‘Eluga Tamil’ rally in Batti postponed

By Dharisha Bastians 

The second ‘Eluga Tamil’ rally expected to be held in Batticaloa tomorrow has been postponed after Northern Province Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran was undecided about attendance and provincial education authorities decreed that Saturday 21 January would be a school day, organisers said.  

Organisers announced that the rally had been tentatively postponed for 28 January after a massive Pongal festival organised by the TNA in Batticaloa also threatened to overshadow tomorrow’s planned demonstration. 

The Tamil People’s Council (TPC), a civil society organisation led by Chief Minister Wigneswaran, was to hold the second of the ‘Eluga Tamil’ (Rise Tamil!) rallies in the Eastern Province town, after the group’s first demonstration in Jaffna drew thousands in September 2016.  

TPC Co-Chairman Thambipodi Vasantharajah told Daily FT that Chief Minister Wigneswaran was yet to decide if he would attend the ‘Eluga Tamil’ rally in the east. 

“The Chief Minister has not given us his decision yet on whether he will attend. Our people are in dialogue with him now,” Vasantharajah said. 

He added that if Wigneswaran was unable to attend the demonstration on 28 January, the rally would have to be postponed again. “He is the leader of our organisation, so he must be there,” the TPC Co-Chairman emphasised in a telephone interview. 

The organisers also pointed to a massive Pongal Festival held by the TNA that was held yesterday, as being one reason for postponement. 

Vasantharajah said it was unlikely that people in Batticaloa would attend two political events held only two days apart. 

According to Vasantharajah, organisers felt compelled to postpone the event after the Eastern Province Education Department decreed that Saturday, 21 January would be a school day, in lieu of a school holiday granted on 13 January. He said the TPC did not want the rally to disrupt student activity in Batticaloa town. 

The rally was to be held at Patalipuram Grounds in Batticaloa tomorrow, with several constituent parties of the Tamil National Alliance expected to participate and mobilise support for the event. 

However, the TNA Pongal festival held at the Devanayagam Hall in Batticaloa, with large crowds expected to be in attendance, had threatened to overshadow the ‘Eluga Tamil’ rally, Daily FT learns. 

The festival which was attended by TNA Chief Sampanthan, the party’s Jaffna District Parliamentarian M.A. Sumanthiran and others, drew large crowds that packed the hall to capacity yesterday. The TNA had also invited Muslim representatives to participate in the festival, Sumanthiran told Daily FT. 

Uncertainty about the ability to draw crowds in the eastern district, which is also home to a large population of Muslims, also may have prompted the announcement one day before the Pongal Festival, highly placed sources told Daily FT. 

Muslim community leaders this week expressed concerns about the rally would lead to tensions in Batticaloa, where Tamil and Muslim communities live cheek-by-jowl. Secretary of the Kattankudy Mosque Federation A.L.M. Sabeel said Muslims had been ignored by the TPC when it was organising the rally in Jaffna last year. 

The only reason the TPC was holding discussions with Muslims in the east ahead of the Eluga Tamil rally in Batticaloa, was because it was wanted the support of the Muslim community to press for a re-merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, Sabeel told Daily FT in Kattankudy this week. 

However, TNA Eastern Provincial Councillor Sathasivam Viyalendran, a member of TNA constituent party and former paramilitary group PLOTE, said that while the Eluga Tamil rally would mainly highlight Tamil concerns, it would also seek to bring out concerns of ordinary Muslims and Sinhalese, who also call the Eastern Province home. 

September’s Jaffna rally proved highly controversial and drew a sharp response from nationalist forces in the island’s south, which compared it to the LTTE-led Pongu Tamil demonstrations held from 2002-2004. 

A declaration during the rally put forward a comprehensive set of Tamil demands, including an end to military occupation of private land in the North, greater devolution and the releases of prisoners being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. It also called for a stop to what organisers called “Sinhala colonisation” of the North and the erection of unauthorised Buddhist statues in the predominantly Hindu region.