NUWARA ELIYA: As Sri Lanka goes to the polls on Thursday to elect a new parliament, political parties representing Tamils, most of whom reside in the north, east and hill country regions, are awaiting the outcome with bated breath as the island nation witnesses a multi-cornered contest on a scale never seen before.
This is compounded by the difficulty in assessing the magnitude of a popular wave the newly-elected president, Anura Kumar Dissanayake, seems to be riding even in areas dominated by ethnic minorities.
Leaders of almost all Tamil political parties that TNIE spoke to said this is the first election in which they have no idea what the results will be like. Even the public seems to be in a “state of confusion,” as an elderly person in Jaffna put it.
To put things in context, for the six seats in the Vanni electoral district, 423 candidates from 22 political parties or alliances and 25 independent groups are in the fray.
Similarly, in Nuwara Eliya and Jaffna, 308 candidates from 17 parties and 11 independent groups are in the fray for eight and six seats, respectively.
In Batticaloa, 392 candidates from 22 parties and 27 independent groups are contesting for five seats.
In Ampara (also called Digamadulla), which has a mix of Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims, a whopping 640 candidates are contesting for eight seats from 21 parties and 43 independent groups.
While Indians may not find the number of candidates surprising, leaders of political parties say, in Sri Lanka’s context, these are unusually high numbers.
MA Sumanthiran, one of the prominent Tamil leaders of the Ilangai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK), who is contesting from Jaffna, said that while the Dissanayake-led National People's Power (NPP) was playing the tactic of persuading the people to vote for the winning side, it will not work since the Sri Lankan president has failed to even utter a word about “political solution” for the Tamil question during his Jaffna rally and his government has already gone back on many of its promises.
When asked about the breaking up of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and a few people leaving his party, for which some blame him personally, Sumanthiran said only those who prioritised their own interests over those of the Tamil people or the ITAK had left.
He said it has, in a way, turned out to be a weeding process through which the Tamil people are able to see who truly represents their issues.
However, Sumanthiran acknowledged that he would not be surprised if NPP bags one seat in Jaffna.
Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, leader of the All Ceylon Tamil Congress, who is contesting as part of the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF), said the fragmentation of TNA due to various vested interests of the politicians within the alliance was a disadvantage to his TNPF.
If they were all together, he claimed, the people would have easily chosen TNPF since his alliance was the only truly demanding a federal solution with a national identity for the Tamils.
“Now, people are confused. However, we are hoping to bag at least 10 seats in the north and eastern region,” he said.
Jeevan Thondaman, general secretary of the Ceylon Workers' Congress and former minister of Water Supply, who is contesting in Nuwara Eliya district in alliance with the United National Party, said it was “chaotic” and said the popular perception is true that many independent groups have been deployed by “certain forces” to deliberately split the votes, especially in favour of the NPP.
V Radhakrishnan, former state minister of education, who is contesting as part of the Tamil Progressive Alliance in Nuwara Eliya, said although the fragmentation was challenging, people of the hill country will not back the NPP since the president has neither implemented his promise of wage increase for the estate workers nor has he promised anything concrete regarding ensuring their land rights.
Daniel Noel Janastar, the NPP candidate from Nuwara Eliya, said legacy parties in the Tamil regions, especially in the hill country, who have miserably failed over the past several decades to improve the lives of the people, were deliberately creating fears about the NPP. “They are concerned about what they are seeing on the ground, which is the people’s yearning for a change. It will certainly reflect in the results,” he said.
