LETTER FROM SOUTH ASIAfebruary 23, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly8The Discreet Charm of IndiaJayadeva UyangodaThe idea of Sri Lanka integrating with India seems far-fetched, but not in the view of Kumar David, a left-wing academic who seems to think that the political and economic integration that India has already achieved would be a powerful impetus to manage the Sri Lankan majoritarian as well as minoritarian politics of mutual enmity within the larger framework of a nation state. Jayadeva Uyangoda (uyangoda@gmail.com) teaches politics at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Let us Join India – Serious’! is the title of a column that appeared re-centlyin one of the Sunday English newspapers in Colombo. The writer, a left-wing academic, has offered this rather innovative option to the Sri Lankan citizens as the most important lesson to draw from their 60 years of existence as an independent nation state. “This country” (Sri Lanka), claims Kumar David, the columnist, “will never resolve its ethnic conflict within its own borders, butwe have much to gain on this and other mat-ters, and comparatively little to lose, by integration [with India]” (Sunday Island, February 10, 2008).Kumar David has made this point, which is very likely to bring him the epithet of “agent of Indian imperialism”, inacontext of political despair, which is characterised by two significant events. The first is the diamond jubilee of Sri Lanka’s independence from British colonialrule – a jubilee celebrated in the midst of a renewed civil war between the majoritarian state and the secessionist Tamil minority. An English newspaper in Colombo characterised Sri Lanka’s some-what surreal celebration of independence in a telling phrase, “terminally ill at sixty”. The second event that provided the context for David to exercise his power ofpolitical imagination in such a creative-lycavalierfashion is the utterly disap-pointing set of proposals produced by the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) to resolve what the government in Sri Lanka sees as the “separatist-terrorist problem”.These proposals, for which the Indian government in particular waited with anxiety and anguish, only reiterated the view held by the extreme Sinhalese nationalist forces. In the world view of these groups, who also define the agenda of the present Sri Lankan government, no political solution was really necessary toaddress a “terrorist” threat to the unity, sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the Sri Lankan state that belongs to the Sinhalese.Political ImaginationHow then can integration with India save Sri Lanka? Kumar David seems to think that the political and economic integration that India has already achieved would be a powerful impetus to manage the majoritarian as well as minoritarian politics of mutual enmity within a larger framework of a nation state. It is a kind of integration that is believed to have accommodated diversity, pluralism and power-sharing. As many Indians would readily agree, thisis not a misplaced reading of the process and outcomes of India’s experience of nation state formation. At least in its southern part, the Indian state has ad-dressed the regional separatist threats by means of economic and political integration. As indeed the left-wing analysts in Sri Lanka would argue, the Tamils in Tamil Nadu would not separate from the Indian union, because separatism in the state does not have a social base or ideological hegemony as such. Neither will it serve any useful purpose. In this reading, for the Tamils in southern India separation is not the only game in town.The idea of Sri Lanka linking up with India has an interesting genealogy. In the early 1940s, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) held the view that what was then Ceylon should join a larger socialist federation of India. In fact, some LSSP leaders who escaped from the British jail in Sri Lanka and lived underground in Bombay formed the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India to promote such a socialist federation encompassing British India, Burma and Ceylon. In weaker moments of intellectual alertness in the past, I myself have advocated the idea that a socialist and democratic federation of southAsia, encompassing even 50 Indian states and many other south Asian micro-states, would be less inhumane and less undemocratic than the existing state in south Asia. (When I mentioned in passing this idea at a conference in New Delhi a few years ago, I got a thundering lecture over lunch by a fellow Indian academic that I was advocating a dangerous theory ‘Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (
