By: K. Selvarathnam
In a recent commentary for Jaffna Monitor, the veteran Indian journalist M. R. Narayan Swamy argued that the exclusion of Douglas Devananda from India’s Vice President C. P. Radhakrishnan’s April 19 meeting with Sri Lankan Tamil leaders at the Taj Samudra was more than an oversight. It was, he suggested, a slight to the Eelam People’s Democratic Party leader and, by extension, evidence of a “gaping hole” in New Delhi’s Sri Lanka policy.
With due respect to the writer, however, a closer look at how the Colombo meeting was actually convened suggests a more prosaic explanation.
We should understand that the Vice President’s engagement on Sunday was not billed as an all-party Tamil consultation. Instead, it was designed as a narrower meeting with representatives of Tamil parties currently holding seats in Parliament.
A PARLIAMENTARY GUEST LIST
The seven Tamil figures who met Mr. Radhakrishnan came from three parties: the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK); the Democratic Tamil National Alliance (DTNA), represented by its parliamentarian Selvam Adaikalanathan of TELO and senior figure Dharmalingam Siddharthan of PLOTE; and the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF). The TNPF’s leader, Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, was abroad at the time and proposed that the party’s general secretary, Selvarajah Kajendran, attend in his place.
ITAK, with eight Members of Parliament in the current 17th Parliament — the largest Tamil bloc by a distance — was given the most places at the table. Four of the seven seats went to the party: its acting president C. V. K. Sivagnanam; acting general secretary M. A. Sumanthiran; parliamentary group leader and Batticaloa MP Shanakiyan Rasamanickam, the lone representative of ITAK’s eastern strength at the meeting; and Jaffna District parliamentarian Sivagnanam Sritharan, whose separate standing within the party.
NOT A SNUB AIMED AT ONE MAN
The heart of Narayan Swamy’s argument is that Mr. Devananda’s absence was singular, symbolic, and political — an Indian policy failure dressed up as a guest-list decision. Several of the most prominent Tamil leaders outside Parliament were also not invited. Among them: V. Anandasangaree, the veteran leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front, whose credentials as an India-friendly, anti-LTTE Tamil voice are at least as long as Mr. Devananda’s; C. V. Wigneswaran, the former Chief Minister of the Northern Province and a sitting political figure of considerable profile; Suresh Premachandran of the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front; and Annamalai Varadaraja Perumal, the former Chief Minister of the briefly constituted North-Eastern Provincial Council under the 13th Amendment — a figure whose personal history is inseparable from the 1987 Accord that Narayan Swamy’s piece invokes at length.
None of these leaders is in the current Parliament. None was invited. Read together with Mr. Devananda’s absence, the pattern points away from a bespoke exclusion and toward a straightforward rule of admission: a seat in the House, or a direct party line to one.
A Matter of Design
Diplomatic engagements of this kind are often tightly structured — shaped by time constraints, protocol, and the intended scope of discussion. In that context, selectivity is not unusual.
But in a fragmented political landscape, selectivity can easily be interpreted as exclusion. Sri Lanka’s Tamil polity today reflects precisely such fragmentation, making any representative gathering inherently incomplete.
Seen in that light, the April 19 meeting appears less an exercise in political signaling than one of design — an attempt to engage a manageable set of parliamentary actors within limited time and format.
The questions it has raised may ultimately say as much about the complexities of Tamil political representation as they do about the workings of diplomacy.
