Will Sri Lanka’s Rishi Sunak stand up?

By N Sathiya Moorthy

Now that a non-white man of South Asian origin has become British Prime Minister, there is indescribable, if not celebration, in the region. Rishi Sunak is to South Asia what Barack Obama was to Africa when he became the US President.

There is a difference. Obama’s parents moved straight to the US from their native continent. Sunak’s grandparents too had taken the Africa route before their grandchild stormed into 10 Downing Street. The question will remain why the Conservative Party rejected Sunak just two months back – racism or lack of expected competence, which anyway his shortest-term predecessor Liz Truss lacked in woefully abundant quality.

Indians call Sunak their man. It is politically not accurate in the contemporary context. Sunak’s ancestors belonged to Gunjarenwala, now in Pakistan. Hindus in India can say he is there man, but from Pakistan. There are still Hindus left in Pakistan, and the incumbent government in India legislated for them to seek and obtain Indian citizenship.

The Indian law covers other non-Muslim ‘minorities’ in Pakistan, and other nations with which India shares land borders in the north. Sri Lanka is not one of them, not because it does not share a land border.

Still, nothing explains Sunak’s induction better than this one tweet, though in a tongue-in-cheek way. The reference flows from IT-outsourcing from the US and Europe: ‘When in trouble, the white man out-sources it… to Indians.’ The fact that Sunak is a son-in-law of India, of N R Narayanamurthy, co-founder and public face of the first-generation billion-dollar Infosys group, does help.

It got Sunak into trouble when political opponents used his unimaginable wealth, much of it the Infosys share of wife Akshata, to criticize and ridicule him. Post-elevation, the Labour Opposition has said that when Sunak talks about ‘tough economic decisions’, in terms of upping the tax-burden, it flows from his lack of exposure to Britain’s poor. The fact is that the Sunaks are twice as rich as King Charles III, the nation’s reigning monarch.

Unsustainable comparison

In its own way, Sunak’s elevation has drawn comparisons and parallels in and for Sri Lanka. More than minority Tamils nearer home, their Diaspora groups have started it off. Their question is simple and straight: If a ‘minority’ in Sunak could become British Prime Minister, why is it not a Tamil could become the elected ruler in Sri Lanka?

The answer lies in their question. Sunask and other Indian/South Asia origin people in the UK do not feel that they are not Britons. The Tamils do. Their constant counter is that the Tamils in the country are being made to feel like ‘minorities’, all the time. There is truth in this, but then, democracy is an elected government where ‘identity issues’ of one kind or the other becomes the decisive factor.

In Sri Lanka, ethnicity became the determinant, as even before Independence, it had become a live political issue. It might not have happened – and it is qualified – if pre-Independence, the Tamils had not asked for ‘equal representation’ in Parliament without reference to population or any other marker.

The preposterous part of it was that the Sri Lankan Tamils (SLT) did not seek ‘equal representation’ for all ‘minorities’ put together – rather, all Tamil-speaking communities, who alone constitute the ‘minority’ in the country. Instead, equitable share in the government might have been a feasible demand – including possibly an equitable share in ministerial positions, etc.

Rather, all Tamil-speaking people could have demanded ‘reservations’ of a kind for them all. If internal divisions needed making, that could have waited. If need be, such a review and periodicity could have been written into the Constitution at inception.

Instead, the SLT polity of the time went all the way out to dump their Upcountry Tamil brethren. They were protective about the government jobs that they dominated already, and would not want to share with anyone – starting with the majority Sinhalas.

Writing on the wall

So, when Sinhala chauvinists wanted the Upcountry, Estate Tamils, out, the Jaffna leadership supported it. They were even members of the early Cabinets, at least until 1956, when ‘Sinhala Only’ hit them. By then, the majority polity had also understood that the Tamil-speaking minority was not united, and had independent agendas, which could be stoked.

It is not a mystery that the majority community, or the perceived runners-up in majority politics in the country wanted ani issue that could expand and consolidate their vote-base. Possibly having identified themselves with the erstwhile British colonial masters the SLT community dominated by government servants of the day did not read the writing on the wall properly. How numbers, and numbers alone, mattered in a democracy.

They lived in a make-believe world that did not exist in democratic reality. Nor were they willing to learn Sinhala, the language spoken by a majority of the nation’s population out of undeserving vanity and pride  – but not spite – forcing their later generations to land elsewhere across the world, often as illegal migrants and/or asylum-seekers, readily learning local languages that many of them did not even know existed. If this was/is not vanity, what was/is?

Symbolic, but…

True, if Sunak, a third-generation South Asian/Indian in the  UK could become British Prime Minister, why could not a Tamil-speaking person become Sri Lanka’s President and/or Prime Minister, even under the existing scheme. Theoretically, it is possible. Practically, it could have if and if only their leaders had acted with certain sense of responsibility and intelligence that goes beyond serving adversity.

Today, when a majority of six in a 10 TNA parliamentarians have voted with the government of President Ranil Wickremesinghe on the controversial 22-A, why not the party formally join the government? The problem is not just ethnic politics, but which of the six, or even ten MPs should be nominated for a Cabinet berth, now that alliance leader R Sampanthan, by far the tallest Tamil leader around, is not keeping good health?

The party lost an earlier opportunity when the TNA refused to cash in on the minority status of the Ranil prime ministership under President Maithripala Sirisena, or when the duo leadership was tentative against the Sirisena-led SLFP, where predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa called the shots. The TNA then said that they were playing a honour game and there were not conditions for their support to the Ranil camp – not even on peripheral ethnic issues like political prisoners’ freedom, land-surrender and the like. They felt undignified to demand political powers, even those promised under 13-A, not to mention all those that they had listed out before predecessor President Mahinda Rajapaksa, post-war.

Fernandopulle saga

Not but not the least, there used to be a leading politician who for his ancestral descendancy used to be known as a Tamil, by default, so to say. In his first term as President, Mahinda Rajapaksa was rumoured to be considering Jeyaraj Fernandopulle to be made prime minister as a gesture to the Tamil community.

Jeyaraj was already a senior minister and the chief whip of the ruling combine, and thus had climbed up the ladder on his own steam.  He belonged to a minority within a minority – a Roman Catholic, a Colombo Chetty, from within the larger Tamil-speaking ethnicities in the country.

The LTTE thought such a gesture to the community was an affront, and smoked him out in a suicide bomb-blast. It was the LTTE’s way of celebrating the Tamil New Year Day (which was also the Sinhala New Year Day), 2008.

Why then speak about a Tamil prime minister, now, in all innocence, much of it a product of convenient loss of memory or whatever!

(The writer is a policy analyst and political commentator, based in Chennai, India. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)