Provincial Councils: Gejendrakumar Ponnambalam & The Federal Party’s Challenge
Prof. Ratnajeevan Hoole
I woke up this morning (05 Jan. 2021) and was shocked to read that Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam will oppose Provincial Councils, and all our Tamil aspirations to take decisions about ourselves by ourselves. Every Tamil likes to be guarded by kindly police who speak to us in Tamil. We want ministers to whom we can express our needs and shortcomings with clarity – in Tamil. We want control over our lands so that they are not leased for exploitation to companies and our forest and animal reserves may be conserved; and that Sinhalese prisoners and hooligans will not be settled around us by a central government currying favors with their voters. I can go on. But these remain our unfulfilled dreams, what we hope to fight for and achieve.
Systematic discrimination and human rights violations against minority communities in Sri Lanka are not new in the country’s political and social realm. The most recent of such violations have been brought to the forefront during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, exposing the State’s skewed practices in its wake. This will be an endeavor to examine how a purely tolerant (in its classical sense) society is ultimately an unrealistic, and moreover destructive, standard to strive towards. By analyzing various viewpoints on what tolerance truly means within the context of Sri Lanka’s treatment of its religious minorities, the ideology itself comes to scrutiny. A system of checks and balances is pertinent by both state and non-state actors for the survival of a society and the ultimate protection of the religious minorities in a country where they are routinely marginalized and discriminated against, specifically in the context of the rise of religious intolerance faced by the M