Learning Politics From Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka

by Mark P. Whitaker

Overview

Remarkable account of the life and impact of the activist, journalist and Tamil freedom-fighter Sivaram Dharmeratnam

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745323534
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	02/20/2007
Series:	Anthropology, Culture and Society
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Mark Whitaker is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of South Carolina, Aiken. He received his PhD in 1986 from Princeton. He has written widely on Sri Lanka, including an ethnography of a Hindu temple entitled Amiable Incoherence , published by a Dutch university press in 1999.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: WHY AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY OF SIVARAM DHARMERATNAM?

On the field of truth, on the battle-field of life What came to pass, Sanjaya, when my sons and their Warriors faced those of my brother Pandu? (Bhagavad Gita 1962: 43)

A Lotus blossoms in the mud! (A frequent saying of Mahesvari, Sivaram's mother)

You made me realize the fecundity of Being, which you have completely misunderstood! (Sivaram Dharmeratnam, personal communication about an earlier draft of this book)

This is how it was supposed to happen. When the book came out, I would stick it in my bags and travel to Sri Lanka. Once there, I would go to his house in Mt Lavinia, near Colombo, and invent a reason why we had to go to Batticaloa, his beloved hometown. He would complain at first but ultimately comply; for, if pressed hard enough, he could not refuse a maccaang. So we would travel east by van, most likely at night, as we had done so many times before, first north, to Habarana, then east through Polonnaruwa, one of Sri Lanka's ancient cities. Somewhere east of Welikanda some subtle line would be crossed, and the ubiquitous sand, the alluvial flatness, and the many army checkpoints would tell us we were in the east. Then it would be a matter of crossing the much battered, bullet-riddled Valaichennai bridge, passing the ruins of Muslim Eruvar, and driving south along the lagoon road into Batticaloa, most likely as dawn was breaking. But even after arriving at his cousin's house, I still would not tell him about the book, not yet. Sivaram would hurry off somewhere – for he had a thousand reportorial things to do in Batticaloa. That night, however, after we had traveled south of Batticaloa to the house he was always dreaming of building, it would be as he once imagined it in an email. 'Batti is cool,' he wrote. So:

I am planning to buy a small plot of land by the lagoon's estuary in Koddaikallar – the village in which we stayed the night over when I took you south to Thirukovil etc. Plan is to build a terrace into the lagoon where we can relax over a drink at dusk, with the sound of the sea waves ... coming over the rippled waters of the lagoon. Small cottage – with office, bedroom and living area with French windows. I have had a full life. What more should I look forward to?

There, several drinks in, I would pull out this book and he would laugh. He would say, dismissively, 'Mark, you bugger, I knew about this weeks ago,' and then we would drink to it, and argue about it, and it would have been great.

He never got to build the house.

Sivaram Dharmeratnam was a man of many names. Once 'Kunchie' to his family, and 'Siva' to his class or 'batch-mates' at the University of Peradeniya, he was perhaps best known to the English- and Tamil-reading Sri Lankan public as the mysterious 'Taraki,' a famous and, to some, infamous military and political columnist for, successively, The Island, the Sunday Times, and, finally, the Daily Mirror – all major Sri Lankan national dailies. To the cognoscenti among Sri Lanka's intellectual elite, however, Sivaram was also recognized by his own name, Sivaram Dharmeratnam, as the editor of the well-known and controversial news agency and website, TamilNet.com, arguably the most powerful and influential news source on Sri Lankan Tamil affairs in the world; a voice so well heeded, indeed, that it was frequently cited, while Sivaram was alive, even by those who detested it out of an inaccurate belief that it was simply a front publication for the the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE or, simply, the 'Tigers'), Sri Lanka's ruthless and single-minded Tamil, separatist army. And, let there be no mistake, plenty of people of various political sorts did detest both TamilNet.com and, more particularly, its editor. In the month of January 2004 alone, for example, Sivaram (as Taraki) was denounced in the Sri Lankan government-controlled press as an LTTE agent, and by the LTTE's chief theoretician, Anton Balasingham, as, at once, a CIA and an Indian secret agent!

But more of this anon.

For there were other names as well: 'SR,' which was Sivaram's underground, PLOTE name during the first of the so-called Eelam wars, in which he was an active combatant – PLOTE being the People's Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam, one of the many armed Tamil separatist groups fighting in Sri Lanka in the 1980s to create a separate Tamil state, an Eelam; 'D. Sivaram,' which was the name Sivaram used since he was 20 to write for Tamil-language journals and the Tamil press ('D. Sivaram,' for example, wrote a weekly column for Viirakeesari, the Tamil national daily with the largest circulation, from 2003 to 2005); 'Ponambalam,' 'Gnanasothy,' and 'Joseph,' all names Sivaram adopted for nefarious business reasons during one of Sri Lanka's vague periods of peace. Beyond these incarnations, Sivaram had also been 'Mr Dharmeratnam the security consultant' to various governments interested in his views about terrorism and counter-terrorism. But to me, for over 20 years, Sivaram was either, simply, Sivaram, which is what I shall call him in this book or maccaang – cousin or brother-in-law, those terms being interchangeable in Tamil – which is what Tamil male friends tend to call each other when they are of a similar age and status. We were maccaang to each other mostly when we had been drinking together, or were in danger. 'I have many names, Mark,' he said to me one night in 1996, waving a glass of scotch toward a rumpled early draft of this book that he had just got done savaging, 'and they are all equally my essence. Be sure you make note of that in this book you are writing about me. It was you, after all, who made me realize in 1982 that it was imperative not to be caught, or, as Wittgenstein says, "bewitched" by the language games of identity, by bringing Narayan's novel, The Guide, to my attention when we first met.'

'I did?'

'Yes you did. Of course, you don't remember it. You don't remember anything.'

'I remember whose bottle of scotch you are drinking!'

And at this he laughed, as always.

Sivaram's many names bespeak an interesting life. A life lived dangerously, yet deliberately, during a period of Sri Lankan history (from1983 to the near present) that has often been painful and chaotic beyond all description. For Sri Lanka's 18-year-long inter-ethnic civil war has been a study in national disintegration. During this war, Sri Lanka's predominantly Sinhalese, largely Buddhist majority has fought its largest minority, the generally Hindu Tamils – and to a lesser extent has fought also its own periodically revolutionary Sinhala youth – to a bloody standstill. The conflict has shattered Sri Lanka's economy, distorted its democracy and legal system, modified its sovereignty, and filled (if we count all its various wars) well over 100,000 official and (perhaps as many) unofficial graves. Even now, as I write, in 2004, Sri Lanka teeters, however unwillingly, on the brink of renewed conflict. So the traces of that awful past left in the trail of identities Sivaram has littered about his own personal history suggest, perhaps, reason enough why his life might be one worth chronicling by a biographer, simply as an exercise in history or ethnography. Indeed, perhaps everyone who managed to survive this terrible period of Sri Lankan history deserves to have their story told. But this biography is less intended as an addendum to the already vast social documentation of Sri Lanka's national disaster – though (inevitably) it is part of that as well – than as an intellectual history per se; as, in other words, the chronicle of a mind achieving its particular thoughts in the midst of a ruthless period in history. But why must this be an intellectual biography? And why should such a biography be written by me: an American, and, for that matter, by an anthropologist?

Of these three questions, the initial one – why this must be an intellectual history rather than a straightforward biography or 'life history' – will be perhaps easiest to answer for a Sri Lankan audience. Since those from outside Sri Lanka or those without any specialized interest in its affairs will require a bit more explanation, however, I hope Sri Lankans will forgive me for appearing, in what follows, sometimes to rehearse the obvious. There have been, as is well-known there, many Sri Lankan public intellectuals of various political stripes at work during Sri Lanka's long ethnic crisis who need and deserve to have their intellectual histories told. Indeed, one of the most unexamined facts of the Sri Lankan conflict has been the complicated role played in it by a rich allotment of intellectuals, for good and ill; and, in this respect, Sivaram Dharmeratnam's biography must be seen as an attempt to take on one small part of that much larger issue. Among Sri Lankan Tamils, for example, there is the central position occupied by the LTTE's 'chief theoretician' (and exSouth Bank University DPhil student; see Balasingham 2003: 30), Anton Balasingham; and, at the opposite extreme for Tamils, there is the tragic Neelan Thiruchelvam, the constitutional theorist and former leader of the moderate, Tamil United Liberation Front (or TULF), who was murdered by the LTTE in 1998. Also relevant here are the various Jathika Chinthanaya intellectuals (like Gunadasa Amarasekera) who, according to Chandraprema (1991: 112-17), provided the intellectual justification for the JVP's (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna or People's Liberation Front) revolutionary impulse in the late 1980s. But even leaving aside intellectuals so indelibly party-linked (the United National Party's G.L. Peiris and A. Jeyaratnam Wilson are two other examples), a host of other names present themselves for future explication: the senior, expatriate professors Gananath Obeyesekere, Stanley Tambiah, and Michael Roberts, for example, who have done so much to probe the tender historical roots and sensitive cultural politics of the crisis; the prescient (now dead) Marxist sociologist, Newton Gunasinghe, whose various analyses presaged so accurately Sri Lanka's future; the journalist, poet, and expatriate Professor Cheran, whose vigorous observations about the North American Tamil diaspora have revealed the inner workings of a new kind of refugee community in Toronto; the various, long-suffering members of the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) who, even now (those that remain alive) must hide from the LTTE; such senior political and military commentators (respectively) as Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda and Iqbal Athas, who have long been astute analysts of Sri Lankan affairs; and the many intellectuals, such as the United Nations (UN) Human Rights commissioner and anthropologist Radhika Coomaraswamy and the eminent historian K.M. De Silva, who are associated with the International Centers for Ethnic Studies in Colombo and Kandy; and so forth, and so on ... and on. Any list of names that truly did justice to all of Sri Lanka's important public intellectuals – or, even better, that included also Sri Lanka's many (as we shall see) not so public, but also very important, local intellectuals – would be longer than this book; for it is one of the peculiarities of Sri Lanka that a nation so lacking in effective political solutions has been, nevertheless, so replete with subtle, heartfelt, and often accurate analyses of its own failures. It is, I imagine, courting no real refutation to assert that the journalist, editor, and now nationalist martyr, Sivaram Dharmeratnam, belongs at least somewhere on this long, long list.

But, more than this, Sivaram Dharmeratnam, as Taraki, arrived on the public scene in such a form, stemmed from so unusual a background (for what other nationally recognized journalistic voice hailed from Sri Lanka's deeply rural east, and actually fought in the war?), came at so confusing a time, and had almost immediately such a dramatic effect on public knowledge that, I think, his story stands out among the others as truly unique. Sivaram, it must be remembered, first came to prominence as Taraki in 1989. This was a particularly dark and complex period in Sri Lanka's recent history: for the Indian Peace Keeping Force (the IPKF), brought into Sri Lanka's north and east with so much hope under the 1987 Indo-Lankan accord, was preparing, warily, to pull itself out after having been fought to a bloody standstill by the LTTE. The Sri Lankan United National Party (UNP) government of R. Premadasa, meanwhile, was still locked in savage conflict in the south with a newly radicalized, nationalist, ruthless, and resurgent JVP, while also secretly funneling weapons north to their former enemies (according to Balasingham, 2003: 244), the LTTE, to help complete the Indian army's humiliation. So the fog of not one but two wars (linked in sometimes inscrutable ways) was considerable, and it was into this murk that Sivaram's column threw so valuable a light. For what was so distinctive about the Taraki columns was, first of all, their cool clarity of purpose. Focusing on the north and east, and generally eschewing all rhetoric except for a rather understated irony, Taraki concentrated on analysing the military and political strategies of the various Indian, Tamil, Sinhalese, and international participants in the conflict. His analyses, which combined uncannily accurate 'inside' knowledge of the intentions of all the participants with pellucid, often ethnographic, descriptions of their strategic discourses, tactical aims, and socio-political preconditions, not only made sense of what otherwise often appeared mysterious, irrational, and scary geopolitical and military moves, but, eventually, seemed even to anticipate them. For example, Taraki was one of the first columnists to speculate about a convergence of interest in the late 1980s between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE with regard to India, as well as one of the first to anticipate that their (publicly) unspoken cooperation would also soon break down (Taraki 1991: 3-4, 39-40). Moreover, as military analysis per se, the columns showed a shrewd awareness of modern military theorizing about 'counter-terrorism' and 'low-intensity warfare' at the highest level – so much so that, as we shall see, they attracted the attention of military leaders and strategists in South Asia and, eventually, the world at large. Perhaps the Taraki column's real value, though, to people at large, was as a public tutorial on the hitherto private, specialist, and hidden culture of geo-military strategy: the very cultural logic that now dominated every endangered Sri Lankan's fear-laden life. And although the exact popularity of Sivaram's Taraki columns in the early 1990s is hard to gage accurately, Gamini Weerakon, the former editor of the The Island and Sivaram's first editor, told me that he reckoned Sivaram, at the time, the most-read of all his columnists writing in English; and Neelan Thiruchelvam (though he was less happy about this) thought Taraki's initial readership almost as large and enthusiastic when I interviewed him about Sivaram in 1997, shortly before his death. But Taraki's fame was not limited to the (actually quite small) English-reading public of Sri Lanka. For the large expatriate Tamil community, hungry for news and understanding, quickly made Taraki a household name throughout the extensive, perhaps 700,000-strong Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora (Fugelrud 1999). They did so at first by passing his articles around by hand; but soon, as though anticipating Sivaram's next move, they began posting them on websites and chat-rooms throughout the rapidly expanding Sri Lankan Tamil corner of the World Wide Web. It therefore became a relatively common concern, not only for people in Sri Lanka but also for Sri Lankan Tamils in the diaspora, to find out something more about the mind that wrote the Taraki columns. Who, after all, was this Taraki?

But there was more to come. In 1996 Sivaram also became involved in revitalizing a moribund Tamil website called TamilNet.com. His achievements there were remarkable for a number of reasons. First, until his involvement, TamilNet.com had been a relatively conventional, and largely ignored, Sri Lankan Tamil expatriate website concentrating on cliched Tamil nationalist rhetoric, translations of LTTE patriotic announcements, and on clipping relevant news stories from the Sri Lankan and international media. Under Sivaram's guidance, and in accordance with his theories, however, TamilNet. com was quickly transformed into a working news agency, with its own independent reporters and editors, its own physical plant (in the cyber-real form of a web page brilliantly designed by an ingenious Norwegian-Tamil computer scientist named K. Jeyachandran), and its own editorial style: a tone, basically, as dry and authoritarian as that of Reuters or the Associated Press, and with an even more passionate emphasis on the need for all reporting to be backed up by tape-recordings, double sourcing, and documents in hand. The real key to TamilNet.com's success here, though, was not only that it collected and edited its own news in a professional manner, but that it collected this news from indigenous reporters living in the most rural parts of Tamil Sri Lanka, rather than from (as was the case with the other news services) reporters in the twin 'capitals' of the crisis, Colombo and Jaffna. Moreover, TamilNet.com did all its work incredibly cheaply: for only US $2000 a month. For all these reasons, and this is the second quite remarkable thing about it, TamilNet.com soon became a kind of world template, for it was one of the first (if not actually the first) strictly web-based, indigenously created, news agencies in the world; and as such its design has since been widely copied. (Indeed, on 18 February 2004 the Sri Lankan government briefly launched its own imitation: www.newswire.IK – see Jaimon 2004). Moreover, third, deeply controversial though TamilNet.com remains for Sri Lankans, there can be little doubt that it has had, and continues to have, a dramatic effect on how news about Sri Lankan Tamil affairs is reported both in Sri Lanka and abroad. Domestically, for example, all the independent Sri Lankan dailies regularly run TamilNet.com reports in their papers – even if only, sometimes, to try to dispute them in their editorial pages. Internationally, the Associated Press, Reuters, and the BBC, who between them control most of the flow of news about Sri Lanka to the rest of the world, often cite or must otherwise reflect TamilNet.com reports. And as if all this is not enough, there is one last, more subjective aspect of TamilNet.com worthy of note: again, as with the Taraki columns, there is sometimes a rather uncanny element of anticipation to TamilNet.com's reports, as if they are not just models of but also for the events they, with at least formal neutrality, report; or, to put it another way, as if there is an intention behind TamilNet.com's reporting to both convey and, somehow, participate in history. For, as in the Taraki columns, there is often a clearly discernible strategy operating behind TamilNet.com.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Learning Politics from Sivaram"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Mark P. Whitaker.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration, Translation, Names and Neutrality

Three Prologues

1. Introduction: Why an Intellectual biography of Sivaram Dharmeratnam?

2. Learning Politics from Sivaram

3. The Family Elephant

4. Ananthan and the Readers Circle

5. From SR to Taraki - a 'serious unserious' journey

6. From Taraki to TamilNet: Sivaram as journalist, military analyst and Internet pioneer

7. States, Nations and Nationalism

8. Return to Batticaloa

Bibliography

Index