Kumar David, supplement to short text in post-ltte.html.
Kumar David was a
brilliant Colombo Marxist
from very young days, and a card carrying member of the LSSP., and activist even as an
engineering student in the "E-fac" at Thurstan Road of the 1960s. (He was an associate of
B. Wijedoru, S. Ganeshan and others). He held high positions in the SLFP-LSSP government
bureaucracies where Leftists gave up their "parity for two language",
policy and began supporting the Sinhala-majority politics.
Vickramabahu Karunarathne and other more "principled" Marxists
(who had a stronger disconnect with the Lankan ethos) left the LSSP at this point.
The LSSP's belated pro-Majority politics was dire survival tactics taken by old leaders (like N. M.
Perera) who finally realized that their 4th-internationalist politics would lead them
to annihilation (this has largely happened now).
Dr. David
analysed the JVP uprising as a dangerous threat to the "true" left movement. But his
attitude to the LTTE has been different. His political, journalistic and polemicist
writings seemed to become increasingly Tamil-Nationalist and pro-LTTE by default, possibly driven by his liberal concerns.
Kumar David, like several other Marxists, began to
interpret the LTTE uprising as a "revolutionary process" that has to be supported even if
one had reservations against the LTTE. Highly reactionary race-based 'self-determination"
is advocated by these Marxists who nominally only recognize class-based divisions.
They envisage a divided Sri Lanka
consisting of a (Sinhala) Socialist republic and a (Tamil) Eelam which they
nevertheless admit may not
be socialist. They do not appreciate that the best
chance for social equality in a caste-ridden, Vellala-dominated Hindu society is
not division into a Tamil Eelam and a sinhala polity, but a
multi-cultural socialist state without borders, allowing the free inter-mixing of ideas.
David the Eelamist wrote approvingly of the technical ingenuity of
the LTTE air-wing when it attacked Colombo, or when it carried out a suicide raid, but has
been generally insensitive to the barbaric aspects of such raids and attacks. He seemed
to not notice the abductions and assassinations of the LTTE in the 2001 and 2004
elections, as well as the subjugation of the TNA (read our entry on the TNA) by the
Tigers. Marxist writers mesmerized by "ends" care little about the "means" used
to achieve the "ends".
In the post-LTTE period (but not prior to it, as far as we know)
David has written eloquently in favour of human rights of the IDPs,
and demanded the immediate release of the IDPs. This concern about the acceptability of the
"means" comes up only
when tide turns against Kumar David's favourites.
(See the debate in Groundviews
among Michael Roberts, Kumar David and Lional Bopage etc.). Meanwhile, his reaction to the
forced ethnic cleansing of Jaffna by ejecting the Muslims and the Sinhalese, and the
forced evacuation of Tamils to the Vanni was mostly to
remark on the efficiency of the LTTE logistics (i.e., terror).
Of course, this is not to say that Kumar David, a genuine liberal, approved
of such LTTE actions. Those IDPs still remain in the Puttalama
area, but Dr. David's pleas for releasing the Vanni-LTTEs completely forgot the Muslim
and Sinhala IDPs of Jaffna. David wrote in the summer of 2009 that the Rajapaksa
govt. is running prison gulags of the IDPS, and stated that
support must be extended to political parties clamouring to re-settle the IDPS.
When the government actually succeeded in settling most of the IDPS within 6-8 months,
Kumar David's politics shifted to a new front for attacking the government.
Basically, David's de facto political philosophy is NOT dominantly socialist,
but dominantly Anti-Rajapaksa- and de facto Eelamist.
This is partly because Kumar David, Vikramabahu K,
Parkiyasothy Sarawanamuttu and others implicitly accept the "exclusive Tamil homeland"
concept which is the basis for "ejecting the invaders" from the regions claimed for
Eelam, by the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kadchi
declarations in 1949, 1952 and by the TULF at Vaddukkodai (Batakotte), 1976.
Dr. Kumar David has claimed that the people of the Vanni actually willingly
followed the LTTE into the Mullativu (Mooladoova) jungles, and that it was not a coerced
march of a whole population (see the link to one of his articles given below,
where he also endorses Bryan Seneviratne's claim of the "congenital meekness of the Tamil psyche").
Dr. David also engages in seemingly racist1 remarks like "the Tamil is easier to domesticate and discipline", as if he were talking of a specific breed of Dog or wild animal.
Although the Kumar-David types located in Colombo would claim that low-caste Tamils from the estates make "good, loyal domestic servants", they simply forget that the hubris and ego
of the upper-caste Tamils played a major role in the political
problems of Sri Lanka. Turbaned Tamils (The Ramanathan Family) ruled over the Sinhalese and
low-caste Tamils in the first three decades of the 20th century, giving a "pan-Tamil
government".
They protested vehemently against any modification of it; even via Universal franchise.
And yet they
went berserk when Senanayake managed to have a "pan-sinhala" government just for a few years,
in the empty aftermath of the "Jaffna boycott" of the state council.
Kumar David also often alludes to the "Pan-Sinhala" government, while
forgetting the preceding Pan-Tamil hegemony that lasted many decades.
Much of the Tamil nationalist battle, created by the very opposite of the characteristic
proposed by Bryan S, can be seen played out in the
Hansard of the 1930s. There Ponnambalam Ramanathan wanted to introduce
the haughty caste system into the constitution, while G. G. Ponnambalam and Natesan stated that they were proud Dravidians (and not Ceylonese). GGP unleashed the
first Sinhala-Tamil riot in 1939 by his superior bragging
about Sinhalese being a "mongrel race", while the Tamils were
pure-laine Dravidians. This was soon after one of G. G.'s visits to Nazi Germany.
(See articles by Oxford Historian Jane Russell, and by Sebastian Rasalingam).
Rasalingam - Some basic beliefs of Tamil Nationalism ....
Michael Roberts - Tamil
Nationalism
and
Kumar David's Mawbima article, "...Tamil nationalism", Oct. 2008
The above three articles on aspects of "Tamil nationalism" are worthy of comparison. Rasalingam's article is that of a passionate Tamil dissident accusing Chelvanayagam and others of misleading the Tamils. Robert's article is scholarly and thorough. Kumar David's article is short, realtively superficial,
and meant for the Green-Cabin2 conversationalists. Kumar D writes such articles every couple of weeks,
although he certainly has the capacity to take some time over it and write more serious articles.
Colombo's faux-Marxist fellow-travellers of Tamil nationalism
has become a process of selecting information to fit in with an ideology
(even quoting Rosa Luxemburg or Gramassi to boot!).
Unlike Philip Gonnawardena, the old guard of leftists like
N.M.Perera, Colvin, and others
misjudged the evolution of the political process, remained disconnected
from the Sinhala and Tamil masses, and got side-lined from the voter base,
and even the trade-union base.
Dr. David's political prognosis of Oct. 2008 is an indication of the nature of this
political misunderstanding of the Sri Lankan situation.
Thus he says that "I envisage a much bigger role for Southern Tamils in alliance with radical Sinhalese". These radical Sinhalese are the like-minded leftists of Dr.Kumar David and others.
The votes garnered by Vickramabahu K. and others at the last Presidential election are a measure of the disconnect between these intellectual leftists and the masses, be they Tamil or Sinhala.
At our request,
Dr. Kumar David has brought our attention to several of his articles which presumably reflect his own thinking about the LTTE etc., than that given in our perspective on him:
[we did ask for his articles of the pre-2006 era to illustrate his time-dependent, often
contradictory political views and claims. But these seemed to be casualties of technological advances.]
Dr. David became
a strong supporter of ex-General Fonseka (a jingoistic right-wing-backed Pinochet like figure:
see Frederica Jansz on Fonseka)
who became a puppet of the UNP-JVP-TNA front, during the 2010 Presidential
election. David, like most disconnected commentators,
believed that Fonseka would win (see, e.g., The hiatus in Tamil politics where David is urging Sivajilingam to support Fonseka).
After the defeat of Fonseka, Dr. David has been
claiming that the "left", spearheaded by Fonseka and the JVP will rise again as a political
force, while also strongly supporting the TNA.
Dr. David's engineering research (published as A. K. David in multi-author papers) is
far more solid
than his political polemics. He is a fellow of the IEEE. His
career as a university teacher in Sri Lanka and Hong-Kong has resulted in
the training of many undergraduate and post-graduate students.
Although we have devoted an extensive write up to
Dr. David, his
impact as a political journalist
is probably very small in the country as a whole (in spite of his prolific output of short articles).
It is directed mainly to the English speaking intelligentia and to ex-Marxist
circles where it provokes discussion;
Notes.
1. Race, racist etc., are used in the technical sense of recognition of the existence of "racial characteristics". Modern science does not recognize race as a valid classificator. Inter-racial comparisons can be closer than intra-racial comparisons, and hence the classification based on race becomes meaningless.
That is,
if A and B are two "racial" populations, given some racial characteristic C(A) typical of the race A, if members α and β of the populations A, and B, respectively are chosen at random, the deviation of α from the expected value of C(A) could be larger than that for β of a different race.
Thus comparison of the "meekness" characteristic attributed to Tamils by Kumar David, and by Bryan S., would fail. If the characteristic is knowledge of Tamil, here again, a leading Tamil nationalist like the late Wakeley Paul may be found to be illiterate in Tamil, while a strong Sinhala nationalist like H. L. D. Mahindapala may be very literate in Tamil. The analysis can be generalized to many characteristics by using the multi-dimensional distance between points in a phase-space of alleged racial characteristics. It can be shown using explicit empirical data, that using more elaborate measure theories of statistical probabilities, phase-space metrics, Bayesian and other sampling methods etc., still fail to establish a valid justification for "race" in human populations.
2. "Green cabin", Colpetty (Kollupitiya) is a coffee and cakes drop-in place and restaurant which used to be frequented by young affluent leftist undergraduates for many decades. "Lion house" was also well known in the 1960s-1970s.