 I'm here with the South Asia program at the endowment. And we're very pleased today to host a good friend, Samant Subramaniam, here for a talk about the roots of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Samant is involved in many different enterprises. He's the India correspondent for the national newspaper out of the Gulf. You probably have seen a lot of his writing in various publications like The New York Times, The New Yorker, Guardian, Granta. He's currently in the United States as a visiting fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, where he's going to be through the end of the month. He's going to be drawing today on reporting he's done over the course of the last several years on and in Sri Lanka, drawing on material that he's written about in this fabulous book, This Divided Island, which I highly recommend to all of you to get after this talk if you haven't read it. The book was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and won the Crossward Book Award for Nonfiction. I'm going to embarrass someone for a little bit by telling you what some very smart, wise people have said about his book, William Dowrymple, who was kind of the literary giant of South Asia, called this book a remarkable book by one of India's most talented young writers of nonfiction. He also refers to Samant as witty and urbane, which we might be able to dispute, but we'll see. Mani Shankarayar, who was until recently a member of parliament from the Congress Party, said in his review, there's only one way, one word to describe this book. It's a masterpiece. A book of the year, even possibly the book of the decade. The writing is exquisite, simile piling upon app simile metaphor upon telling metaphor. And finally, the newspaper Mint, the business paper, said, like its predecessor, which is Samant's first book, this is narrative journalism at its most literary, diligently researched, reportage presented with poetry and flair. Subrahmanyam has an eye for an image, an ear for an anecdote, and an affection for the absurd. So that's setting the bar pretty high, Samant, for your talk this afternoon. So as I mentioned, he's going to be talking about the roots of the Sri Lankan War, taking us back well before what I think is commonly regarded as the start of the war in what he's calling an elongated history. So he's going to talk for about 20 or so minutes and then we'll have a conversation and then open it up to all of you and then we'll try to end around a quarter to five. So please join me in welcoming Samant Subrahmanyam. Okay. Thank you. An affection for the absurd. So this talk is going to be all absurd. My idea here was to basically give you a slightly complex answer to a question that I am often asked, which is how and when did the Sri Lankan War start? And my, you know, in sort of casual conversation, it's not usually possible to give this kind of answer. But since I have the stage for 20 minutes, I thought I would present an elongated history. And why an elongated history? Because I feel that you can sort of start at what is commonly regarded as the beginning of the war, which we'll get to in a bit. But then if you kind of keep telescoping backwards, if you keep sort of going back a little bit in history, you'll find that the causes are really sort of more complex than is usually portrayed in literature or even in the media. And so this is essentially sort of a potted history of Sri Lanka itself about the sort of religious and political trends that shaped the country and that then led to the war. And then I think maybe Mila and you and I can later have a little bit of a chat about the future, such as it may be. A little sort of map to get us started. You can see some of the main cities on the map on the left, Colombo on the sort of eastern, on the western coast. That's the capital, Jaffna is at the very top. That's the peninsula that kind of extends and reaches towards India in a way. Batikolo, Trinkomali on the eastern coast. The map on the right is really more crucial for our purposes. This is a map that has been divided, that has divided the country by language. So you see that the green is composed of people who speak Tamil. These are, it's the same Tamil that is spoken in India and Southern India where I'm from. And the yellow, which is the majority of the country, these are people who speak Sinhalese. And the war, which is commonly believed to have started in 1983, that ended in 2009, was basically a battle between these two linguistic sort of groups. At some point the Tamils decided that, or a group of Tamils decided that they wanted an independent country of their own, composed of the northern and eastern areas that you see over there on the map. And they started, they started a guerrilla sort of war against the Sri Lankan state to secede from the state, to declare themselves independent. And that was essentially the war. The war ended in 2009 in May. Roughly 100,000 people at least are believed to have perished over the course of that time. More egregiously in a way, the UN estimates that 40,000 civilians, Tamil civilians were killed in the final weeks of the war. And this was because the Sri Lankan army at some point decided that in their quest to wipe out the militants, the guerrillas, they would just shell entire populations into submission. This is still contested by a certain section of the Sri Lankan establishment. The number though is 40,000 at least is what we work with when we talk about this in the international discourse today. A few figures also that I think we can keep in mind. In 2012, which is not so long ago, the population of Sri Lanka was 20 million. And out of this, 75%, so Sri Lanka's census board sort of breaks this down by ethnicity. The 75% of this 20 million people speak Sinhalese, 15% speak Tamil. The third category in the ethnicity breakup is Muslim. And they come in at around 10%. Now right away you see one complication, right? Because we think of ethnicity as something that doesn't have anything necessarily to do with language. But now you have this confused sort of category where there's ethnicity includes people who speak Sinhalese, people who speak Tamil, and people who are Muslim, but who actually speak Tamil. But there is separate category all by themselves. So there's a little confusion right here and this sort of bleeds into larger confusions about the way the war is perceived. Another sort of quick statistic that I can tell you, 70% of the people who live in Sri Lanka are Buddhist. So there was a strong Buddhist nationalism that went hand in hand with the Sinhalese nationalism. This may be important to keep in mind as we move through the next few slides. So I'm also, what I'm gonna do is as I talk you through these things, I'm gonna read out just short sort of snippets from my book itself just to kind of illustrate a point or an anecdote that I may have made in the book. July 1983 is when the war is commonly, this is the starting date of the war. If you ask anybody when the war started, July 1983, the Black July riots of 1983. What happened on the 23rd of July is the Tigers, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, but I call them the Tigers. This is the Tamil guerrilla group. They ambushed a convoy of soldiers, killing 13 of them up in the North near Jaffna. And a little snippet that I will read out from the book. For nearly a week thereafter, in what came to be known as the Black July riots, Sinhalese mobs visited retribution upon Tamils across the South of the country, killing more than 3,000 men, women and children unhindered and sometimes even abetted by the police. Cars were stopped on the road and if they were found to contain Tamils, burned without hesitation. Property was looted. Even before the practice grew notorious in South Africa's race riots, Tamils were pulled out of their homes and necklace that torso inserted into a rubber tire which was then set on fire. At their best behavior, soldiers and policemen watched the violence helplessly at their worst they conspired in it. Somewhere in a book, I'd seen a photograph that haunted me and when I arrived in Sri Lanka, I dug around online and discovered it again. It dates from July 1983. It's this picture in fact. And it shows a reed thin Tamil man stripped naked by a mob, sitting on a stone plinth at a bus stop in a Colombo suburb. His head held in his hands and his body whip-caught tight with despair. It is late at night. His tormentors stand around him smiling. The broadest grin belongs to a youth in spectacles, a white shirt, slacks and rubber slippers who is mugging for the camera as he dances a little two step in front of his victim. Minus the naked man, the photo might just be a group of friends fooling around shooting the breeze waiting for a bus. Every time I looked at it, I felt a hollow shock in the pit of my stomach at the casual cheer with which this brutality is being enacted. In my mind, at least the violence began much earlier. I did the start of open hostilities to July 1975, so exactly eight years earlier. This was when Velu Pillai Prabhakaran, who's the gentleman you see on the left of the screen, holding a gun, he was the young Tyro, the young Tamil Tyro who then started the LTTE, the Tigers. This was when Prabhakaran, the then leader of the newly founded Tigers, carried out his first major assassination. The target was Alfred Duryapa. You see him on the right here. The mayor of Jaffna, who was seen by Prabhakaran as a traitor to the Tamil cause. Duryapa was a part of the Sri Lankan state establishment. Only even by that sort of act of complicity as Prabhakaran saw it, he was a traitor. He was a traitor to the Tamil cause, to the Tamil people. That morning, in July 1975, as he did every Sunday, Alfred Duryapa, the mayor of Jaffna, drove with two friends to the Vardaraja Perumal temple in his white peugeot. At the temple where Duryapa got out of his car, four young men, boys really, stood waiting. I like to believe the account in which they greeted him in chorus with a Vanakamaya, good morning sir, a final moment of civility before the shooting began. One of Duryapa's companions later remembered a short youth shivering as he aimed his pistol at the mayor. This was Velopilai Prabhakaran in his Gavrilo Princip moment. His assassination of a representative of a state he did not wish to belong to. His inauguration of a war. Unlike Princip, Prabhakaran remained the only protagonist of his conflict. He created the Tigers in 1976 and the curtain on the civil war fell with his death on May 18th, 2009, cornered and shot up by the army in a lagoon in northeastern Sri Lanka. Let's go a little further back. We could stop in 1972 when there was a constitution that basically enjoined the Sri Lankan state to recognize Buddhism as the official religion of the country and to make it incumbent upon the state to protect Buddhism, as opposed to any of the other religions that were in Sri Lanka, that are in Sri Lanka. We could go back to 1971 when there was a law passed that instituted quotas for a university admission so that Tamils suddenly got a far smaller number of seats available to them in universities across the island. We could go back to ethnic riots in 1958 or 1976, which were not quite as bloody as the 1983 riots, but were still markers of violence in the country's history. But let's go to 1956, when the government passed what is called the Sinhala Only Act. So ever since even before independence, Sinhalese nationalists had complained that Tamils were disproportionately represented in universities and in the civil service. By way of an example, in 1969, and this was before the university quotas kicked in, Tamils comprised around 20% of the population. They formed around 50% of the student body in medical colleges and 48% in engineering colleges. This was sort of part of the litany of complaints that the Sinhalese nationalists had when they talked about protecting their language and their people. So in 1956 to satisfy the Sinhalese majority, the president, the government passed the Sinhala Only Act, which basically declared that Sinhalese would be the only state religion of the country. This meant that civil service business was conducted mostly in Sinhalese. This meant that if you were Tamil, you could write the entrance exam to get into the civil service in your own language, but then every single step of promotion, you had to pass an additional level of Sinhalese proficiency before you were promoted. This was the first sort of alarming signal to Tamils that they were being discriminated against. We'll go back a few centuries, I think, the colonial era, what you see here is a Jaffna College in Vadukode. I'll come to why this is up here, but there are waves of colonization that happen in Sri Lanka. The Portuguese come first, they leave, they are ousted by the Dutch, who are then in the early 1800s ousted by the British. Simultaneously, there's a huge American presence in the North and East of the country, and this is not commercial colonization as we know it with the British. This is in the form of Christian missionaries who have settled in the North and the East. Jaffna College was one of the many, many educational institutions that the American Ceylon mission, as Sri Lanka was called then, Ceylon, the American Ceylon mission set up a bunch of universities and colleges across the North of Sri Lanka in Jaffna throughout the 1800s. So we can discuss the influence of colonialism upon Sri Lanka directly for minutes, hours on end, but I want to draw your attention to a couple of things. The first is that because these colleges were in the North and they were run by American missionaries, the language of instruction in these educational institutions was English, and this made it signally different from the schools in the South, in the Sinhalese dominated South, where the Buddhist monasteries mostly ran the schools, and so the language of instruction was Sinhalese. Now, when it came to people trying to get into the civil service, people trying to get into the universities, the Tamils who had studied in English had a significant advantage. This was part of the reason why they did so much better when it came to representation in universities and in the civil service. The other part of the colonialism debate is this, is that Britain throughout South Asia, as you all know, practiced this well oiled technique of divide and rule, which is basically that instead of sort of allowing communities in the colonized state to gang up against the colonizing power, they would play one community off against the other. So I went through some of the old census reports that the British conducted in Sri Lanka, and it's remarkable. I want to cite one particular example that I found. In 1901, when a census was conducted, there were 3.5 million people on the island, the census classified people into seven categories. 10 years later, the matrix had exploded. So you could classify yourself, if you're a Sri Lankan, you could identify yourself, any one of 10 ways by ethnicity, and then again, any one of 11 ways by religion. This is how broken down it was. And the British then tried to assemble legislatures based on ethnicity, setting aside quotas, making sure that there were reserved seats for particular communities. One governor wrote to his secretary of state in London that if there were such fractured legislatures, no single community can impose its will upon other communities. So this was a strategy, clearly, by the British, and these are still the ethnic fractures and the fault lines that continue into the post-independence era. We can talk about Anagarika Dharmapala. Those are sort of the years that he was born, that he lived. Here's a short chapter, from an excerpt from a chapter on militant Buddhist nationalism. The Sri Lankan International Buddhist Academy in Kandy stands on Anagarika Dharmapala Road, named after the 19th century reformer who cast the country's Buddhism into its modern shape. Dharmapala was not a monk, but an Anagarika. He wore the robes and he adopted the faith's eight precepts, but he never shaved his head and his sharp, satinine features sat under a cowl of gravy hair. Through his searing speeches and writings, Dharmapala rallied Buddhists around a nationalist project, prodding them into resistance against both the colonial authority and the Christian church. Some of this involved reminding his audiences that Sri Lanka belonged to the Buddhists and that the Sinhalese were a race distinct from the Hadi Demulu, the filthy Tamils. Enter into the realms of King Dutugemunu in spirit and try to identify yourself with the thoughts of that great king who rescued Buddhism and our nationalism from oblivion, he wrote, addressing the youth. In another place, ethnologically, the Sinhalese are a unique race, he writes. Before Christian imperialists and Hindu polytheists ruined Sri Lanka, this bright, beautiful island was made into a paradise by the Aryan Sinhalese. So you can see sort of the theories of race, the constructs of race that were popular in the late 1800s, feeding into this particular strain of nationalism. This is an illustration in Thailand, but it's an illustration of a scene from the Mahavamsa, which is the central Buddhist epic of Sinhalese nationalism. The Mahavamsa was written by a series of monks beginning in the fifth century and it tells the story of Sri Lankan Buddhism over the previous thousand years. The Mahavamsa, this shows, for example, King Ashoka's daughter, Sangamitta, sailing from India to Sri Lanka with a sapling of the original boatry under which the Buddha sat. The Mahavamsa has it that the Buddha himself visited Sri Lanka three times, this is unconfirmed elsewhere. And one of the book's missions, really, is to provide what it sees as evidence of the ancient rivalry, the ancient enmity between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. The central king in this text is a guy called Dutugemnu, who Dharmapala refers to in that little passage I read out. Dutugemnu is the hero of the Mahavamsa, if you will. There's a great story about him that when he was young, he used to sleep curled up in a fetal position. And one day his mother asks him why he doesn't stretch out, why he doesn't stretch his limbs out. And he says, on one side of me is the ocean, and on the other side are the Tamils who are waiting to push me off the island. How can I lie down with my limbs outstretched? Dutugemnu goes on to fight a 13-year war with a Tamil king named Ellara, and he wins. Finally, the Sinhalese king wins. Ellara is killed on the battlefield. Subsequently, as he's sort of raining over this island of peace and prosperity, he starts to be assailed by some doubts. He thinks, what happens to my karma if I have helped kill so many Tamils in war? What happens to the sort of karmic deficit? What happens to my cycle of birth and rebirth? So he calls a delegation of eight senior Buddhist monks into his chambers, and he asks them this question. The reply is worth reading in full. There is no hindrance on the way to heaven because of your acts. One of the monks assures his king. Slaughtering Tamils is no moral mistake. Only the equivalent of one and a half men died at Dutugemnu's hands according to the monk's official arithmetic because the Tamils were heretical and evil and died as though they were animals. You will make the Buddha's faith shine in many ways. Therefore, Lord of men cast away your mental confusion. So this is, it's often a surprise, and it was a surprise to me when I moved to Sri Lanka, the strains of sort of what we see to be religious conservatism in a religion like Buddhism, which many people think is a fairly Pacific, fairly accepting religion. Sri Lanka was one of the few places in the world, I think that disabused me of that notion. We know what's happening in Myanmar. So, in every religion, the seed of this exists. And finally, we go back to more than 2000 years ago, the pre-Christian era. This is Kandarore. The Kandarore is an archeological site near Jaffna. It's pretty much in ruins. In fact, the bases, the circular bases you can see are really sort of what remain of the original site. The domes that are built on top of it are all much newer. They were rebuilt by Buddhist monks in the first millennium. For a long time, Kandarore functioned as a pure ruin, not publicly attributed to belong to any particular civilization. That was left to the scholars and their journals. Some of the literature referring to pot sherds that had been excavated that bear Tamil Brahmi script and date to 300 BCE. A Smithsonian expedition in 1967 found types of pottery similar to the megalithic culture of South India, as well as a plaque depicting a version of the Hindu deity Lakshmi, which was discovered below a layer of Buddhist remains. No Sinhalese texts mention Kandarore until the 10th century. So tentatively, historians thought Kandarore was first a Tamil settlement, or rather a settlement first populated by Dravidians from the south of India who arrived in the pre-Christian era. In the renewal of Sinhalese nationalism after the war, after 2009, this line of reasoning was neatly reversed. It is now labeled by the government as a Sinhalese Buddhist site only. Since these monuments are among the most ancient relics on the island, the question of who built this site has come to matter very much, because it means that what the civil war was fought over, which is the doubt as to who was here first, who the island belonged to, can be resolved as if this site, the island, was a gold mine, and the latecomers were claim jumpers. All of which is to say, I think that in questions about the war and in questions about causality, it's important to keep in mind with any war, with any historical event in fact, it's important to keep in mind this sort of complex chain of causality that precludes giving a simple answer to when something began or why it began. I think in this particular case, definitely you can make the case that the strains of friction between the Tamils and the Sinhalese stretch back 2000 years. And that is something to keep in mind as we look towards the future, which I guess we can talk about now. Thanks. Thanks, someone. It's okay to clap. So I thought maybe we could just start on a personal note and then get deeper into the politics. So you allude in the first couple of pages of the book in an interview that you gave, that you were sort of guilty of committing a trifecta of sins, right? You were Indian, you were Tamil and you were a journalist. So by virtue of being Indian, you were represented the kind of big brother, right? Who was always meddling in domestic affairs of Sri Lanka. By being Tamil originally from Tamil Nadu, you were a partisan in some sense or could be viewed as a partisan siding with one or the other. And by virtue of being a journalist, you couldn't be trusted, right? Because you were planning some extra... That's a crime everywhere. That's crime everywhere, correct. So how did you navigate this trifecta and why did you navigate this? I mean, you moved to Sri Lanka in 2011, correct? So how did this all happen and result in this book without you being killed? Well, as to why, I think it's just... I mean, it was sort of a very purely journalistic instinct which is that in 2009 the war ended and I thought as a journalist would probably think which is that this is a great time to go into a country which was closed off for much of the last 30 years, to travel around as in the way that journalists have not been able to do thus far and to talk to people who are suddenly for the first time unafraid to speak their mind about the war and their involvement in it or their experience of it. And this was the reason that I moved. Secondarily, I guess, also was the fact that since I was Tamil, as you say, I grew up in South India which is very close geographically and almost spiritually, I guess, to Sri Lanka. The conflict was always sort of very close to home. It always used to make the front pages of newspapers, sometimes even in bigger headlines than the news from Delhi. And so I felt that I, and since I spoke one of the two languages in Sri Lanka, I felt that I was sort of well poised to take advantage of this new opening up of the country. It's much closer to Delhi than... It is. I mean, it's much closer to Madras than Delhi sometimes. Yeah, I mean, it takes sort of 45 minutes to fly there and it doesn't really feel like a different country when you land, which Delhi feels like sometimes. And the navigation of this was, I mean, in a sense involved doing the work of a journalist which is basically to spend as much time as you can with people to get over their initial barriers of mistrust. And frankly, there were many people who didn't want to talk to me. And so at that point, I would just, there are only so many barriers you can break down with some people. But there are sort of a lot of people in the book who I wrote about who, once you spend some time with them and once they got to know you, they would then start to open up. And this is really, I mean, this is sort of the, it's part of the job description, description of any reporter, I think, about any writer sort of doing this kind of writing. And so, I mean, India had a unique position to put in some sense. I mean, at one point in time was both training the Tamil Tigers and also providing assistance to the military, right? So it was fighting both sides of this conflict. The defeat of the Rajapaksa government and the new Syracina regime was seen as a positive move towards India and perhaps away from China and the kind of broader geopolitical game that's being played. How do you see the Indian role in Sri Lanka today? How has it evolved? And is it as in such a bright position as it sometimes gets portrayed in the international press? I mean, this question of sort of playing both sides of the game, I think like actually persisted almost until 2009, until the end of the war. I think like even then there was sort of one channel of communication that was open between one section of the Indian government with the Tigers and there was another section of assistance that the Indian government was providing to the Sri Lankan army. So this continued right until the very end. Subsequently, I think what has happened is, I mean, given political changes there but also here, which is the new government in India, not new now, it's been almost two years but this particular government I feel has not been quite as invested in sort of what happens in Sri Lanka as the previous government was. And particularly because change on the ground, democratic change on the ground has been, has happened in a sense in a way that has surprised all of us, that the Rajapaksas have first lost the presidential election and then subsequently the parliamentary election. I feel also that a lot of the overt stances that India had to take at, for example, UN Human Rights Commission conferences and so on, the need for that has lessened a little bit. There are rumors, as always, that Indian intelligence agencies played a great role in unseating the Rajapaksas. I think that's a little of, some of that is overblown. But India itself, I mean, we can talk about India's role but India's role in its neighborhood I think has changed a lot since the new prime minister came into power. But how much of it is just a function of coalition politics, right? So you have a government which doesn't need to be best friends with the ruling party in Tamil Nadu and therefore necessarily get invested in their particular views on Sri Lanka, right? I mean, it's a single party government. They have some coalition partners but none of them are really consequential in Southern India and this part of Southern India. That's true, but I mean, at the same time, I mean, one would think that in a region like South Asia, India always, there is always cause for India to be invested in its neighbors to a certain extent. And I think with this particular government, that level of sort of commitment or investment in Sri Lanka and its immediate future has decreased for this Indian government. Maybe its priorities lie elsewhere. But it's benign neglect. So could it be a good thing? Could it be actually a blessing in disguise that they're not overtly meddling by taking a step back? No, I think if anything, I mean, what would have been a crew blessing I mean, given the change in government in Sri Lanka and given sort of for the first time in decades, this window that has opened up in which real reconciliation on the ground can actually begin and real systemic reform, structural reform of the countries, how the country is set up and how the constitution is drafted. I think for the first time, there is a window like this and India could actually play an extremely beneficial role. But as far as I see it, the constitutional drafting, they're drafting a new constitution and that process has not particularly registered on the Indian radar, on the radar of the Ministry of External Affairs, for example. I mean, these things are happening independently of India's commitment to Sri Lanka at the moment, I feel. So it could come back to haunt the Indians. I mean, many people would say this is similar to what happened in Nepal where the constitution-making process got to such a point where India realized much too late in the game that there are things in there that were gonna be potentially problematic from an Indian perspective. And maybe they're tracking it. But it could definitely sort of play much more proactive vocal role in the process, I feel. But what's the status? I mean, you mentioned the machinations of the United Nations, right? So there's this very interesting moment, I'm sure many in the room followed, of a resolution that the United Nations Human Rights Council was considering, which related to truth and justice and accountability, post-war. And they actually held back from introducing that resolution till the verdict of the Sri Lankan election was known. And then the Sri Lankan government actually co-sponsored that resolution, I think, with the United States. They co-sponsored it, but they also said they wanted sort of UN investigators to delay their entry into the country because they wanted to be given time to set up their own independent internal inquiry. And as a matter of, as a gesture of good faith, the UN allowed that, I think. And so, you know, things are, again, there is sort of a new reconciliation commission that the government is starting to put together. There have as yet been no judicial probes of war crimes, for example. I think what the new government has done is to try to approach the Rajapaksas in a slightly oblique way and try to pin corruption charges on them, which is easier, but also simultaneously not really the issue at point over here. And so, you know, part of this could just be the natural political process. I mean, it's been less than a year since the new parliament came into power. And so, maybe these things have a life span of their own and they will take time for the ball to get rolling, but it's difficult to say that they've done much in the last one and a quarter years since Siresena came to power. And, you know, there have been a lot of symbolic changes which are in one sense important, you know. I mean, the Tamil, the national anthem is now sung in Tamil, which is a big deal. There is this constitutional drafting process which is important. You know, governors in the North were replaced and there used to be sort of, I think, an ex-army guy who was a civilian governor of the Northern province and he was replaced and, you know, a real bureaucrat was appointed there. So, I mean, these are changes that are important from a symbolic point of view and they were very, they were welcomed when they were first made. But I think, you know, by the end of this year, if, you know, if the probe doesn't get going, if the constitutional drafting process has not picked up some steam, I think there will yet again be a certain amount of impatience in Sri Lanka over how slowly things are moving. Vino, a skeptic could say this shouldn't be that surprising because then, you know, how different is the new establishment from the old establishment, right? I mean, Siresena himself was a defector from the ruling regime. There are many parties which are part of this government. So, you know, is this just sort of, you know, old wine and new bottles? No, I don't think I would say that. I mean, the old bottle, which is the Rajapaksa bottle, was basically, I mean, it was a one man or one family government. And, you know, despite the fact that the change in personnel has not been quite as extensive as people might have hoped for, I think it's fairly true to say that the previous government was essentially cast in this family's mold and that removing the family from power in a way itself is a refreshment of government. And there were a lot of people, a lot of ministers in the previous government who talked about how they disagreed with the president, but could not speak out for fear of sort of retribution of one kind or another. And so, I think many people who have continued from the old government to the new one feel a certain kind of liberation just at being a part of an actual coalition that has the usual push and pull of coalition politics as opposed to a top-down, fairly totalitarian government. So do you worry about the resurgence of violence? I mean, this is impatience translated into violence? No, I think it, no, I really, I mean, any visitor to Sri Lanka in 2011 and 12 in particular, you would just sense the fatigue with fighting and with war, I mean, the land is ravaged, the people are just, you know, everybody has lost somebody and there was such a sense of exhaustion that you could not imagine, I was there last in January and even now, I don't think I can imagine sort of a return to violence you know, in the immediate future at all. I think there might be a lot of political churn. There might be sort of, for example, in a welcome move, there might be new Tamil political parties that represent what the people want in a far better way than the TNA and its constituents can. But that kind of churn is welcome, that's part of the political process and I don't think this will sort of turn violent in the way that we've seen it in the immediate future at all. So this telescope history has its limits in terms of how much it can project into the future? Yeah, I mean, I was talking to somebody today and he was telling me about the cyclical nature of Sri Lanka's history in a way that there was always sort of throughout the 20th century, you'd have a riot and you'd have like, you know, Tamil parties and Sinhalese parties kind of reaching an accord before an election and then the Sinhalese parties would let the Tamil parties down and break all these promises and then this would kind of generate more friction yet another riot, you know, there was a cycle there. And I think definitely both the way in which the war ended which was brutal and then the way in which the Rajapaksas were unseated, which was extremely welcome because it was a purely democratic process and it was a democratic result that surprised everybody in Sri Lanka. I mean, including the people who voted who were hopeful of change. I mean, this is the kind of election that, you know, really sort of makes your hair stand on end as far as sort of the wonders of democracy go. And, you know, so these were both such momentous events that I feel that maybe in terms of predicting the future, the telescope history may not really sort of be our best guide. So let's open it up to your questions. I just ask that you just raise your hand and identify yourself and just keep your question short and wait for the microphone. So we can start with this gentleman here. Just wait for one second. Mr. Jainal Kumar and I'm currently retired. In the 50s, I was in Madras Christian College and had a lot of Sri Lankan students there. I visited Sri Lanka a number of times. I didn't feel the ethnic tension at that point but going back in history, it was my understanding rightly or wrong that most of Sri Lanka was populated by people from India and that the millions were Hindus and the Buddhists came from Bihar. Is that correct? Well, they say Orissa. I mean, a part of like sort of the border of Bengal and Orissa is where they attract the Sinhalese. That's the origin myth is that they came out from the northeastern coast of India in a way. So in one sense, you're right. I mean, everybody came from India at one point or another. This is the question of, question is of sort of who got there first, as I said. This is complicated a little by the fact that Sri Lanka has its own, what used to be referred to as aborigine population. That's a terrible term now, but it's sort of people who are there much longer than either the Sinhalese or the Tamils. The Veddas are now sort of marginalized completely from public life. They've been sort of, they've been kept as kind of like a showpiece tribal population in the forests in the center of Sri Lanka and their say in this, which is ironic because if anybody was there before, at the beginning of time, so to speak, it was this population, yet their say in this has been completely marginalized and cut out of history. But you're right. I mean, both populations draw their origin stories to India. I guess the only difference is the histories of the modern histories of Tamil Nadu and Northern Sri Lanka or Tamil Sri Lanka are much more tightly bound up than the Sinhalese and the area in India where they're supposed to have come from. I had an extremely revealing conversation with a slightly right wing Sinhalese historian in Sri Lanka, which is that, you know, we were talking about sort of demographics and so on and he said to me, he said, but how can you blame the Sinhalese for being insecure? We are the minority here. And I didn't understand that. And I thought maybe I had the numbers wrong in my head. So I tried to recalculate it and every way I kind of, you know, rejigged them, it all turned out to be, you know, the Sinhalese were clearly the majority. And I said as much, I said, but that doesn't make sense because I have 20 million people. And he said, no, no, but you're forgetting the 70 million Tamils who live in Tamil Nadu. So there's this, you know, this population of Tamils that is looming over Sri Lanka and the Sinhalese nationalist kind of spirit. And I feel that, you know, that has never really gone away. I mean, throughout the past few centuries. Tom. The things I would like to hear from you. You just hold up your mic. One of the things I would like to hear a little bit more about is what's happening, as you know, at one point, the figure was 50% of the population of Colombo was Tamo speaking. After the riots, it's probably a bit lower. To what extent are Tamils able to reinsert themselves in particularly Sri Lankan Tamils, not so much so-called Indian Tamils, into the economy of the country. And that is connected a little bit with the welfare of the Indian Tamils as who politically had a somewhat different political history in Sri Lanka than in Sri Lanka. Yeah. So just to, I mean, the distinction that he's drawing here is that the Sri Lankan Tamils are the Tamils who live in the North and the East. These are the Tamils who draw their history back thousands of years, at least a couple of thousand years, to India. The Indian Tamils, as they are called, are these plantation workers who the British brought from India to Sri Lanka in the middle of the 19th century, purely to work as sort of semi-indentured labor on the plantations of central Sri Lanka. And the Indian Tamils for a long time were disenfranchised utterly. I mean, they didn't have the vote. They were only sort of given citizenship a couple of few decades ago after India pressured the Sri Lankan government to recognize these populations as Sri Lankans. It's interesting because Colombo is still, sorry, I don't know if it's a majority Tamil-speaking city, but it's certainly up there. And the reason, of course, is that because there are a lot of Muslims who live there and the Muslims speak Tamil as well. So between the Muslims and the Hindus and the Christians who all speak Tamil, there is a significant population of Tamils and Tamil speakers in the capital. As far as the economy goes, I mean, the so-called small shareholders in the economy, and this includes farmers, it includes like spawn shopkeepers and small businesses who are in the North and the East. I mean, those remain, I mean, the North in particular, those remain devastated to a large extent. I mean, there's still sort of extensive problems of land returns. A lot of land was seized by the army in the months and years following the end of the war. And after the new government came into power last year, a system of returning some of the seized land has begun to be put into place. And I believe that this is going on at a very slow but nonetheless steady rate. Large sections of this land here are still held by the army. And it's unclear whether those will ever be given back. So it still involves a lot of Tamils who were farmers or who owned sort of land on which small businesses stood. These people still in a sense are displaced, if not residentially at least economically. But the life of Colombo itself and the economic life of the capital of the urban economic life continues to be pretty much as we knew it in the 90s and the 2000s. I mean, a lot of the Tamils who fled following the 1983 riots did come back. Partly because they didn't want their children to be pressed ganged into the tigers. They didn't want their children to be seized and conscripted. So they would come back to the south where ironically they felt safer. So the economic life kind of in a sense remains fairly constant. And I think it's really sort of the Vanni which is the northern and slightly north central part of Sri Lanka that requires the most rebuilding and reconciliation. Yeah, a question here in the back. Tim Ryan from the Solidarity Center. I wonder if you could make a few comments on that period in the late 70s and early 80s when you had quote unquote moderate Tamil parties and was the inevitable radicalization of the tigers? Was that inevitable or was this partly just the eclipse of these parties because of the intransigence of the Sri Lankan government? Within that context, you started to talk about it a little bit, where is that space now for mainstream quote unquote Tamil political activity either nationally and as we see in the north and east this is still maybe problematic. Yeah, I mean the late 60s and the 70s are very interesting because I mean I mentioned this cycle of sort of before an election the Sinhalese parties would come to the Tamil parties and ask them to join up to get the Tamil vote and promise them a list of agenda items that would then be instituted when they came to power. This particular Sinhalese party would then win and the promises would never be fulfilled and this happened as a cycle sort of throughout the 60s and the 70s and a number of the sort of people who joined the tigers then in the 1970s who quit in the 1980s and 90s for various reasons would tell me that at some point they just got sick of this, that there was sort of it was not so much that the government or the Sinhalese majority parties didn't keep their promises so much as the Tamil parties were not able to hold their partners to account and they felt that there was in a sense no room for political activity, for political maneuvering for the Tamils who were essentially such a minority that their numbers didn't make a difference to the votes. So in retrospect it feels that violence was inevitable. I mean people who now sort of renounce the way in which the tigers evolved over the late 80s and the early 90s still say that in the 1970s there still was a particular, it felt urgent that some kind of violent action needed to be taken and they're sort of very, I mean they're very conflicted about this because they simultaneously decry the violence that came later but also remember the circumstances that led them to pick up the gun in the first place. The space now is, I mean in a sense we don't know what the space is like now because I think in the election immediately following the end of the war, Rajapaksa and his parties sort of won such an overwhelming majority had such great political capital by virtue of winning the war that they didn't need the Tamil vote. The very next election which was last year's was again an extraordinary kind of specimen of political activity because there was so many political actors intent and eager to get the Rajapaksas out of power that they were all forming bridges across party lines and the Tamil parties were an integral part of this coalition. What really would be interesting is to see what happens next. I mean how deeply and frequently the Tamil parties are consulted for example in the process of drawing up this new constitution. What happens in the next election when this urgent need to get rid of the Rajapaksas that is not there anymore. It returns to sort of fractured political party loyalties. I'd be very curious and I don't know actually. I know what I do see quite a bit of is that there's a gap between the parties that claim to represent the Tamil population, notably the TNA, this coalition of parties and the Tamil people themselves. And the Tamil people in some ways are able to articulate in a much clearer and more forceful way what they expect out of the state now that the war is over. And the TNA I feel is still a little bit sort of muddled and torn between various factions between its own sort of, you know, it is in a sense stuck in its own history. It has not yet been able to negotiate the end of the war and what came with it. And so I feel what is of consequence now is not only bringing Tamil parties into the political mainstream, but for these parties to reinvent themselves. And I think that process probably hasn't started yet. There's still a number of sort of, you know, gray-haired parts who are kind of being called back into the political landscape just to be able to lend their weight to these parties. And I feel like maybe they're going the wrong way with that. Yes. My name is Allison Glick. I'm with the Government Accountability Project, which is a whistleblower support and advocacy organization. I think I heard you say in response to the moderator's question that you don't fear future explosion of violence. Certainly I guess nothing similar to what happened at the end of the Civil War. But I'm wondering to the extent that the sort of rebuilding of the country falters in the way that you just described, based on your reporting after the war, what signs would you say we would need to look for that would signal that that might happen? And I found it interesting that you mentioned what's happening in Myanmar now to the Rohingya, because especially in a country with these ethnic divisions that have been, I would somewhat say created, that that's always a possibility. Well, I mean, I would definitely look to, for example, a repeat of the cycle of political betrayal that I just described that came in the 60s and 70s. And I feel that in the aftermath of the war, in the aftermath of this election last year, if there is over the next decade and a half, if you see sort of repeated moves to sort of ignore Tamil political sentiment and the Tamil demographic, if you see a continuation of, for example, the army's presence in the North and the East in a way that is disproportionate to the number of people who live there, if you continue to see lands that are held, that continue to be held by the army, if you see an empowerment of the Buddhist right wing, whether it's the clergy, the right wing part of the clergy or the right wing parties themselves, I think these would all be fairly strong signals. What happened in the previous government was very interesting because there was a party formed in the mid-2000s, it was called the Jatika Hella Urmaya, which is a party made up of Buddhist monks. These are monks who stood for parliament and some of them won. This was inconceivable 20 years earlier. And the JHU was at its time, when it was founded, I believe this was 2005, at its time was a fairly strong right wing outfit. Between 2005 and 2011, or maybe 2012, between 2005 and 12, in the space of seven years because the JHU had been tolerated and even coddled by the state, by the Rajapaksa government, a number of other right wing Buddhist extremist outfits came up that made the JHU look relatively moderate by comparison. These were the more right wing outfits or the ones that were going around the country tearing down Muslim shrines, for example. And so when you see the toleration of that kind of violence, as we saw in the previous government, and if that extends for a significant period of time, I think these would be worrying markers to me. Let me just pick up on that and ask, we're sitting here in Washington, so one wonders the obvious question of what should the United States be doing in this, right? I mean, to the extent that we in this town tend to focus on South Asia, we're always preoccupied by India and countries further to the West where there's conflict going on, but we tend to ignore other large, but smaller compared to India countries, whether it's Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and so on. Is there something that we should be doing as Americans in the United States? I mean, what's the posture of the government? Is it even a topic of conversation? Are we such small players that we're really operating at the margins? I mean, Sri Lanka is, I think Sri Lanka operates at maybe three levels below the Secretary of State. That's where the discourse currently rests. And maybe in 2009, when the war was going on, it would have been escalated one rung, but that's pretty much it. Having said that, I mean, I think over the last year, and particularly since the elections, I know for a fact the U.S. government has been extremely clear in communicating to the new government, to the citizen government, that what is most important at the moment and what the U.S. would most like for them to do is to open up these war crimes investigations and to begin serious processes of reconciliation with the Tamils. And I don't think the Obama government has sort of beaten around the bush at all for the last couple of years. It was much harder when the Rajapaksas were in power because then they got a lot of pushback. And the Rajapaksas at the time aligned more towards China. So for example, when defense ties were cut between the U.S. and Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka could quite easily pivot towards China and lean on Chinese aid in various ways. I think now the new government is much keener to reestablish that old connection with India and with the U.S. And I think again this would be, this is another reason I say that it's kind of a shame that India right now is not becoming more involved because there's clearly, it's one of the few times in Sri Lanka's history where clearly the government is looking to India for some sort of, is looking to strengthen its ties with India. And I feel like that it might be a mistake to not capitalize on that. But with the U.S. I think as I said, you know, there will be at some point as this process of drafting a constitution goes on, especially as the new lessons learned and reconciliation. And I think there's one more term in there. Commission starts to take effect. I think there will be sort of gradual escalation of economic and defense ties almost as a sort of reward process, like an incentive process, which is probably the way it should work in the diplomatic world. I want to just dig a little bit deeper on the India point because I mean, at the end of the day you are the India correspondent for the national, not the Sri Lanka correspondent, right? And you spend a lot of time reporting on what's happening in India and trying to translate it, explain it for an international audience. Out to myself. Or to yourself. But I mean, this government has gotten a lot of praise for a reinvigorated sense of India's positive role in the neighborhood, paying attention to visits to the neighboring country, whether it's Bhutan, whether it's Sri Lanka, whether it's Nepal, even dropping in Pakistan on 24 hours notice for a wedding. So is this been overhyped as the rhetoric sort of surpassed the reality in terms of the effectiveness of this new posture? Or how do you sort of evaluate it? I mean, we're getting on to the two year anniversary of this government, right? So I think we can start coming to some initial conclusions both on the economic reform plan, domestic politics, what's happening in society and clearly foreign policies and other dimension. So a couple of things, right? I mean, I think this particular Prime Minister, foreign policy in this particular Indian government is dictated, I think. I would think, I think it's safe to say almost solely by the Prime Minister. Everything is top down. The Ministry of External Affairs is basically the Prime Minister's ministry. And the Prime Minister is very clear about the ties, the bilateral ties that he wants to encourage. And he's very clear about sort of which, where his energies and where the energies of his staff and his diplomats will be focused. So ties with the US are one example. Ties with Japan are another example. I mean, the clarity that India's external affairs officials have brought to these particular ties over the last two years, people within these governments will testify to that, including people in the US government. Initially, Modi also did start off with sort of a focus on South Asia as well and on the neighborhood. And Pakistan, I feel like Pakistan is a separate case almost, I mean, it's not just a neighbor, but it's sort of an aggrieved spouse in several ways. And there's a certain amount of energy and time that needs to be devoted to. But for the rest of the neighborhood, I feel like the initial energy did flag. And I definitely feel that whatever happened in Nepal and Bangladesh, I mean, the energy that was given there by the Prime Minister was still sort of significant when compared to Sri Lanka. And I feel this is in a way, comes back to what I said at the beginning to your conversation, which is that India is a kind of country where you could live in the South and you could feel that Sri Lanka is the most important player in the neighborhood or one of the most important players. And you could live in the North and feel that Sri Lanka is, you know, spiritually and geographically too distant to worry about too closely. And Nepal is, you know, Nepal and Bangladesh have had particular pressing problems as well. You know, with Bangladesh, there was sort of, there is not only the issue of a particular kind of cross-border terrorism and refugees coming in, but also this, you know, this question of land enclaves and the land borders that were settled earlier this year, last year. And with Nepal and its own constitutional rafting process and the, you know, and frankly, I think also the land border, which is a big deal. And I think land borders are psychologically, you know, we are sort of so much more important when it comes to calibrating this kind of relationship. And so in that sense, I think, I mean, maybe it hasn't been overhyped because definitely there's a lot of energy going into the foreign policy sphere. And, but I think with Sri Lanka in particular and in this neighborhood, Sri Lanka is clearly probably bottom of the list, actually, I would say. Any other questions from the audience? Let me ask you about one thing going back a little bit to the past. I mean, you mentioned 1956 as this critical juncture, right, is one of many potentially where you had the Sinhala-only Act, right, which mandated the Sinhala's become the official language. And that was a critical juncture in India as well when you had the States Reorganization Act, right? So that was the real first creation of linguistically oriented states, right? Where Tamil became the official language of Tamil Nadu and that sense of decentralization or autonomy was given to all of the states, right? And that became the defining principle. And the two countries and the two leaderships handled things in basically the opposite way, right? One had a very concessionary approach and the other had a very hard line approach. But if you were to step back at the time of independence, I mean, many political scientists have talked about this and you looked at the two countries and you look at their literacy rates and you look at the societal fissures, many people would have placed a bet on Sri Lanka as being a democratic success story rather than India, but yet it seems to have been reversed. What do you sort of ascribe that to? I mean, is that just a great man or great woman kind of leadership issue that India had this visionary, one of a kind leadership under Nero and others who was able to kind of forestall this issue and Sri Lanka lacked that or kind of what do you think was this the factor that kind of set these two off on opposite trajectories? I mean, it's, there's a couple of things. I mean, one is India had the kind of pan-national, nationalist movement for independence that Sri Lanka never had. Sri Lanka got independence in 1948 and they, as they themselves say, on the coattails of Indian independence. They had sort of a small group of elites who were agitating for Sri Lankan independence from the British, but there was never sort of island-wide Satyagraha or a grassroots movement that drew people in from various parts of the country and from various communities. This was what India had. So for a not-so-brief moment in time, which was the first half of the 20th century, if not a few decades before that, there was an independence movement that aimed to unite people across communities, religions, languages, caste, and did sort of an imperfect but significant job of that. And this has a lot to do with your great man theory because even before Nehru, in fact, there was Gandhi and this was Gandhi's sort of clarion call to independence, which is that basically Indians across all these fault lines must unite. That is the only way India will become independent. So it's possible to argue that the after effects of that was so significant that they continue into the present day, which is that the momentum of that unifying call, that call to unity is still with us to a large extent. The other thing is that India in a sense is, a lot of people thought that India is so diverse and so big and accommodates so many people and so many kinds of people that it is almost certain to break apart, to balkanize. But maybe it also works in a different way, is that there are so many sort of pressures and counter pressures in various ways that for example, that it's never possible entirely for one group to prevail over the other. And I think the most dangerous moment of that particular type would've probably come in the 1950s when the language agitations in Tamil Nadu tried to resist the imposition of Hindi, which is spoken by 400 million people now, resist the imposition of Hindi on Tamil Nadu and on other states. And again, this was a moment in time where there was certainly a high degree of wisdom and practicality in the leadership at the time, who then decided to set about this reorganizing states based on languages. And this would often strike me when I was in Sri Lanka, is that Sri Lanka has two languages. It is not difficult to figure this out, to figure out like a federal structure where powers can be devolved enough that both communities are kept happy. But in a sense maybe that's the problem, maybe the problem is that one minority is 20% and so it was always possible for them to be, for the majority to ride roughshod over them and their rides. Whereas in India, that kind of imbalance would never have taken place, even if all the Hindi speakers united tomorrow and agitated for Hindi to be the national language of India, there's still 600 million people who don't speak Hindi. So this is a good thing in a way. We've been blessed with this kind of diversity. Okay, now a lot of questions. Let's just take a, where were you guys? Like two seconds ago. So let's just take a final round and then we have about eight minutes. So why don't you just take whatever you can take it. Yeah, let's do that. So let's start and we'll work our way across. Oh my goodness, okay. Everyone's coming out of the woodwork. Go ahead. I served in the embassy in Colombo and I arrived just after the riots in 58 and I was there for three years. It seems to me that after all you've forgotten that Bandra Nika rode to power on the issue of Sinhalese nationalism. It was the only way the SLFP could take power from the UNP and he was succeeded by J.R. Jaya Wardner and a whole bunch of characters who used the language national issue to remain in power. If Bandra Nika had stayed in the UNP and not decided to break off and form this other party, this might never have happened. The riots might never have happened. The Sinhala only law might never have been passed. So I think you have to factor in the politics and the people who were using the nationalist issue to rise to power. And just an added footnote, I was there when Bandra Nika was assassinated by a Buddhist monk. The Buddhist monks played a very important role in being pro SLFP. Yes. And that was another source of Bandra Nika's power. So it wasn't just the language issue, it was a political issue. That's right, yeah. Hold on, I'm responding. We're gonna collect with you. So we'll go to this gentleman in the back there. Hi, Maria Ruthas from the Tamil Guardian. So you spoke about the Sinhala nationalism as a gentleman also said before. I think one of the key things to remember is that serious in our last year when he won the election, it was on the Tamil vote. If you just look at the single East vote, Rajapaksa actually would have still been in power. So when the issue is one of singular nationalism that keeps blocking progress on so many issues and which has been the case for so many decades, what option do you see for progress where the government has not done anything to address that issue or even admitted that singular nationalism and singular chauvinism is an issue? Let's take one back here. Maybe we'll have time for two quick rounds if you can keep your answers short. Okay, so let's just do three. Yeah, and then we'll get to this side. You don't have a question or not, but if you go back actually, the reason you're getting these questions is because of your comment actually. Sorry. And that is if you go back to the 1950s, 1960s, Salon was then, Salon, not Sri Lanka, was probably the major progressive, quote, country in South and Southeast Asia. Way beyond Singapore, et cetera, et cetera. It was the leading economic and political sort of country in the area. It was the country that was gonna lead most of the others relatively, not withstanding of size. Is there any kind of feeling that, me clearly that's all been lost. And it's been lost because of nationalism because et cetera, et cetera. Is there any feeling, are there people looking back at that and saying, look, this is what we lost. This is what we need to regain. And here's why we lost it. And here's what needs to be done in order to put our country, maybe not in the same lead position because things have passed it by. But move it back on track. Is there any sense of historical regret among the Sinhalese population that look what's happened here? So historical regret, the Tamil vote, Sinhalese nationalism, and then counter-nationalism. No, I mean, I think right now, in terms of a sense of regret, I think it's still so soon in a way after the war. And people are still sort of recovering from 26 years of fighting and then another sort of 10 or 20 years before that of sheer friction. That I think looking back to a relatively glorious economic past, I think it hasn't quite come to that. I mean, there are still sort of deep issues on the ground that the government and the people have to contend with before they can think about something. I mean, in one sense, the economy's in bad shape in Sri Lanka and their fiscal bill is huge because the government employs so many people at various levels that it's sort of perpetually paying through its nose. There's talk that it will at some point soon probably go to the IMF for a loan, which may force some sort of structural reforms to the economy. We don't know, but I mean, it's certain that they're thinking about the fact that their economy really needs to now be lifted back out of the depths. And I don't even think it's sort of looking back to a sort of proto-Singapore when they were the dominant power. I think it's much more basic than that right now. Okay. To your comments, you're completely right about using Sinhalese nationalism to gain votes. I think that's spot on. I mean, I'm reminded of these little measures that seem so silly in retrospect, but were so charged when they happened. You know, there was at one point the Sri Lankan government decreed that every single car had to have a license plate with the Sri Lankan letter Sri painted on it, but it had to be in Sinhalese. It couldn't be in Tamil. So at some point when the Tamil vehicles and the drivers of these vehicles refused to change their letters, that led to riots and that led to sort of, you know, friction and people getting arrested. And I mean, it's just, this was raked up in so many different ways. And in one sense then, what you're saying is completely correct is that the Rajapaksas didn't do anything differently. I mean, they still sort of used that same issue to a ride to power, to then win the war and to then ride to power again and to cement their hold on the country and its polity. The demographics of sort of how the government was voted to power last year and Siddhasena was voted to power, I think is important. I think it's in a way is more important how the parliamentary elections played out. And the fact that Siddhasena has transferred power from the presidency back to parliament is I think is a significant achievement. And I feel that the sort of, the sort of hardcore Sinhalese nationalists who we in this room probably would be worried about, the kind who would sort of agitate for more violence or constricted civil rights for minorities. I think a lot of those people who did continue to vote for Rajapaksa and may still continue to do so in the future. I don't know what the government would do to, I mean, you say the government hasn't dealt with that. And I don't know what you would do to deal with it in, yes, yes, but I'm saying, when you say the government hasn't dealt with it, what I mean to say is it's difficult to see what a government would do to deal with people who think a certain way apart from just run the country's affairs as best as it can. I think sort of that's sort of what, you know, the economic revival would be a part of it. Effecting and effect, you know, sort of a solid reconciliation process would be a part of it. Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, this is something they have to, they have to fight. I mean, in parliament, they have to fight this all the time. You're completely right. Let's just take one last question. I'm sorry for those who didn't get it. I want to make sure we try to end on time. So we'll give you a chance to ask and then quickly respond and then we'll call. And then you're here for a few minutes if people want to come in. I'm Garmini Kirvela, presently attached to the Sri Lankan Embassy in Washington. Earlier I was the professor of modern history and international relations at the University of Peradiniya. Yeah, this is regarding the, you mentioned, you're mentioning about the Sri Lanka's independent movement and Sri Lanka received independence simply because of outcome of the Indian grant of independence to India. But, you know, by about 1930s, there was another political movement in Sri Lanka initiated by left movement, left movement, Lanka Samasamaja Party and the Sri Lankan Communist Party. They are the, then they started the political agitation and they had very close collaboration with the Indian National Congress and Kamala Chatyodpati visited Sri Lanka. And Gandhi did too. Yes, Gandhi himself came to India. And by about 1940s, Sri Lanka's Samasamaja Party was proscribed and in 1943, there was a mutiny by Sri Lankan soldiers. And Sri Lanka, the British authorities feared that the traditional conservative leadership will go away and new brood of leadership will come forward and they were more critical. And at the same time, Great Britain, they wanted to have that East of Sue as the program, a naval strategy in the Indian Ocean area and Sri Lanka's strategic location, especially the Katunayaka and Sri Kumali were very important in this situation. They wanted to grant independence in order to avoid radical leadership coming to power. Therefore, it is not 100% correct that Sri Lanka... Fair enough, that's fair. I may have said too much when I said it went on the court tables of Indian. You're completely right. I mean, what I was indicating was this large-scale grassroots movement, but you're right. I mean, that's completely fair to say, yes. Let me just end it here and if those of you who want to follow up with someone can, before we end and thank our speaker, I just want to highlight a couple of programming notes. We're quite busy here when it comes to South Asia for the next two weeks. So there are three upcoming events that I'd like to make you aware of and please tell your friends and colleagues. This Thursday we'll be hosting Nathan Sheets, who's the Department of Treasury under Secretary for International Affairs and the key point person on the economic and financial relationship between the US and India and ahead of the big bilateral meeting between the Indians and Americans next week. He's gonna be previewing what they've done and what's on the agenda next week. Although the invitation, Rachel, I don't believe has gone out on the 11th. We'll be hosting a kind of launch for a new paper by my colleague, Ashley Teles, called India as a Leading Power, which is something that the Prime Minister has talked a lot about and actually kind of breaks down what this concept of India as a Leading Power means and does India have any hope of becoming a Leading Power? That went live. Today it's on our website. You can download it. That event will be on Monday. And then on Wednesday, the 13th, that's the last event of the four. The Indian Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, will be speaking here in the afternoon. So it'll be a nice bookend. You'll hear the American version this week and Indian version next time. And that'll be a kind of wide-ranging conversation about what's happening in India on the economic agenda. So we started with Samanth and... And we end with Arun Jaitley. And we end with Arun Jaitley. So please join me in thanking Samanth for being here. Kick up a copy at a bookstore near you and hope to see you for this weekend next for these other events. Thanks so much.