Pragmatism endangered

Highways Minister Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, who is also the Chief Government Whip, was assassinated on Sunday at Weliweriya. The indiscriminate assassination also resulted in the deaths of 15 others while 93 were injured, including 35 critically.

What stinks to high heaven is the assassination was staged during a sports event.

This political assassination, just like many before, deserves the unreserved condemnation by one and all. The assassination bore the trade marks of the LTTE on whose target list Minister Fernandopulle ranked high.

Fernadopulle’s staunch criticism of the LTTE was not the only reason for eliminating him. There are many vociferous critics of the LTTE among Sinhalese politicians, including Cabinet Ministers, who are not on the Tiger hit list.

Only national leaders and potential ones are wiped out by the LTTE. President Ranasinghe Premadasa, Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake were targeted and eliminated, while President Chandrika Kumaratunga escaped narrowly.

Tamil politicians opposed to the LTTE and particularly, those that hold government office or, are perceived as backing official moves, are high up on the LTTE hit list. The names of Lakshman Kadirgamar, Keethesh Loganathan and Neelan Thiruchelvam come to mind.

Fernandopulle, who completes 25 years in active politics, having been appointed an SLFP organizer for Katana in 1983, had the political support of the Catholic constituency, and was endeared by Sinhala Buddhists.

Having taken up the post of party organizer, the very year the separatist war broke out, Fernandopulle stood out as a truly liberal politician who transcended ethnicity and religion. An Attorney-at-Law since 1977, Fernandopulle, who was skilled in all three languages, was as asset to the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party, in which he served as a Senior Vice President since 2005.

Like Kadirgamar, Fernandopulle too, had ambitions to higher public office and was compelled to toe the party line. Of course, he backed the government’s campaign to eliminate terrorism and recently, expressed concern over the LTTE’s occupation of the sacred Madhu shrine.

But, it must be noted that, despite the President’s brother, Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa pushing for the ban on the LTTE, Fernandopulle resisted sanctioning such a move. He was bold enough to state it openly in an interview with the State-owned Sunday Observer last month. “My opinion is that, we must not ban the LTTE because, when the outfit is banned, the government cannot talk to them…if, by any chance, we are to start peace talks, we cannot talk to them, as they are a banned organization,” said Fernandopulle. He was a sane and sound voice drowned in a cacophony of extreme Sinhala nationalism, and advocated devolution of power as a political solution, but the extremist LTTE did not tolerate such sanity.

The country, and most certainly the SLFP, will miss the services of another moderate Tamil politician who opposed separation, but fiercely advocated a political solution to the ethnic conflict.

Beginning from the 1975 assassination of SLFP Mayor Alfred Durraippa, the LTTE is partly responsible for depriving moderate Tamils from joining either of the two national political parties.

The two national parties have also a fair share of blame in failing to support a political solution while in the opposition. The national parties are no longer the catchall parties they used to be. This has driven Tamils and Muslims to form parties exclusively for the minorities to have their voices, drowned in the major parties, heard by civil society and the international community.

What Sri Lanka has often taken pride in is procedural democracy, while substantive democracy has taken a back seat.

We have, time and again, criticised what Arend Lijphart refers to as the practise of majoritarian democracy and emphasized the need for devolution of power to enable the minorities to determine their affairs, at least at provincial level.

We hope the Eastern Provincial Council elections will not be another attempt by the two main parties to extend its majoritarianism rule there, to drown the voice of minority Tamils and Muslims. It is hoped that the whole exercise in democracy, after 20 years, would not end up becoming what Alexis de Toqueville described as the tyranny of the majority.