Articles by Jayadeva Uyangoda

The January presidential election campaign as well as the post-election developments in Sri Lanka indicate quite clearly that the dominant political class of the country is deeply and antagonistically divided. The tragedy of electoral democracy in Sri Lanka is that elections do not seem to help the political class to negotiate and settle their contradictions and resolve problems in the polity. Rather, elections compel the factions of the political class to resort to false agendas and, in turn, to invent and pursue enmities. Although the civil war is over, the trajectory of the island's post-civil war politics is still in the process of being formed. One thing though seems clear. Neither the ruling party nor the opposition (not even the minority parties) are going to place the rights of the minorities at the centre of their political agenda.

Indian and Pakistani political establishments should deal with the post-Mumbai crisis with greater prudence than they seem to demonstrate at present. Both countries should realise the immense dangers awaiting them if one country, Pakistan, avoids its responsibility towards India's security and the other country, India, globalises the threat from militants operating from Pakistan. There are signs that sections of the Indian political class are eagerly awaiting closer military cooperation with the US under Obama with the hope that India would be the sole beneficiary of the new south Asian war against terrorism. That would be a fresh invitation to greater disaster.

Pakistan and Nepal offer contrasting scenarios in a transition to democracy. Both countries are going through a period of painful transition with significant specificities. The complicated power-sharing arrangements in Pakistan and the Maoists' task in Nepal of integrating their own parallel institutions with the state apparatus and managing a transition in a "bourgeois democracy" are all difficult jobs to carry out. South Asians watch with both anxiety and hope at the two experiments, especially in Nepal.

The radical, Sinhalese nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna has split, the real reasons for which are not yet clear. Among the various possible reasons are the mainstream jvp's unease with a breakaway faction's Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalist project and the collision of the Sinhalese nationalist and class struggle lines within the party. It is also a dispute about coalition strategies that has spilled on to the domain of personal relations. For now, the Rajapakse administration is the beneficiary.

The ltte's separate Tamil state project faces a "quasi-state trap" in which the group finds that only by war can it defend the state-like entity it has built over the years. But the defensive war it has been engaged in exposes the vulnerability of its state-like behaviour. The ltte's "state" is also overdeveloped militarily but grossly underdeveloped in civilian governance. Making matters more difficult is one fact (the Tamil group has never built a strong and autonomous political movement) and one trend (globally the legitimacy of minority nationalisms is in decline).