Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam’s rejection of Provincial Councils – sour grapes

Now, that his pal Manivannan has broken off from him with a good half of the party, Gajendrakumar has no chance of winning. His rejection of PCs is simply sour grapes

I woke up this morning (5 Jan. 2021) and was shocked to read that Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam will oppose Provincial Councils, and all our Tamil aspirations to take decisions about ourselves by ourselves. 

Every Tamil likes to be guarded by kindly police who speak to us in Tamil. We want ministers to whom we can express our needs and shortcomings with clarity – in Tamil. We want control over our lands so that they are not leased for exploitation to companies and our forest and animal reserves may be conserved; and that Sinhalese prisoners and hooligans will not be settled around us by a central government currying favours with their voters. I can go on. But these remain our unfulfilled dreams, what we hope to fight for and achieve.

And then along comes Gajendrakumar. It is said that one must argue the point and not demolish the person opposing our point of view. Anything contravening this is said to be ad hominem and is seen as bad manners. However, sometimes the character of a person and his family tells us that person is not to be trusted. To ignore that works to our peril. 

The purpose of this article is to examine Gajendrakumar’s family antecedents and conclude that he cannot be trusted with anything that affects Tamil lives. The man has no loyalties to anyone. Except for the time the LTTE admittedly rigged elections, he has been defeated and just squeaked in in 2020.

His grandfather G.G. Ponnambalam (GGP) voted for stripping our Tamil brethren in the hill-country of their citizenship. After promising Savumiam oorthy Thondaman to support them, in the first bill he feigned a massive cough and walked out of parliament to avoid voting. In the second bill he shamelessly voted against Hill-country Tamils. According to J.L. Fernando (Three Prime Ministers of Ceylon, MD Gunasena, 1963, p. 27), “The Damila [Ponnambalam] bowed low before the Sinhala Lion, D.S. Senanayake, and was made a Minister.” GGP would soon be rejected by the Tamil electorate.

Take Rose Clough, Gajendrakumar’s paternal grandmother. Through her Gajendrakumar, scion of the Clough family of Kaarai Tivu, is into big money from rubber estates in Malaya. He is building a palace on Cross Street Nallur close to my home and, after a change of mind, is taking it down to build by another plan. His roots are Christian. And yet, the family has argued for a Hindutva order. His mother told Carlo Fonseka that the Vice Chancellor of Jaffna ought to be a Hindu according to the Ramanathan Trust. 

When I joined that dinner in a Tamil home in Wellawatte, Carlo beckoned me to come towards him as he was speaking to the mother and said, “I say Jeevan. You know Mrs. Kumar Ponnambalam (Yogalakshmi), don’t you? She says that according to the Ramanathan Trust no Christian may be made VC/Jaffna. Do you know anything about that? Yogalakshmi, waffled and went off without even waiting to eat, telling the hostess that she would never have come if she had known that I would be there. Ramanathan gave the land to the university, but indeed, the Ramanathan Trust has no provision like that. Truthfulness is not one of the family’s strong points. 

Switching to my times, in the 1970s Jaffna saw a lot of political turmoil. Standardisation had just been introduced in its initial form, adding 28 marks to the four-subject aggregate of every Sinhalese student for deciding on university entrance. Thus, a permanent secretary’s son at Royal was declared underprivileged while a street sweeper’s son from Vaideeshwara was deemed advantaged. We were aghast and angry. The Maanavar Peravai was founded and we took to several protest marches. A Sub-Inspector called Waragoda was terrorising us. I too was badly assaulted by him.

The Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duraiyappah had control of the all-important bicycle tyre through the coop and wanted us to pay the Rs. 2 SLFP membership fee to get his signature for buying our tyres and being mobile. Politics was strange those days. We were a Federal Party family related to several MPs by blood or marriage (Chelvanayakam, Kathiravetpillai, Vanniasingahm, Tharmalingam, Naganathan). My Federalist Uncle, Peter Somasundaram, ran the illegal Federal Party Post Office and was jailed for the Sri-tarring campaign. He was the FP’s Councillor for Chundikuli. 

Duraiyappah was part of the Jaffna Protestant lot though he played the religious card to effect. His wife was my mother’s student. We were at once enemies and friends. When I went to him for my cycle tyre permit to the Mayor’s Office, he asked me, “Hello young Hoole. What can I do for you?” and signed off on my permit without asking me for the Rs. 2 charge. Sirima Bandaranaike really thought he was very popular for getting so many new members into her party.

Duraiyappah asked me why I will not support him. I told him the SLFP was a communalist party. I mentioned that I had been admitted to Peradeniya for engineering, and then moved to the Ceylon College of Technology after 28 marks were added to Sinhalese students. The politician that he was, he promised me: “Oh I did not know about it. You should have come to me. I will speak to the PM and get you back to Peradeniya.” I never pursued it.

The point is that all of us hated Sirima. We hated S.I. Waragoda even more. A horrible man, at his next posting in Anuradhapura he had tried his jackboot tactics and was murdered. We were a meek people then. As a people we rejected Colvin’s constitution which removed the protections of Article 29 and imposed Buddhism.

It was a time of political hyperventilation. Sirima and nephew Felix Dias Bandaranaike (who gave non-competitive admission to law college for MPs and gave us lawyers who do not know the law) were visiting Jaffna often. It was the general view that they should be boycotted. Gajendrakumar’s father-in-law T. Murugesapillai was additional GA through promotions. He did three things that made people hate him. One he washed Sirima’s feet when she went to the Nallur Temple. It was like GG falling before D.S. Senanayake. Then worse, two, he garlanded Sirima violating the norm that a man garlands only his wife. In that anti-government frenzy there were newspaper headlines asking whether he had married Sirima. And three, Felix was on the stage at a public meeting. Murugesapillai was in the audience. When Felix needed a light, Murugesapillai, despite being Additional GA, ran to the stage and lit Felix’s cigarette for him like a peon. We were devastated. In Tamil there is a saying, “kind marries kind.”

Loyalty is the least of the virtues of the Ponnambalams. Much has been made of female servants facing trouble in GG’s home. Exploits in Tamil Nadu were the subject of an FP Election rally I attended in Narikundu in 1970. Gajendrakumar himself is now married for the second time.

When UNHRC 30/1 was passed, Gajendrakumar, trying to stake a strong LTTE position, burnt a copy of the resolution claiming it had nothing in it. At the time, he was married to a strongly pro-LTTE British Tamil whom he has since divorced and remarried. 

Still yearning for succession to the LTTE mantle, during the 2018 UNHRC hearings, he went to Geneva seeming to demand punishments for war criminals using the same resolution he had burnt as useless. There he made a pitch for switching from UNHRC to UNSC in New York. At the UNSC we Tamils have no one to talk for us while there are countries ready to veto anything against Sri Lanka. All the painstakingly gathered eye-witness testimony and video evidence is in Geneva; not with the UNSC. The many activists in Geneva fighting for justice for victims pleaded with Gajendrakumar not to jeopardise their work which was slowly but surely moving forward. According to a Muslim activist there, the other activists fled from Gajendrakumar merely on seeing him. Seemingly supporting 30/1, he was undermining it.

Very recently Gajendrakumar fell out with his member V. Manivannan. Manivannan now says that Gajendrakumar had given his party offices to the CID who were keeping watch on us. Why was he silent till now? They are all the same.

That is our man. At the time, it seemed that he was trying to undermine the efforts to get war criminals punished. Today he is scuttling all our effort to get some say in running our lives.

Recall that in 2013 Gajendrakumar who had been badly defeated in the 2010 and 2015 parliamentary elections had no chance of winning the PC elections. When Bishop Rayappu Joseph wanted all Tamils to contest together, Gajendrakumar emphatically said he would not accept Provincial councils as even a starting point prior to a long-term solution. Then after 2015, working with C.V. Wigneswaran, he got hope and was preparing to contest. Now, that his pal Manivannan has broken off from him with a good half of the party, Gajendrakumar has no chance of winning. His rejection of PCs is simply sour grapes. The President may be able to make him bow down and rise as a Minister like his grandfather. That is the kind of man he is.

The TNA has a huge responsibility to show that if given the reins of our Provincial Council and Municipalities, they can make self-governance real for us. It can start by getting the Nallur and Jaffna municipalities in order, and getting the Palaly Airport which came through Indian pressure to make devolution real, going again after the Government shut it down and transferred out the equipment and staff.