A Common Presidential Candidate From A Fractured Tamil Identity?

By S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole –

Wigneswaran’s Ideas for a Common Candidate

C.V. Wigneswaran recently floated the idea of Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam as a common  Tamil candidate for the presidential elections this year. I strongly suspect that Wigneswaran was trying to interject himself, while appearing to suggest Ponnambalam, whose family name raises suspicion for having deprived estate Tamils of their citizenship. Both men were described by Colombo Gazette as hardliners (7 Aug. 2020) presumably because they could not keep their word to the TNA. Anyway, they are weak in the East where both Wigneswaran and Ponnambalam hardly got any votes in the 2020 parliamentary elections.  Wigneswaran got 1.66% of the vote in Batticaloa and 0.66% in Trinco. Ponnamabalam’s Tamil National People’s Front did not contest in Batticaloa and got only 0.85% of the vote in Trinco. The very foundational reasons for a common candidate are lost when the proposed candidates are nobodies in the East. 

A northern candidate needs solid support in the East. But the only possibility is Cheeannah Yogeswaran, who is Wigneswaran’s partner in Christian-bashing. He has been named as a possible successor to Mr. Sambanthan by D.B.S. Jeyaraj in what he calls a triangular contest between him, M.A. Sumanthiran and S. Shritharan. We Tamils should never propose a common candidate who is well-known for anti-Christian diatribes and Hindutva jingoism. We should say a resounding no to Wigneswaran as a Common Candidate, as well as to any of his proteges who are divisive Saiva supremacists determined to undermine anything that unites Tamils.

Taking from an old article of mine, and echoing the words of Velupillai Thangavelu who has blasted Wigneswaran for many errors, our Chief Minister “is a devotee of [Matara’s] Premananda. This Premananda was convicted of raping under-aged orphans living in his [Indian] Ashram. He was convicted of murdering a young engineer Ravi at the Ashram.” Premananda’s victims were Jaffna children who followed him to India for safety after the 1983 riots. He was sentenced by the Indian courts to double life-imprisonment and an I-Rs 66.4 lakh fine. 

Shortly after his election as CM (by when his Guru Premananda had died in prison), Wigneswaran requested PM Modi to release three Premananda devotees convicted for life for raping 13 Sri Lankan Tamil girls (including minors), and conspiring to murder ashram inmate Ravi who objected to the rapes and abortions by Premananda. Despite the evidence, and the various appeals turned down by the Supreme Court of India, Wigneswaran argued unsuccessfully with the Indian PM that these convictions were wrong.

In a Thinappuyal interview on 14.04.2017, Wigneswaran was asked about his being a devotee of a convicted criminal. He justified these acts by declaring that Jesus Christ himself was convicted 2000 years ago but that people now worship him as God – essentially equating Jesus’ conviction by a mob to Premananda’s formal conviction in an Indian court affirmed by multiple reviews. Other remarks he made during this interview were even more damaging. According to senior writer Shamindra Ferdinando (Island 09.05.2017), Wigneswaran subsequently began to worry about Catholic outrage, and the Thinappuyal “website has (now) deleted extremely controversial sections of the interview on Wigneswaran’s request.”

Wigneswaran’s Foot in his Mouth

Wigneswaran continues his anti-Christian diatribes. Speaking at the Thirtieth Anniversary Celebrations of the Department of Hindu Religious and Cultural Affairs (Uthayan, front page, 19.11.2016), Wigneswaran first talked up Arumuga Navalar’s brilliance, failing to mention that Navalar never finished school, despite languishing as a student from 1834 to 1847 and is on record in his own plaintive words that his juniors had finished and gone on to get good jobs. Then Wigneswaran said that the missionaries knew that local Christians came to work for them only for the money, but that Navalar was different so the job of Bible translation was given to him. He event stated that Navalar’s knowledge of the Bible exceeded that of the Christian clergy. It was an absurd boast about one who the historical record shows was like a valet to Missionary Percival without a salary. In reality, Navalar did not translate the Bible into Tamil. He joined Principal Percival’s college at the age of 12, and was still a student 13 years later when he, according to The Morning Star, 25.11.1847 (and also Emerson Tennent), walked out with nearly half the boys objecting to Percival admitting Gabriel Jeroni of the toddy-tapping Nalavar caste. He then founded a school for upper castes, but because the teaching there was deficient, most students returned to Percival. This puts Wigneswaran’s history in the mythological genre – faith-based wishful thinking transformed into pseudo history, abusing the powers of the majority.

Insulting the Pope

Wigneswaran continues to insult Christians who, comprising 20% of the Jaffna electorate and forming the ITAK-Chelvanayagam base, made Wigneswaran CM. As attensted by an Uthayan writer, there were red flags about his character event at the time, such as a reporter having to be persuaded not to publish investigative photographs taken looking into Wigneswaran’s bedroom. The occasion of insulting the Pope was an argument with NPC’s S. Thavarasa, who accused Wigneswaran of not delivering. Wigneswaran thereupon retorted that the Pope makes statements repeatedly to see himself in the news, and that Thavarasa was doing just that (vide Record 102 NPC sitting, 17.08.2017 around 9:30 am; Virakesary 21.08.2017). Wigneswaran’s insular mind cannot comprehend that the Pope, being such an important global figure, has very little need to chase publicity.

Amusingly, the day I read of this, Wigneswaran’s numerous statements in just one newspaper, Thinakkural, were in three different pictured articles.

Only Saivites are Tamils: Others are Tamil Speakers

At the same Hindu Religious and Cultural Affairs celebrations where Wigneswaran spoke, he was followed by his sidekick in religious hate-speech, then Batticaloa District MP Cheeannah Yogeswaran. On that day, Yogeswaran, vituperating as the speaker at the Hindu festival after Wigneswaran in partnership, outdid Wigneswaran in his hate for low-castes, especially Christian low-castes.

To describe Yogeswaran’s gimmickry, it was in 2006 in Vaharai that my one-time Parish Priest at St. James’ Nallur, Rev. Fr. Gnanakarunyan, was Assistant Priest. Yogeswaran was an aspiring politician. Their paths crossed when attending to displaced refugees. Yogeswaran, disgustingly, expectorated phlegm and spat at Fr. Gnanakarunyan – the case of a marginal Tamil from Batticaloa trying to assert caste-status by insulting another marginal Tamil. The irony is that Rev. Gnanakarunyan was unfairly accused under the PTA and spent over a year in jail and yet is called a non-Tamil by Yogeswaran who has not suffered as much for being Tamil. 

Yogeswaran asserted (Virakesari, 19.11.2017) that the mark of a race is its religion; that it has been shown that it is only Saivites who are truly Tamils; and that only Tamils can be Saivites, and that all others are not Tamil, but Tamil speakers. He stated that Navalar’s dreams  — of upper-caste Hindu nationalist dominance — came true when Wigneswaran, a Saivite, was elected Chief Minister.

Then the punch-line – referring obviously to the iconic Christian founder of the ITAK, Samuel JV Chelvanayagam – Yogeswaran said that some people had

unfortunately been elected as leaders of the people in violation of this Navalar vision. Few come into politics to safeguard Saivism, he added. He wanted Navalar’s vision to be upheld, continuing that we must follow Saiva culture and eat Saiva food. He advocated vegetarianism, and then in the same breath, regretted that few temples now have animal sacrifice. Is this fair, he asked, seemingly unaware of his own contradictions.

The people of Batticaloa had the good sense to kick him out of Parliament in 2020. 

The Saiva Juggernaut

The Saiva juggernaut, led by Wigneswaran, is inexorably moving in Jaffna crushing all in its path. A small shrine is built on public land and then expanded – just like the Buddhist temples sprouting up, but to which we Tamils object. No one dares complain for fear of being accused of being anti-Hindu. We are silenced because of this fear. As Prof. K. Sivathamby wrote, Christians live in fear in Jaffna – ghettoized and oppressed.

A case in point is the just concluded Nallur Thiruvilla. Point Pedro Road used to run between the Kandasamy Temple and its idol’s bath pond (Theerthang-kerni). That posed a hazard for devotees crossing Point Pedro Road from the temple to get to the pond. Point Pedro Road was therefore diverted around the pond and the land acquired by the temple. Now at festival time to go to my food boutique run by shop-keeper Chokkan, I am asked to remove my footwear because it is “holy ground” despite the cuds of betel chew spat everywhere by devotees. A Hindu relative who lives in the closed zone had to remove his shoes to get home. He asked the police by whose order he had to remove his shoes. It turns out that Shayanthan Kumaradas Maapaana Mudaliyar, the son of the temple owner, called the police daily to give instructions, which they obeyed, and in turn had special poojas performed for their families.

The Vinayagar Kovil

Can such acquisitiveness be unfair when only the Buddhists do it, but not when the LTTE does the same thing? The Vinayagar Kovil on Chemmany Road, 50 m from my home is unique and deserves mention as the only temple constructed by the LTTE, says Balasundaram Palanivel who controls two festivals at the growing temple.

St. James’ Church Nallur had Chemmany Road running from Muththirai Chanthai [market and not Chanthi (junction) as many incorrectly say, not knowing it was a market up to the 1960s] to the front gate of the Church, turning right and immediately left to run along the Church boundary to Chemmany. Up to the 1970s boys would play by the open area in front of the church by Chemmany Road. When the government wanted to use that area for office buildings, my late father, the Vicar of St. James’ then, mounted a campaign with village elders and got the plan abandoned. The government listened to us. 

Later, after the LTTE took over Jaffna, they took over the road in front of the Church from the Church entrance to Muthirai Chanthai and made it Kittu Park. Properties by the original Chemmany Road lost value. Those in little huts down a narrow strip along the straightened Chemmany Road became rich overnight. Objections to the LTTE were unthinkable by then. 

When I was a boy, a foot-high stone was placed by the side of the playground by one Appathurai. As it grew and the LTTE put up Kittu Park, they built up the temple, taking over the land, and fencing the temple with wooden walls. After the demise of the LTTE, the locals built concrete walls. Technically the land belongs to the municipality  which is unlikely to ever assert control. They have in fact essentially ceded the land as temple property by erecting a barbed wire fence around it.

Vinayagar Kovil  has now grown into a large temple. Like the Buddhists, we Tamils too are good at acquiring public land for Hindu use. My friend and neighbor Palanivel attends to the temple across which he runs his grocery boutique. 

As Protestant Christianity is weakened by fear of the Hindutwas, the Church seems weak. At St. James’, Archdeacon Selvan preached Erham Sat (every religion is true. Priest Stephen (who was sacked from his position as Dean at Pilimatalawa Theological College for leaking question papers, in turn creating a generation of priests desensitized to cheating) has been posted to St. James’. He wants to celebrate Hindu events like Navaratri and Pongal. Meanwhile, the prayerbook has deleted the words “You only are Holy, you only are the Lord” from the ancient hymn Gloria in Excelsis Deo that expresses right theology and faith during high service. Pilimatalawa Lecturers explain that the deleted words deny holiness and lordship to Krishna, Mohammed, et al. Bishops Dhilo Canagasabey and Dushantha Rodrigo have authorized the deletion of these prayers despite a near unanimous resolution by the Church’s Council demanding correction. The question is, when is a Church transformed into a Hindu Kovil? Has St. James’ with the Church of Ceylon crossed the line to make St. James’ Church become St. James’ Chaiva Kovil? I am saddened because St. James’ is where my great-great-grandfather (Tamil Pandit at St. John’s and later priest there) was ordained in 1866 and my grandfather and father served as priests.

The culture of fear silences any protest. Homosexuals, child-molesters, womanizers those caught forging cheques, all celebrate at the altar as priests without punishment. As Fr. Selvan says, Erham Sat. At parishes like St. John’s a member who returned to Jaffna with his mother’s ashes for burial in the family plot, has been waiting because the parish wants him to pay $150 to bury the urn in a grave the family already owns. Curiously Archdeacon Selvan, Bishop Rodrigo, Parish Priest Jebachelvan and the St. John’s Wardens are passing the buck to each other on the charge, although the Church Constitution is explicit that one who goes abroad and returns does not lose privileges – which include burial at local rates. Many have left the church (specializing in bilking foreign members) including Bavani Christopher who lives across Vinayagar Kovil and knows its history. I have the options of my parents’, or grandparents’ or great grandparents’ grave and one I bought for Rs. 15,000, all at St. James’, but the issue of my receiving communion elsewhere because the Anglican priests are apostates remains an obstacle to my burial in these graves. 

Who as a Common Candidate?

There are parallels with the church, literacy, connectedness, and identity being central themes in proper understanding of the issues.

 If Tamils are to put forward a Tamil candidate, Philip Vasantharajan from Australia is in Jaffna planting thoughts. Based on the ineffectiveness of monolingual MPs – he urges the choice of candidates who are fluent in English and Tamil, or, even better, trilingual. He says no candidates with more than ten years as MP. People like R. Sambanthan and V. Anandasangari can play the role of guiding elders who know outsiders and know the history, and have not been associated with violence. He plugs for Shanakiyan Rajaputhiran Rasamanickam  and Mathiyaparanam Abraham Sumanthiran (who closely  fails the 10-year test)  for the next leader. Perhaps Jeevan Thondaman can be drawn back into the original TULF. Vasantharajan says only those passing the language test are any good in putting our case across outside Tamil circles. We need candidates who accept the equal rights of all regardless of religious persuasion, caste and gender. Indian state support for our rights needs rekindling as we cannot progress without Indian support even for the 13^th Amendment. We cannot wait for 2 years for the next parliament as Ranil Wickremesinghe suggests because by then our electoral strength with be further weakened through colonization, especially in the East. And Ranil may be gone. 

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