The fall of Kilinochchi and Elephant Pass over the past month signals the end of the LTTE as a player whose conventional military capacity had helped it to win some major battlefield victories and dominate large swathes of Sri Lanka since the early 1990s. Because the LTTE decimated Tamil politics in the process of asserting its claim of 'sole representation', the end of the rebel force, as with the exit of any fascist political force, will inevitably create a political vacuum. Critically, this will also provide an opportunity for a transformation in Tamil politics.
The LTTE's exit will also create a major shift in politics in Sri Lanka more generally. Much of the politics over the last 25 years has been framed around the LTTE, with successive governments oscillating between attempting to wipe out or negotiate with the Tigers. The Muslim community, the Up-country Tamil community (Tamils of Indian origin) and the Sinhalese community were also drawn into engagement with the intransigence of the LTTE. The rebels' eclipse, then, will open up possibilities for a whole range of other issues to be brought into the Sri Lankan political terrain, including issues of economic justice, gender, caste, labour rights and democratisation. It will expose the opportunism of the two major political parties, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), both of which have over the past quarter century engaged in politics focused on the war and the rhetoric of the war. At the same time, the challenges are many, including the manner in which the war is being waged to the accompaniment of Sinhala nationalist propaganda, and attacks on media freedom, constitutional norms and the democratic process itself.
In thinking about the current political opening, we can borrow from Peradeniya University lecturer Liyanage Amarakeerthi's insightful term, the "post-LTTE era", to discuss the future of Tamil politics, its relationship to the other minorities and the Sinhalese communities. In attempting to think about the post-LTTE era, one cannot forget the 25 years dominated by the Tigers, which largely reduced Tamil democratic engagement to that of individuals or atomised groups. Many such Tamils attempted to work with the state and within state structures to push the concerns of the Tamil community. While some were mere opportunists, there were others, such as Neelan Thiruchelvam and Kethesh Loganathan, who in a principled manner challenged successive governments to move on state reform. Both of these individuals paid with their lives, besides being dubbed 'traitors', a label promoted by the LTTE and acquiesced to by large sections of the Tamil community.
The failure of a large section of the Sinhalese progressive community to come to the defence of such Tamil dissident intellectuals is another matter that needs to be addressed in thinking through the need for inter-ethnic solidarity in the post-LTTE era. While there was indeed the risk of the appropriation of independent Tamils by Sinhalese chauvinism promoted by nationalist regimes, it is also true that a Tamil presence in government acted as a possible check on the further 'Sinhalisation' of the state. Such engagement for reform, both from inside and outside the state, should be contrasted with the Tamil nationalist demand for a political solution, which rarely spells out what it would like to see in the form and substance of state reform. LTTE proxies such as the Tamil National Alliance became mere mouthpieces for the rebels, paying lip service to the need for a 'political solution'. Meanwhile, the LTTE consistently exploited the Tamil diaspora and the opportunistic politicians across the Strait in Tamil Nadu in order to reinforce its own agenda – to the detriment of broader state reform that could, in fact, address Tamil aspirations.