Book review: Sri Lanka The New Country

Author: Padma Rao Sundarji

Publisher: Harper-Collins Publishers, Noida, UP

Price: Rs 499; Pages 322

By Col R Hariharan

Seasoned journalist Padma Rao Sundarji’s book Sri Lanka – The new country is refreshingly different from scores of other books that appeared in the wake of the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ending their 25-year separatist war in May 2009. She is a self-confessed critic “of the one-size fits all application of Western perceptions, expectations and demands unique to South Asia” a view I heartily share. This probably has given her the strength to look at the Sri Lankan side of the “fence” that had been ignored particularly by Western critics and sections of Sri Lanka Tamil diaspora and polity after the war ended in May 2014.

The author has not allowed her tenuous South Indian lineage (with some Tamil connection also) to cloud her objective of reporting the situation on ground as she saw and understood it. Her years of experience as the South Asia bureau chief of Der Spiegel, the reputed German news magazine, in New Delhi with sufficient exposure to Sri Lanka and its ethnic conflict has enabled her in writing an eminently readable book for the average reader and traveller to the emerald island.   

After giving a brief background to the current Sri Lanka scene, inevitably touching upon the origin and growth of Tamil extremism and separatism, Padma Rao gives vignettes of her visits to Sri Lanka during various periods before and after the War. Absence of the shrill rhetoric we have become so familiar with writings on Sri Lanka is a welcome feature of the book. So is the absence of instant remedies in her reporting.

Padma has almost succeeded in presenting Sri Lanka with “equanimity and open mind” as she claims by not allowing emotion to override common sense in presenting her viewpoint.  But I have one reservation. Padma’s analyses fail to critically examine the Tamil arguments with the same interest she has shown in presenting the Sri Lanka government viewpoint. Perhaps this was intentional as it would have made the reading heavy. But the question why Tamils ‘well integrated in Sri Lanka upper echelons of power’ like Northern Province Chief Minister CV Wigneswaran supporting a united Sri Lanka were not charmed by Mahinda Rajapaksa’s dispensation for Tamils during five years of peace is left unanswered. Rajapaksa’s failure to put through a nuanced strategy in the last five years is as much responsible for this as Tamil politics or LTTE’s overseas remnants’ handiwork has sustained the ethnic confrontation. Rajapaksa’s defeat in the January 2015 presidential election due to massive minority votes against him is a testimony of this. To certain extent this weakness has been rectified in the quick fix addition towards the end, written after presidential election.

In chapter 3, Kilinochi commander Major General Udaya Perera cogently presents the Sri Lankan perspectives on some key issues like allegations of war crimes and human rights violations. But it is to be noted that he had wisely avoided commenting on the alleged killing of surrendering LTTE leadership in the last stages of war (White Flag incident). The cameos on former LTTE women cadres now serving in the army and former LTTE’s international gunrunner KP (chapter 4) and on former Tamil Tiger PR man Daya Master (chapter 7) touch upon how they have come to terms with life after the LTTE’s defeat. Chapter 6 is a unique but a little lengthy exploration of the rare species of Tamil Buddhists in Jaffna before and after the war. The rest of the book presents the beautiful country that Sri Lanka is (if we omit the two political interviews (with Rajapaksa and Wigneswaran) with added human touch.  

The author need not be apologetic (as she had done in the end)  for writing a book on post-war Sri Lanka that focuses on the human aspects of the nation trying to rebuild itself from the embers of nearly three decades of war that cost nearly 200,000 lives. Both Sinhala and Tamil purists who look at the past in the back drop of the past are likely to criticise the book because it does not conform to their analytical pattern. But I have faced years of criticism for telling them to learn from the past to build a new idiom for peace. I am sure Padma Rao as a seasoned reporter has enough resilience to take it in the stride; this is what I do.

Written on March 15, 2015; Published as “Sri Lanka-The New Country” by Padma Rao Sundarji is a Refeshingly Different Book from Scores of Others Appearing After Defeat of LTTE    in www.dbsjeyaraj.com