The war in Sri Lanka is officially over. LTTE founder and chief-for-life, Velupillai Prabhakaran, is dead beyond all doubt, killed while trying to escape from the tiny strip of land in northern Sri Lanka where he had been cornered by the Sri Lankan Army. Most of the top LTTE leadership, as well as Charles Anthony, Prabhakaran's son, have also been killed. But putting down the Tigers has been accompanied by a heavy cost. Tens of thousands of civilians faced indiscriminate fire by the security forces and were held hostage by the rebels in the last throes of war, used as human shields and denied access to basic amenities and medical attention. Even though the war has come to what can only be called a catastrophic end, with a huge and unacceptable civilian death toll and an impending humanitarian emergency, there now loom larger questions about the future of the Tamil community and Sri Lanka as a whole. These must be addressed with as much urgency.
The last 25 years of conflict have been irrefutably detrimental to Tamil political culture. The rise of the LTTE, in the early 1980s, was accompanied by the brutal silencing of dissent across a wide political spectrum within the Tamil community. The LTTE embraced a fascist political culture, and proceeded systematically to eliminate politicians, intellectuals and activists struggling for Tamil political rights. Many of these – such as Rajani Thiranagama, Neelan Tiruchelvam and Kethesh Loganathan – could now have been making a contribution in chalking out the future of a post-LTTE Sri Lanka.
The exclusionist politics of the Tigers has resulted in alienating the Tamil community, even as it targeted and massacred Sinhalese civilians, and 'ethnically cleansed' and attacked Muslims. The LTTE also precluded long-term sympathy for Lankan Tamils in India, through its assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. As such, the current quandary faced by the Tamil community – the decimation of its democratic political culture, and dashed possibilities for inter-ethnic co-existence and a political solution that addresses Tamil grievances and aspirations – is for the most part the consequence of the literally suicidal politics of the Tigers.
It must be said, however, that the exclusionist and violent brand of Tamil nationalism developed over the last several decades is only partly to blame for the current political predicament. Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, which predates Tamil nationalism and gained increasing strength after Independence in 1948, has dominated the politics of successive governments in Colombo. The Sinhala elite and both the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the United National Party (UNP), the two major political parties, have consistently undermined efforts at addressing the root causes of the conflict. Even today, Sinhala Buddhist nationalists are putting up major barriers to a credible political solution, and the two political parties seem to have willingly succumbed to the demagoguery.