Tamil Nationalism, a dead end to the Tamil working class in Sri Lanka

Tamil Nationalism, a dead end to the Tamil working class in Sri Lanka

Three and half decades after the bloody anti-Tamil pogrom in Sri Lanka, in July 1983, and ensuring war in the North and East that caused colossal losses of lives and wealth to the working people, both in the North and South of the country, and close to a decade since the end of civil war in 2009, the Tamil bourgeoisie is yet more emphatically fixing the Tamil working class in the most damaging Tamil Nationalist defensive strategy against  the Sinhalese working class.

Cankili Thoppu Archway

While the Tamil bourgeoisie has been all throughout endeavouring to strike a deal with the Sinhalese liberal bourgeoisie in the South, it was always confronted with even harsher offensive by Sinhalese bourgeois Nationalists. In an attempt to carve up an autonomous pro-imperialist capitalist state in the North and East, it was always necessary for the Tamil bourgeoise to rationalize and assert a Tamil Homeland in the North and East, which task was assigned to Tamil nationalist historians, in a cold war with Sinhala chauvinist historiography and archaeology.  This debate remains unresolved, as it should, propounding competing historical narratives, while the Sinhalese nationalists denying to recognize the North and East as the lands where Tamil civilization prevailed for centuries.

Against each anti-Tamil offensive by the capitalist ruling class in the South, using parliamentary, military and police state measures, the bourgeoise Tamil nationalists place the blame on the Sinhalese working class and the poor, as if they were responsible for the discriminatory and oppressive treatment by the Sinhalese Majority government of the South. In the backdrop of the government of the South retaining the lands of the Tamils and fortifying its military presence in the North and East, even nine years after the end of war, some Tamil nationalist academics and politicians even revived blaming Sinhalese of being an internal colonizer, portraying the Sinhalese working masses as an oppressive colonizer of Tamil masses. The picture painted is false to the core.

This blame-game flows from the very interests of the Tamil elite, which is devoted to formulate narratives in order to dilute the class question of the entire national question. When class differences are sidelined and diluted, the nationalist issue is retained in the interests of the Tamil elite, at the expense of the Tamil working class.

The politics of Tamil nationalists is so bankrupt that it fails to unravel the truth of the real enemy of the Tamil working class and the poor, which is none other than the Tamil and Sinhalese ruling class, borth in the North and the South. In this background, the more the identity politics of Tamil Nationalism is strengthened, the more the Sinhalese Nationalism is strengthened in the South by the Sinhalese ruling elite, in order to further entrench the nationalist dividing lines that separate Tamil and Sinhalese working classes and the poor on communal lines.

This is a vicious cycle. It affects the whole working class in the island, as it disarm them of a political programme of a united independant fight against the capitalist ruling elite of both the communities, that serve the demands of neoliberal market economy.

Naloor Manthiri manai in Jaffna 

Without a complete breakaway from this bankrupt politics of Tamil Nationalism, the Tamil working class and the poor will have no imancipation, no lasting solution to any of the day-to-day problems of their lives. History has taught the most important lesson that the only programme that saves the Tamil working class against the oppression by the Southern government is only a fight against these ruling classes in union with the Sinhalese working class of the South, in order to establish a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam on the internationalist perspective of a Socialist Federation of South Asia. This is a fight that was ever resisted and hated by the Tamil elite and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam(LTTE), who never ever appealed to the Sinhalese masses.

Nationalist politics serves the ruling elite, not the working class and the oppressed peoples.


Images by SWJ.