The Pirabhakaran Phenomenon Part 44 http://www.sangam.org/PIRABAKARAN/Part44.

htm

The Pirabhakaran Phenomenon

Part 44

Sachi Sri Kantha

[4 October 2002]

COUNTERING THE FANGS OF

BROWN-SKINNED BUDDHIST
ARYANISM
“When of two adjoining tribes one becomes less numerous
and less powerful than the other, the contest is soon settled
by war, slaughter, cannibalism, slavery, and absorption.
Even when a weaker tribe is not thus abruptly swept away, if
it once begins to decrease, it generally goes on decreasing
until it becomes extinct.”
– Darwin, in The Descent of Man (1871).

Darwin’s message on the ‘Survival of the Fittest’ provides a

glaring prediction on the impending fate of Eelam Tamils in the
island. Sinhalese and Tamils have been two adjoining tribes in the
island for centuries, ‘minding their own business’. That the Tamils
in the island are less numerous is a given. On top of that, if the
Tamils become less powerful, their survival is in question has been
best understood by Pirabhakaran than other Tamils of his
generation or earlier generations, even though he would not have
read a line from Darwin. Among the influencing processes (war,
slaughter, cannibalism, slavery and absorption) mentioned by
Darwin, Tamil-speaking Colombo Chetties of the 18th and 19th
centuries have turned into ‘Sinhalese’ by the absorption process.
Slaughter at regular intervals since mid-1950s had depleted the
Tamil population. Slavery also plays its insidious role of turning
some born Tamils (Names need not be mentioned) into ‘hiding’
Sinhalese. Thus, it is not a surprise that Pirabhakaran’s call for a
war against the fanatics of Buddhist Aryanism did elicit favorable
response among the younger generation of Eelam Tamils in the

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early 1980s.
Strategies adopted by Pirabhakaran
To counter the fangs of Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism, the
following strategies were adopted by Pirabhakaran’s Tamil Tigers.
First, severing the complete reliance of Tamils on parliamentary
politics. Secondly, establishing a truly viable Tamil guerrilla army
– as opposed to the logorrheal pyrotechnics of fringe Leftists of
previous generation, like N.Sanmugathasan. Thirdly, adopting a
‘Hit where it Hurts’ strategy in military confrontations. Despite the
choleric outburst of self-anointed, partisan human rights activists,
in each of these strategies, time has proved that Pirabhakaran’s
choices were not inappropriate for the occasion.

One can wonder how many Tamils would have chuckled on the
observation made by Vipul Boteju, one of the retired army
brigadier generals, to Amal Jayasinghe, prior to the recently held
Sattahip negotiations between the Government of Sri Lanka and
the LTTE. According to the Agence France-Presse report,
“Retired army brigadier general Vipul Boteju believes it is
the military strength of the Tigers that forced the government
to talk with them with the help of Norwegian peace brokers.
‘If the [Sri Lankan] army was even half an inch taller than the
Tigers, the talks would not have been necessary’, Boteju said.
‘It is the corruption in the army, and conversely, the
dedication among the Tigers that brought about this
situation.’” [Sept.15, 2002]

This candid appreciation from a former battle field opponent of

Pirabhakaran deserves merit and proves that the second and third
strategies I have listed above did succeed to a significant level,
against domineering odds. While knowledgeable combatants like
Vipul Boteju had complimented the ‘dedication among the Tigers’
for their stupendous feat, Tamil Tigers have hardly lacked
doom-sayers as well. Here is an example, penned in 1990, by the
Tamil Tiger-loathing amateur historians:
“The Tigers’ history, their theoretical vacuum, lack of
political creativity, intolerance and fanatical dedication will
be the ultimate cause of their own break-up. The legendary
Tigers will go to their demise with their legends smeared with
the blood and tears of victims of their own misdoings. A new
Tiger will not emerge from their ashes.” [Rajan Hoole et al. in

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The Broken Palmyra, 1990, p.367]

Gandhi on Prostitutes and the Parliament

Eelam Tamils have produced quite a number of professionals who
have enriched the parliamentary debates of colonial and
post-independent Sri Lanka. Among those who have passed from
the current scene, G.G.Ponnambalam, C.Suntheralingam,
S.J.V.Chelvanayakam, C.Vanniasingham, A.Amirthalingam,
V.N.Navaratnam, E.M.V.Naganathan and M.Sivasithamparam
were leading debaters with conviction, who were chosen by the
Tamil-speaking population to represent them at the parliament
between 1930s and late 1970s. All of them adhered valiantly to the
Gandhian concept of non-violence to fight for the rights of Tamils,
but ignored the admonition of Gandhi on the barren state of
parliament controlled by the hands of wily adversaries.

Einstein once remarked sarcastically that ‘It’s of no use if the

wrapper is of better quality than the meat it covers’. Parliamentary
democracy as inherited from the British imperialists was nothing
but the ‘wrapper’ of Einstein’s description and the ‘meat’ [the
rights of Tamils] it was supposed to protect has begun to stink
even before D.S.Senanayake, the first prime minister of then
Ceylon, died in 1952. Gandhi had warned about the flaws of
parliamentary politics in 1909, and among all the Eelam Tamil
leaders, it is now evident that only Pirabhakaran took serious note
of Gandhi’s warning.

What was Gandhi’s warning? I will quote from Erik Erikson’s

classic work:
“In 1909, on his return from a most discouraging trip to
England, where he had found that the Imperial Government
was half helpless and half unwilling to support Indian
self-respect either in South Africa or in India, Gandhi wrote
Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, a rather incendiary
manifesto for a man of peace. Written on a steamer in less
than a week, it staked out a sphere of leadership reaching
from utterly personal and local concerns to the very limits of
India. The motto is: Home Rule equals Self Rule and Self
Rule equals Self-Control. Only he who is master of himself
can be master of his ‘house’, and only a people in command
of itself can command respect and freedom…” [Book:

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Gandhi’s Truth – On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence,

1969, p.217]

Erikson continues on Gandhi’s opinion:

“There follow sweeping denigrations of the British
Parliament and of the ‘free’ press, of civilization in general
and the railways in particular, of lawyers and doctors, all of
whom are said to prostitute, infect, weaken, and cheapen the
Indian people, who enjoyed Home Rule in the ancient past…
‘Prostitution’ is a word used rather often in this document;
…the British Parliament is first referred to as the Mother of
Parliaments and then derided as no better than a prostitute or
an otherwise ‘sterile woman’. To justify such a comparison
the pamphleteer uses rather strange metaphors. The
Parliament, he says, is like a prostitute – ‘under the control of
ministers who change from time to time’. The word ‘under’
appears again and again in what is in all probability not a
conscious pun: ‘Today it is under Mr.Asquith, tomorrow,
under Mr.Balfour, and the day after it will be somebody
else’. Rather than being ‘under one master all the time’, then,
Parliament is used by a series of prime ministers who exploit
this institution for their purposes without making it fertile,
with the result that ‘its movement is not steady but it is
buffeted about like a prostitute’….” [ibid, pp.219-220]

What Erikson did not stress on Gandhi’s attitude to the British

parliament also is notable. Though a trained lawyer, Gandhi was
not a parliamentarian. Period. As an activist, who concentrated on
deeds and not words, Gandhi would have felt that the parliament
set-up prostituted the words which need to be used sparingly.
Demagoguery by tub-thumping oratory became the norm since the
parliamentary tradition rooted in India and Sri Lanka. Keen
observers have recorded how S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike, the brown-
skinned Hitler-imitator, exploited such oratorical technique to
pour scorn on his opponents in the 1950s. Two examples are given
below:
“I heard Bandaranaike speak at a mass rally near the Kandy
market, a shortwhile before they killed him. It was a classic
discourse in Sinhala. He poured sarcasm on his UNP
adversaries, quite effortlessly. One had to hear him pour
vitriol through the microphone to comprehend the contempt

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he reserved for the ancien regime. He intonated in the most

ironical of voices. People listened to him with rapt attention.
He knew he was giving a command performance.”
[A.Jeyaratnam Wilson, in Lanka Guardian, Aug.1, 1993,
pp.9-10]
“S.W.R.D.[Bandaranaike] used, in his usual contemptuous
style, to lift his forefinger when speaking, and harangue the
crowd, telling them that when ‘a Bandaranaike’ lifts his
forefinger, there is not a single man in the country who could
lift his own forefinger above that of the Bandaranaikes.”
[S.Jayaweera, in Lanka Guardian, Feb.15, 1997, pp.13-14]

While Jeyaratnam Wilson’s observation on padre Bandaranaike

was made in 1959, two decades ahead of this observation, the
tart-tongued 37 year-old young Tamil leader G.G.Ponnambalam
had pulled the populist mask of Bandaranaike and aptly
prophesied him as ‘pocket Fuehrer’. This has been noted by Jane
Russell in her book, Communal Politics under the Donoughmore
Constitution 1931-1947 (1982, p.157) as follows:
“In January 1939 at a meeting in Balapitiya, Bandaranaike
appealed to the electors in this vein:
‘I am prepared to sacrifice my life for the sake of my
community, the Sinhalese. If anybody were to try to hinder
our progress, I am determined to see that he is taught a lesson
he will never forget.’
At the conclusion of the meeting, a lady in the audience,
Mrs.Srimathie Abeygunawardene likened Mr.Bandaranaike
to Hitler and appealed to the Sinhalese community to give
him every possible assistance to reach the goal of freedom.
(Hindu Organ, January 26, 1939). This reported remark
caused G.G.Ponnambalam to term Bandaranaike ‘the pocket
Fuehrer’ (Hindu Organ, May 24, 1939).”

In the same page, ahead of this passage, Jane Russell also had
cited Ponnambalam’s speech at the then State Council in 1939, as
a member of Point Pedro constituency, with a footnote that the
young Tamil leader had visited Nazi Germany in 1938:
“This is our home. We are inhabitants of this country and we
have as much right to claim to have permanent and vested
interests in this country, politically and otherwise, as the
Sinhalese people. We do not propose to be treated as

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undesirable aliens. We will not tolerate being segregated into

ghettos and treated like Semites in the Nazi states.” (Hansard
Parliamentary Debates, 1939, col.890)”

The problem faced by the Eelam Tamils was different in plane

from the problem faced by the Jews in Nazi Germany. Hitler did
not have a wife and a daughter who came to be elected following
the demise of the Fuehrer. His mistress had committed suicide
with him. But in Sri Lanka, following the assassination of ‘pocket
Fuehrer’ in 1959, the Sinhalese public chose pocket Fuehrer’s
Frau (Leader’s Wife) as the ‘weeping widow’ Sirimavo, who
carried out the first ethnic cleansing in the armed forces of the
island and held power from 1960 to 1977, with an intermittent
1965-70 period as the Leader of the Opposition.

Following pocket Fuehrer’s Frau, 1994 saw the rise of Tochter

Fuehrer (Daughter Leader) replacing her mother. The despicable
assassination of a noted sympathiser of LTTE who had tussled
openly with Tochter Fuehrer in the 1990s, G.G. (Kumar)
Ponnambalam Jr. - the son of G.G.Ponnambalam - in January
2000, by the Gestapo-style agents in Colombo exposed the fangs
of Buddhist Aryanism prominently. It may not even be a hyperbole
to think whether Tochter Fuehrer was taking a revenge on the son
of Ponnambalam who had aptly tagged her father with the
mischievous monicker ‘pocket Fuehrer’.

This is because, the British academic Jane Russell, who had

described the political antics of the pocket Fuehrer of colonial
Ceylon in her 1982 book, was also unceremoniously deported
from the island in 1996 on flimsy grounds, though she has been a
resident in Sri Lanka for 23 years. Reports and letters on this issue
had appeared in the Colombo press. [Shelani de Silva, ‘Britain
takes up Russel issue with Lanka’, Sunday Times, April 21, 1996;
Mangalika De Silva, ‘Jane Russell: that infamous deportation,
Sunday Times, May 11, 1997; Preethi Jayaratne, ‘Jane Russell
forgotten’, Sunday Times, April 25, 1999].

While pocket Fuehrer’s Frau could distinguish herself as a grand

practitioner of tub-thumping oratory, since early 1970s for two
decades, Premadasa – who can be tagged as Schatten Fuehrer
(shadow Fuehrer) - hijacked pocket Fuehrer’s oratorical scorn and
harangue effortlessly. His parliamentary speech during the Motion

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to deprive the civic rights of none other than Fuehrer’s Frau in

1980 was a landmark in such despicable oratory. When one heard
that speech, one could have wondered whether Premadasa was
avenging the defeat of his mentor [A.E.Goonesinghe] by S.W.R.D.
Bandaranaike in the early 1930s, by pouring scorn on
Bandaranaike’s widow in 1980.

Pirabhakaran on the Sri Lankan parliament

It is revealing that in one of his earliest interviews to Anita Pratap
in 1984, Pirabhakaran had expressed similar sentiments to
Gandhi’s on the parliamentary system of Sri Lanka.
Interviewer: ‘What made you opt out of a conventional
system and spearhead a liberation movement which you knew
would be outlawed?’
Pirabhakaran: ‘The democratic parliamentary system, or
what you refer to as the conventional political system in Sri
Lanka, has always tried to impose the will of the majority on
the minority. This system not only failed to solve the basic
problems of our people but, in fact, aggravated our plight. For
decades, the repression by the State has made the life of our
people miserable. The non-violent democratic struggles of
our people were met with military repression. Our just
demands were totally ignored, and the oppression continued
on such a scale as to threaten the very survival of the Tamils
in Sri Lanka. It was these circumstances which led me to form
our liberation movement. I felt that an armed struggle was the
only alternative left to our people, not only to ensure our
survival but ultimately to free ourselves from the Sinhala
oppression. I have always been aware that our movement
would be outlawed. It is for this reason that we organised our
movement as a clandestine underground structure from its
inception.’
[Sunday Magazine, March 11-17, 1984]

That Pirabhakaran is not imperfect in his 1984 assessment of the

parliamentary democracy as practised by the Sinhalese politicians
is proved by the later observations made by non-Tamil natives of
the island. In 1992, ex-diplomat Izeth Hussain tagged the
prevailing system as ‘nonsense democracy’. To quote,
“…Sri Lankan democracy was made nonsensical by the 1977

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Government. It will be remembered that under that

Government we were deluged by an unrelenting torrent of rot
about Sri Lanka’s far-famed five-star democracy, a
performance that was vastly impressive for its sheer zaniness.
The more appropriate term might therefore be ‘nonsense
democracy’ [Lanka Guardian, July 15, 1992, pp.11-13]

Recently, another ex-diplomat K.Godage (who is a voluble

Pirabhakaran critic nonetheless) had labeled it as ‘deformed
democracy’ [see his commentary: ‘MPs disgrace the country’, The
Island newspaper, Colombo, July 29, 2002]. Godage even
reiterated Pirabhakaran’s viewpoint, if not by word – but in spirit,
as follows:
“Sri Lankan democracy has a form all its own. It is deformed.
For many years we confused Majoritarianism with
democracy. Most politicians understood democracy to mean
the vulgar business of majority rule; a situation where the
Opposition has no role whatsoever in the governance of the
country. This simplistic and vulgar understanding of
democracy prevails seventy years after universal suffrage was
introduced and fifty three years after we started to govern
ourselves.”

Thus, Pirabhakaran’s first strategy of severing the complete

reliance of Tamils on parliamentary politics to defang the Brown-
skinned Buddhist Aryanism is not without merit.

Following the footsteps of Mao in preference to Gandhi

I provide below, excerpts from my past writings, in 1988 and
2001, originally written as a defence on Pirabhakaran’s strategy to
LTTE’s critics, namely David Selbourne (an Oxford University
academic cum journalist) and the authors of the Broken Palmyra
(1990) book.

In a rebuttal to David Selbourne, written at the height of

LTTE-Indian army confrontation, I had superficially pointed out
the reasons why the Gandhian method of non-violence agitation
failed in Sri Lanka. I was forced to write this rebuttal since
Selbourne had expressed some condescending sentiments on the
Eelam Tamil leadership of the past. To reproduce excerpts of my
thoughts:

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“Selbourne also sarcastically observed that ‘the Gandhian

way is not available, since the Tamils have no Gandhi’. I raise
objection to this statement. When he was leading the struggle
against the British rulers, the great Gandhi was also ridiculed
from many corners. Leo Rosten reminisced; ‘They called him
(Gandhi) a crackpot, a hypocrite, a mystic. To the rajahs and
maharajahs in their palaces, he was a preposterous rabble
rouser. To the Indian politicians struggling for home rule, he
was a deluded demagogue. To an incredulous Parliament in
London, he was a trouble maker in a nappie.’ [refer, Readers
Digest, July 1983]. Look at the Who’s Who annual reference
books, published by A.C.Black of London for the years 1930
or 1931. You cannot locate an entry on Gandhi. He was a
non-entity to the British rulers even in 1930.
To be fair by the Sri Lankan political leaders of yester year,
Tamils had a Gandhi, in S.J.V.Chelvanayakam. He was an
exception among the politicians of Indian subcontinent for
two reasons. First, in a region known for religious bigotry,
though being a Christian, he commanded the respect of
majority Hindu Tamils for two decades. Former prime
minister of Ceylon, S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike, who was born a
Christian, had to become an adopted Buddhist to lead the
Sinhalese. Secondly, Chelvanayakam (like Mahatmaji) was
not recognized for tub-thumping oratory. Instead, he was a
man of action. Chelvanayakam organized Gandhian-style
satyagraha campaigns and other non-violent resistance
movements in the mid 1950s and early 1960s. But
unfortunately, Gandhian methods couldn’t perform any trick
for Tamils in Sri Lanka. There are many reasons for the
failure of Gandhi’s techniques in Sri Lankan atmosphere.
(1) Mahatmaji was lucky to have the British as his
opponents. He himself had acknowledged that his tactics
could not have worked against any other enemy, who is less
civic-minded. Praise the British rulers for being good sports.
(2) Gandhi was fighting an oppressor who was living and
planning his moves, thousands of miles away from the battle
scene. But Chelvanayakam had to fight an oppressor who was
(and is) living next door.
(3) Gandhi and his followers could enter and leave the jails
under British rule without much physical agony and with no

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threat to life. No one denies that they suffered mental torture.

In Sri Lanka, considering what happened to the 52 Tamils in
Welikade jail in 1983, one’s life was (and is) in jeopardy
when incarcerated even for political reasons.
…The Westminster model of parliamentary democracy could
work in the United Kingdom to cater to a single ethnic and
single religious constituency. It has failed to take firm root in
other countries with multi-ethnic and multi-religious
constituencies. So, the younger generation of Tamilians
drifted towards the military ideology of Mao Tse Tung, since
1977. One may label it as a reckless move. But it remained as
a practical alternative. And among Tamils of Sri Lanka, a
small faction led by trade unionist N.Sanmugathasan had
espoused this cause, though not with much popular
support…” [Tamil Times, London, March 1988, pp.14-15]

In my commentary [originally written to commemorate Gandhi’s

53rd anniversary of death] which appeared in the now-closed
Tamil Nation website, on January 31, 2001, I have mentioned the
shifting of Gandhi’s thoughts from non-violence agitation to
recognizing the value in violence agitation along the decades, and
the reason why such a shift occurred. I wrote this commentary to
negate the argument of the authors of The Broken Palmyra (1990),
who had blindly extolled the virtues of non-violence, in chapter 7
of their book entitled ‘A Perspective on Nonviolence’
(pp.376-385). Expressed opinions of Rajan Hoole and colleagues
in this chapter have completely ignored Gandhi’s as well as
Nehru’s caveat on the limitations of non-violence strategy.
Excerpts from my commentary are as follows:
Fuel from a Freedom Fighter
“Though non-violence was his chosen method of agitation,
Gandhi did not underestimate the need for violent methods to
overcome aggression of the demonic State and its authorities.
This is because, especially during the last decade of his life,
he recognized the limitations of non-violent methods against
adversaries who were rabid, reckless and not given to reason.
It could be inferred that though he developed the non-violent
confrontation with his oppressors [British imperialists] in the
late 19th century in South Africa, the events of Second World
War as well as the parallel liberational war conducted by
Mao Ze Dong in China, made Gandhi to realize that his

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non-violent methods of agitation had limits.

However, selective regurgitation of Gandhi’s thoughts on
overcoming fear by the politicians and pundits (who had their
own axes to grind) had made it difficult for millions to agitate
against oppression. One possible reason for this occurrence is
because the popular autobiography of Gandhi, The Story of
My Experiment with Truth, comes to a close in the year 1921.
But he lived for another full 26 eventful years, during which
he continued to write passionately and modified his beliefs
according to the new developments in India and the world.
Let me offer six quotes of Gandhi [between 1940 and 1947,
when the Aryan Nazi oppression peaked and was vanquished
by the Allies] on the use of violence, as culled from the book,
The Way to Communal Harmony – a Gandhi anthology,
compiled and edited by U.R.Rao [Navajivan Publishing
House, Ahmedabad, 1963]. The original dates of these quotes
from the Harijan newspaper are mentioned at the end within
parentheses.
‘Every Indian, be he Hindu or any other, must learn the act of
protecting himself. It is the condition of real democracy. The
State has a duty. But no State can protect those who will not
share with it the duty of protecting themselves.’ [Harijan,
Feb.10, 1940]
‘Self-defence can be violent or non-violent. I have always
advised and insisted on non-violent defence. But I recognize
that it has to be learnt like violent defence. It requires a
different training from that which is required for violent
defence. Therefore, if the capacity for non-violent
self-defence is lacking, there need be no hesitation in using
violent means.’ [Harijan, Mar.2, 1940; suggestion to
Manoranjan Babu and other friends from Noakhali, regarding
the difficult situation faced there by the Hindus.]
‘I have said that for those who do not believe in non-violence,
armed defence is the only remedy. But if I am asked to advise
how it can be done, I can only say, ‘I don’t know.’ [Harijan,
Oct.16, 1940; in the context of terrorization of Sindh Hindus
by Muslims, Gandhi received a letter from Shamlal Gidwani
holding Gandhi’s advice of non-violence as contrary to the
teachings of Lord Krishna.]
‘Cowardice is impotence worse than violence. The coward

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desires revenge but being afraid to die, he looks to others,

may be the Government of the day, to do the work of defence
for him. A coward is less than man. He does not deserve to be
a member of a society of men and women.’ [Harijan, Sept.15,
1946]
‘What I saw and heard showed me that people are apt to
forget self-respect in order to save themselves. There is no
Swadeshi and Swaraj for persons who will not sacrifice
themselves or their belongings for their honour.’ [Harijan,
Jan.5, 1947]
‘My Ahimsa forbids me from denying credit where it is due,
even though the creditor is a believer in violence. Thus,
though I did not accept Subhas Bose’s belief in violence and
his consequent action, I have not refrained from giving
unstinted praise to his patriotism, resourcefulness and
bravery.’ [Harijan, Nov.16, 1947]
It is interesting to ask why Gandhi, towards the end of his
life, came to acknowledge the need for violence against
oppressors. I think that he came to understand that the arsenal
of oppressors were becoming more powerful. When he began
non-violent agitation in South Africa, Gandhi’s adversary was
not using aerial bombs. But in the 1930s and 1940s,
air-attack became a chosen arsenal for aggressors against
their opponents and non-combatant civilians. This could have
made Gandhi to reluctantly revise his complete reliance on
non-violent agitational methods.”

Then, I commented on the quasi-pundits who have critiqued

Pirabhakaran for his use of suicide warriors using the cyanide pill.
“The quasi-pundits [including the Indian Tamil opinion
makers such as N.Ram, Cho Ramaswamy and Subramanian
Swamy as well as the scribes belonging to the spurious
University Teachers for Human Rights-Jaffna] in their
sermons, show revulsion to Pirabhakaran’s addiction to
cyanide pill. But Mahatma Gandhi has endorsed such a mode
of action for freedom fighters. Here is one of his quotes in
late 1947, written after Indian independence.
‘Man does not live but to escape death. If he does so, he is
advised not to do so. He is advised to learn to love death as
well as life, if not more so. A hard saying, harder to act up to,

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one may say. Every worthy act is difficult. Ascent is always

difficult. Descent is easy and often slippery. Life becomes
livable only to the extent that death is treated as a friend,
never as an enemy. To conquer life’s temptations, summon
death to your aid. In order to postpone death a coward
surrenders honour, wife, daughter and all. A courageous man
prefers death to the surrender of self-respect. When the time
comes, as it conceivably can, I would not leave my advice to
be inferred, but it will be given in precise language. That
today my advice might be followed only by one or none does
not detract from its value. A beginning is always made by a
few, even one.” [Harijan, Nov.30, 1947]
Exactly two months after this passage appeared in print, the
Great Man met his death peacefully at the age of 78 years and
120 days.”

It should be stressed that Gandhi was not alone in shifting his

belief on the limitations of non-violence vehicle during the 1940s.
His equally talented contemporaries like Bertrand Russell and
Einstein, who were ardent pacifists during the First World War,
also shifted their stance to support aggression against Hitler’s
Aryanism during the Second World War. Bertrand Russell had
reminisced as follows:
“Even during the First War I had maintained publicly that
some wars are justifiable. But I had allowed a larger sphere to
the method of non-resistance – or, rather non-violent
resistance – than later experience seemed to warrant. It
certainly has an important sphere; as against the British in
India, Gandhi led it to triumph. But it depends upon the
existence of certain virtues in those against whom it is
employed. When Indians lay down on railways, and
challenged the authorities to crush them under trains, the
British found such cruelty intolerable. But the Nazis had no
scruples in analogous situations. The doctrine which Tolstoy
preached with great persuasive force, that the holders of
power could be morally regenerated if met by non-resistance,
was obviously untrue in Germany after 1933. Clearly Tolstoy
was right only when the holders of power were not ruthless
beyond a point, and clearly the Nazis went beyond this
point.” [in Autobiography, 1975, Unwin Paperbacks,
London, ch.12, p.431]

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Einstein, as is typical of him, was brief to the point. In a letter to a

pacifist student, dated July 14, 1941, he had stated, “Organized
power can be opposed only by organized power. Much as I regret
this, there is no other way.” [in, O.Nathan and H.Norden eds.
Einstein on Peace, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1960, p.319].

Thus, it is nothing but ignorance and hot air on the part of the
authors of The Broken Palmyra (who have had nominal tertiary
education) and the pseudo-Gandhian commentators in India to
project a view that Pirabhakaran, without the benefit of tertiary
education, was foolhardy and irrational to reject the path of
non-violence for his objectives.

The Strategy of ‘Hit Where it Hurts’

That Pirabhakaran’s adopted strategy of ‘Hit Where it Hurts’ to
de-fang the Brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism was beginning to
show results by 1992 was revealed by the following realistic
appraisal of the situation by Mervyn de Silva. Wrote the editor of
Lanka Guardian,
“…The unwinnable war goes on, with each massacre not
underlying that self evident fact but strengthening the
conviction of ‘wannabe’ winners of the Glory Boys Club that
only more men, weapons and a Sinhalese ‘Patton’ or
‘Sharon’, is needed to storm Jaffna, fly the flag and bury
Prabhakaran.
The irony is that the ‘enemy’ Prabhakaran, is one of these
gifted and daring guerrilla commanders whose mindset is
totally, unalterably militarist. Unless he is captured, he
cannot be converted. And capture you can’t, since he has
anticipated the possibility and carries his cyanide capsule
with him. It is the self-same cyanide which also denies
‘intelligence’ to the security forces. Without ‘intelligence’
the war cannot be carried deep into enemy territory. Since all
front-line fighters are armed with the capsule, the chances of
gathering productive intelligence are slim.
No great reader, Prabhakaran knows the truisms instinctively.
The army cannot be everywhere while the guerrilla can be
anywhere. If the guerrilla is not losing, he’s winning; if the
army is not winning, it is losing. Your armchair pundit will

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say ‘recruit more, double the strength of the army, buy the
most modern weapons and equipment’. All that means
money, and the willingness of Sinhala youth to join the army.
But recruitment has become exceedingly difficult, while
desertions multiply. Where does that leave the gung-ho
militarist?
Second, our budget is controlled by the IMF and the World
Bank, the Aid Consortium. They have placed limits on arms
spending, and the limits have narrowed, with the threat of an
‘aid squeeze’ for non-compliance with such percentages on
defence, more and more serious. So one doesn’t have the
money to recruit the soldiers from the queues that aren’t
there; or far too short to recruit enough to meet your target.”
[Lanka Guardian, Nov.1, 1992; pp.3-4 & 7]

Compared to this realistic appraisal of the Sri Lankan situation in

1992, the following fallacious pontification by the authors of The
Broken Palmyra made in 1990 expose their myopic overlook.
Wrote Rajan Hoole and his colleagues, in their ‘Final Thoughts’
for this book:
“The LTTE’s political line, its obstinacy and
shortsightedness left us without any substantive achievement.
Even at present, their moves pave the way for total
subjugation to Indian domination. For example their recent
warning to boycott the civil administration, if heeded, will
remove from people the little control they have over civil
structures, thereby creating conditions for Indian authority to
encroach fully into the society. Thus the move is counter-
productive and would signal doom, as control of the civil life
of the community slips by default into Indian hands.” [p.400]

This viewpoint when read 12 years later proves unequivocally how

far these authors of The Broken Palmyra allowed their minds to
wander from reality in assessing Pirabhakaran’s strategy. But one
should admit that Mervyn de Silva, though with a liberal Sinhala
bias, could read well the mind of LTTE leader, as he opined as
follows:
“An incredibly gifted and unrepentant militarist, Velupillai
Prabhakaran, the LTTE supremo, has no great faith in
democracy but he appreciates the importance of popular
opinion. He knows that the armed struggle that he launched

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well over a decade ago is all about land and people. He is not
impressed with ‘power’ or authority in the abstract. From the
very beginning, he has grasped the geo-political – the crucial
role of the East, and externally, the vital importance of Tamil
Nadu. Both dominate his strategic thinking, except that one
factor becomes more crucial than the other in a political-
military struggle, which he does not, and cannot, control.
What the LTTE leader fears most is a closely coordinated
Delhi-Colombo policy.” [Lanka Guardian, Feb.15, 1994,
pp.1-2]

One should qualify Mervyn de Silva’s opinion that Pirabhakaran

“has no great faith in democracy”. Like Gandhi, who tagged the
British Parliament with the prostitutes, Pirabhakaran lost faith not
in democracy per se, but only in the version of prostituted
democracy as practised in Sri Lanka since Independence.

Postscript on the Origin of Sinhala Maha Sabha

In part 43 of this series, I had mentioned that six of the sources I
checked for the origin of Sinhala Maha Sabha provide four
answers: 1937 [K.M.de Silva; A.Jeyaratnam Wilson], 1935
[S.J.Tambiah], 1934 [C.Woodward; R.Nyrop et al.] and 1932
[Samarasinghe and Samarasinghe]. To this, should be added the
year 1936 as the fifth answer, as indicated by Jane Russell in her
book, Communal Politics under the Donoughmore Constitution
1931-1947, published in 1982. This is not an issue of nit-picking
on years. I wanted to know, how much Hitler’s rise to power in
1933 influenced the rise of brown-skinned Buddhist Aryanism in
colonial Ceylon.
It appears that Jane Russell may be correct, since she mentions the
month of the year as well. The relevant chapter is provided below
to identify the individuals who were active in this caucus and to
demonstrate the waffling behavior of padre Bandaranaike on
issues. To quote Jane Russell:
“The Sinhala Maha Sabha was founded in November 1936.
Its inaugural meeting consisted of a heterogeneous collection
of the more radical young Sinhalese politicians, including
S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike, R.S.S.Gunawardena and Dudley
Senanayake. A number of teaching figures from the Sinhala
literary world, including Piyadasa Sirisena and Munidasa

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Cumaratunga, and a number of lesser figures involved in local

politics, and men interested in the culture and religion of the
Sinhalese community were also present. Sirisena proposed
Sinhala Maha Sabha as the name of the society;
Bandaranaike countered this with a suggestion that the name
adopted be Swadeshiya Maha Sabha, or ‘the Greater
Congress of the Indigenous Peoples’. This latter suggestion
was opposed by Cumaratunga and others, including
Abeygunasekera, the State Council member for Nuwara Eliya
and Sirisena’s suggested name was adopted. At this point
several participants at the meeting, including Dudley
Senanayake left the newly-formed society.” [pp.141-142]
Then, in the following page Jane Russell continues to mention
how Bandaranaike came to lead the Sinhala Maha Sabha and in
two foot-notes include G.G.Ponnambalam’s – the then rising
star of Tamil politics representing the Point Pedro constituency in
the State Council - observations, which are worth reproducing.
“By the late 1930s, Sirisena and Cumaratunga had severed
their connection with it, and the Sinhala Maha Sabha had
developed into a very effective political organisation under
the leadership of Bandaranaike. In State Council it was
nominally the largest of the political groupings in 1939
[Foot-note: According to G.G.Ponnambalam, the Sinhala
Maha Sabha had thirty Members in Council. This was a gross
exaggeration on Ponnambalam’s behalf; in my estimation
there were at the most fifteen Sinhala Maha Sabha Members
in Council, of which only the handful on Bandaranaike’s
Executive Committee were effectively unified. Hansard,
1939, Col.959.], and it had a very substantial following
among the electors in the Sinhalese provinces. The Ceylon
Tamil political leaders cited the existence of the Sinhala
Maha Sabha as a dire threat to their continuance as a
differentiated community in Ceylon. [Foot-note: For
example, G.G.Ponnambalam’s speech (‘The Sinhala Maha
Sabha caucus is of very deep, sinister significance….(as
e.g.)…the Sinhala Maha Sabha meeting at Anuradhapura
when the Tamils were called usurpers and there was an
injunction issued that a Dutugemunu should arise and throw
these usurpers out.’ Hansard, 1939, 890ff.)"
In sum, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 influenced strongly the
Buddhist Aryan demagoguery in colonial Ceylon and

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Bandaranaike exploited it via his Sinhala Maha Sabha vehicle. As

revealed, originally he preferred the name of Swadeshiya Maha
Sabha in place of Sinhala Maha Sabha. He lost out at first to the
literati. Then, after the departure of literati Sirisena and
Cumaratunga who stood for the name Sinhala Maha Sabha,
Bandaranaike captured the leadership; but continued the activities
of his caucus under the name Sinhala Maha Sabha which was
more expedient politically. Hitler gave a bad name to the ‘Aryan’
cause. Thus, following Hitler’s demise in 1945, Bandaranaike
muffled his ‘Aryan’ voice for a while and joined the UNP with his
clique when it was formed in 1947. In September 1951, the
Sinhala Maha Sabha was reborn as the Sri Lanka Freedom Party,
whose leadership has remained within the pocket Fuehrer’s family
for the past 51 years. [Continued]

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