Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia - EURAC

nationalism was that the nationhood goal of the Tamil ‘nation’, which has been reduced
to the status of a ‘minority’ in Sri Lanka’s post-colonial political order, could be achieved
only through a project of separate ‘statehood.’ This was quite different from the presecessionist
Tamil nationalist project of ‘nationhood.’ The latter was based on the idea
that the ‘nationhood’ goal of the Tamil minority could best be achieved within a reformed
and federalized state of Sri Lanka. While the nationhood goal envisioned a future of ‘two
nations –one state’, the statehood goal posited a vision of ‘two nations-two states.’
Indeed, the Tamil nationalist struggle for separate statehood through secession
constituted a qualitatively new dimension in the political practice of a minority to secure
group rights. But, the politics of secession, particularly of armed struggle, only further
complicated the minority rights campaign of the Sri Lankan Tamils. The protracted civil
war that began in 1983 brought forward some new dynamics that even put into doubt the
validity of secession as a credible path to group rights with democracy. The emergence of
militarized and thoroughly authoritarian rebel movements and their eventual dominance
weakened the Tamil nationalist project for democratic rights. Since the armed struggle,
understood in the language of ‘national liberation’, gave primacy to self-determination
rights over civil and political rights, the protracted ‘liberation struggle’ has turned itself
into an intensely militarised phase of state formation of the Tamil polity. One of its key
features is the exceptionally high level of internal militarization of political and social
relations that has allowed virtually no space for democratic struggles within.
The problematic consequences of according primacy to self-determination rights became
manifest when the LTTE, the main Tamil nationalist insurgent movement, began to
control territory and administer civilian populations. From the mid-1990s, the LTTE set
up institutions and structures of a ‘parallel state’ in areas under its control in the Northern
and Eastern provinces. These institutions included the police, the judiciary, social
services, education, civil administration, management of humanitarian assistance, and the
LTTE’s military institutions. While setting up these institutions, the LTTE also engaged
in war with the Sri Lankan state. The process has produced a highly militarised system of
a sub-national state in a part of Sri Lanka. Combined with the LTTE’s authoritarian
politics, this militarised sub-national state precluded internal democracy within the Tamil
polity. It did not provided space for representation, political pluralism, dissent, or civil
and political rights. This situation enabled the Sri Lankan state, run by the Sinhalese
political class, to claim that democratic and minority rights are better guaranteed and
practiced by the Sri Lankan state from which the LTTE is seeking secession. It has
reinforced the conventional liberal constitutionalist argument that self-determination
claims by minorities are not necessarily emancipatory projects.
The LTTE is not the only Tamil nationalist entity that has brought into sharp focus the
limits of the self-determination project of Tamil nationalism in terms of democratic
rights. In the course of their armed struggle, all Tamil militant groups have been using
excessive violence against the civilians, including Tamil civilians whom they claimed to
be liberating from the Sri Lankan state. The primacy accorded to the armed struggle has
to a great extent prevented any broadening of the debate on political emancipation within
the Tamil polity. As the experience of the EPRLF-run provincial council administration
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