist cause is obviously not unifying. Too many people have fled or died, a process that the LTTE expedited. The LTTE also doomed development in the North and the East, leaving them years behind the rest of the country. They still don’t have the phone, Internet and social infrastructure to support a self-sustaining revolt.
The one scenario where non-violence might have worked is if the Tamil people of the 1980s had basically given up and had children in Sri Lanka. Those children would have grown up, presumably under oppression, and by the time they decided to revolt they would have Twitter, Facebook, Al Jazeera and a fighting chance at change. What happened in the Arab world was that a generation denied gave birth to a generation that could not be denied. In Sri Lanka, a generation fought, left, and gave birth instead to a diaspora. Thus, non-violent Tamil resistance looks like it will remain the road not taken.
Posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011 in Sri Lanka, Sunday Leader, tamils.
Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, has a nice 
I’m happy to be featured in Echelon magazine’s 40 Under 40 feature, profiling young people who contribute to the economy in some way, mainly in business but also in terms of innovation and thought leadership. It’s an interesting article not just in that I’m in it (mainly for work on indi.ca and 
I won’t add too much commentary, but just read I guess. The youngest Rajapaksa, Rohitha (Chi Chi) has given an amazing interview to the 
In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from 
Tamils should make it a non-violent national revolution for equal rights for all segments of the population. They would then get my wholehearted support. They are not the only people who feel marginalised in this country.
@shammi I wanted to say the same thing while reading this post, but you were faster.
That was what 50-50 representation and the 13th Amendment were about.
Good point Shammi, but Tamils are largerly a VERY INSULAR community who only see things through Tamil lens. So it is always Tamil this, Tamil that with no room for non-Tamils.
“Any large, professional military is unlikely to fire on unarmed civilians”
I get the feeling that is indi talking and not the prof, because if that’s the prof she is never going to get tenure.
Hmm …… So she teaches International Realtions at Wesleyan Univerity, Harvard and Berkeley. : )
Meh! i don’t think that quote was from her it’s some thing indi came up with and it’s very demonstrably wrong.
Er, that wasn’t what I was thinking about actually, though I believe even the flower children of Kent State Uni got hit with live ammo during a demonstration way back in the 70s.
taboo’s blog is gone
Gosh, you’re right.. I’m sure it was there last night. If I remember correctly, the last comment I saw there was you disagreeing with him on something Dodo. Wonder what’s wrong.
Hey Dodo, Kolu’s blog’s being pulled too. I cant read the Sinhala characters on the computer I’m on, but the English comments there on the last post seem to point that way. I had trouble visiting his blog lately, but put it down to my cranky computer.
Now I think something very fishy’s going on. Two controversial blogs closing down within a few days of each other, with no reason given? Please tell me your uncle Mervyn isn’t involved. It could be some religious or conservative group too, I guess.
Checked it out. There’s just a farewell post there, on Kolu’s. Everything elsa has been deleted. Looks like there’s been some serious intimidation. What a shame. Does no one care?
taboo’s blog was hacked.
Lol. the drama in the Sinhalese blog community is absurd yet delicious at the same time. It’s splattered all over kottu just check it out.
LOL at taboo… wonder what happened to him.
Success of non-violent movements largely depend on one thing – who the opponent is. Try non-violence against Genghis Khan.
Shammi said, “Tamils should make it a non-violent national revolution for equal rights for all segments of the population. ”
This is never going to happen. Tamils are way too conservative for that. Seriously if Tamils were for equal rights for women, GBLT and yes, even low-caste Tamils, that’ll be the day. Tamils want their own country, or at least devolution of power to govern themselves so they can institute their coveted systems, which include a high place of the caste system, subjugation of women, and pretending GBLT do not exist. No one in the diaspora complained or even made a peep about Prabhakaran’s laws that made it illegal for women in LTTE controlled areas to have access to any form of contraception until each woman had 5 children. Saree was mandatory dress for adult women. Unless they were fighting for the LTTE, they were required to marry young. As for high caste Tamils, this entire ethnic conflict started, not as one between Tamils and Sinhalese, but rather as one between high caste Jaffna Tamils and Sinhalese. High caste Tamils consider the Sinhalese low caste. They found it intolerable that they had to share education opportunities and the cushy government jobs with the Sinhalese and other races. By virtue of them being high claste, they saw these things as their sole domain. They had no desire to improve the lives of low caste Tamils, even as late as the 90′s or 2000′s. All they wanted was power, so they can institute their age old systems that benefit high caste Tamils. The high caste Tamils of Jaffna had a sweet set up. They had exclusive access to the best education, and therefore all the good government jobs (those days equivalent to being a millionaire) and they came to see this as their birth right. When Tamils militarized in the 70′s, even at that time Tamils had a larger share of the said jobs than their percentage of the population! In any other country this would be considered better than equality for a minority. Consider here that while the percentage of the population was calculated by using ‘all’ Tamils, the jobs were only held by the high caste Jaffna Tamils, mostly Vellala. No other sect or group or race in Sri Lanka even came close, and yet that was not enough, they wanted ALL of the jobs. In what other country do minorities rise up because they do not want to give equality to the majority? This was a caste issue more than a race issue. They treated the Sinhalese with the same disdain and intolerance they would have applied if low-caste Tamils had asked for equal rights. It’s just unthinkable to them. As long as the majority of Tamils hold onto their caste beliefs, even secretly, we can never have peace, because deep inside they do not believe Sinhalese (or Muslims or Burghers) should be equal to them. They want us to fall in line and accept our stock in life, just as the low-caste Tamils meekly do. I will never understand their complaints over equalizing the government job opportunities (one of their loudest battle cries at the time). They were not asking for equality, they were protesting having to give up their exclusive access and give equality to the the rest of the country! Sinhalese do not share their belief that Sinhalese are of lower birth than high caste Tamils, so unlike the low caste Tamils who fall in line as they too believe in the caste system, we had a unwinnable situation.
The best chance Sri Lanka has for equality for marginalized groups like women, GBLT, low caste people of all races, etc is through the Sinhalese and/or Buddhists. As amply demonstrated by recent history, Sinhalese are the most likely, not only of all races in Sri Lanka, but the entire South Asia, to embrace modern ideas, culture, dress, etc. Let’s not forget that of all the people in the entire world including the West, we were the trail blazers who voted a woman leader into power. She turned out to be horrible, but that’s beside the point. When no one else in the world had done it, we saw it as something acceptable. That says a lot about Sri Lankans and the Sinhalse Buddhists. We did not need examples to be set by anyone else. It is unlikely that Indian, Pakistan and Bangladesh would have followed suit with their own women leaders if not for Sri Lanka setting an example. All three of those countries are extremely conservative when it comes to women, and steeped in age old traditions, they would have never done so without our example. Indian perhaps, but I still doubt it. Certainly not Pakistan or Bangladesh which are as Islamic as any State in the Middle East.
It is the Catholic church and Islam imams that oppose the distribution and widespread easy availability of birth control, which is something that goes to the heart of women’s rights. A former Catholic Father turned Gay activist tells a story of how they were distributing free condoms and a deluge of Catholic nuns put themselves in between the activists and the people receiving the condoms preventing them from distributing the condoms as a means of preventing HIV in the gay population and women’s ability to control reproducion.
Of all the religions in Sri Lanka, Buddhism is the ONLY religion that textually has nothing against GBLT in the sacred texts. Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, all being god-religions, denounce GBLT. While Catholics, Christians, Muslims or anyone else can learn to ignore what’s in the sacred book and have a open mind about GBLT, and there are many around the world belonging to these religions who do, Buddhists have a natural advantage, in that there is not a single passage or even world in the entire Tipitaka that denounce or disparage GBLT in the slightest. The laws against gays in Sri Lanka exist only because most laws concerning minorities have not been updated from the British Colonial times. We still have their archaic laws about rape on the books too. When it comes to anything GBLT, any modernization of laws are heavily opposed by Catholics and Muslims who have a disproportionate say in public policy in Sri Lanka compared to their percentage of the population. Look to Buddhist countries like Thailand who were lucky never to be colonized by Europeans, and you will see that their law books don’t have, and have never had any laws discriminating GBLT, further proving my point.
It is easy to blame the Sri Lankan Goverment as a Buddhist Goverment or Sinhala Goverment, the Tamils have done this forever, but the truth is, for all its faults, the Sri Lakan government is the most minority-represented government, both in terms of race and religion, compared to any country in the West, and perhaps even the whole world. Only 40% of the MPs are Buddhist. Muslims have a larger share than their percentage of the population. The only reason Tamils are lagging behind is that the LTTE killed every Tamil Minister or MP that was Tamil. Can Norway, Canada, US, UK, France or any other country even come close to the distribution of power in the government that SL has? Not even close. There is not a single black senator in the US. In the entire history of the US spanning nearly 300 years, compared to our 63, there have only been 2 black senators. In Lanka we’ve had both Tamils and Muslims holding very high Ministries. The Tamils were all assassinated by the LTTE, but that’s cannot be blamed on the Sinhalese. The representation of Tamils in the Government is only not as high as the Muslims because the LTTE killed them reducing their numbers, and it also became that one had to be really brave to become one. Otherwise, they will be enjoying the same place Muslims do, which is having a higher representation in the Government than their percentage of the population. Even with all this, we managed to have a higher representation of Tamils in the government, including high offices like Foreign Minister and Fisheries. Even with all the assassinations by the LTTE, the Tamil representation the government was higher than any western country can claim of their governments for their minorities.
The point is that the SL government is not all evil like it is portrayed to be. We are naturally set up to reach a good place. The toppling of the MR government by the West because that’s what they do to any third world country they see coming up in the world, would be the only bad thing that can happen to us. And I’m not saying MR government is good or bad, but that is the only government that can establish autonomy for SL from the West, and after that we’ll be set up to go forward. West toppling the MR Government and replacing it with their puppets will keep us down forever. The West, or even Indian is not interested in seeing us come up or develop. They only care about their interests and how to keep us down and controlled to their own ends.
Interesting write up, thanks for sharing. A long read to be honest, but a good write up. Many points on I agree and on some I disagree. You should get a blog.
Taboo’s an idiot whenever he’s not high. No wonder he got hacked. Perhaps he had his dad’s nickname for his mom as his password.
Not as much of an idiot as some people I could name, but idiots can be fun too. Most of Taboo’s stuff was interesting and some of it really funny, like the midnight telephone calls from the president, the opposition candidate and the leader of the opposition. If his blog was just hacked, he’ll be back, won’t he?
I think he’s one of the smarter progressive bloggers around. Although he does have horrible taste in music
@shammi
Then you must know a damn lot of idiots and I must be the only genius you know.
I don’t know. He probably had the same password for his email account and maybe that is hacked too.