Sinhala-Tamil or Centre-Periphery

Sinhala-Tamil or Centre-Periphery?
G P D G PARTHASARATHY reaches Colombo next week. By the time these lifles appear in print he would have done a neat quiet job of sorting out the ethnic tangle in Sri Lanka. His solutions or recommended solutions may not meet the expectations of Uma Maheswaran and other Tamil Tigers, if they have any expectations from such trips and such formulas that is. Nevertheless, Parthasarathy is about to undertake as delicate and complex a job as the one he did as the Vice- Chancellor of the JNU. We do not mean sorting out the problems of that University! The reference is to the talks on Kashmir which he conducted then. Being an Iyengar Brahmin he would not arouse any undue suspicions on the part of the Sinhalese people. For them Tamil nationalism" is essen- tially the non-Brahmin, even anti- Bifchmin, nationalism of the Dravida Kazhagam variety. Ths is probably the reason why Jayewardene accepted his nomination. After all, a single Iyengar is much better than a host of Indians who, he had thought, would land in Sri Lanka and with whom he had solemnly proclaimed, "wo shall fight''.