Leadership crisis rocks Ceylon Workers Congress

By Nirupama Subramanian

COLOMBO, JULY 9. The void left by Sauvimyamoorthy Thondaman, the leader of the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), who died last October, is manifesting in ways that can only be detrimental to the people whose interests the party claims to represent.

The political party-cum-trade union that boasts the largest following of Indian Tamils, is now in the throes of a leadership crisis, with five of its eight Members of Parliament ranged against the present leader, the dead patriarch's grandson and political heir, Mr. Arumugham R Thondaman.

Two cases filed by the dissidents will come up in the courts later this month. One seeks to prevent Mr. Thondaman from operating the bank accounts of the CWC, and the other asks that the dissidents be permitted to function from the district offices of the party, to which their entry has been barred since last month.

The crisis has hit the CWC at a time when shrewd leadership is most required. In the ongoing consultations on constitutional reforms, the CWC has yet to gain any ground on its main demand that descendants of Indian origin Tamils who were given Indian citizenship under the Srima-Shastri pact be automatically given Sri Lankan citizenship.

The inner-party rivalry is a legacy of the late Thondaman's iron hold over the CWC's organisation, his centralised leadership and intolerance of dissidence, and his blatant promotion of dynastic succession, overlooking the claims of more senior and experienced members.

The power struggle will no doubt be played out in the coming months, especially with general elections due by the end of this year. But for the side that emerges victorious, the immediate challenge would be to make the organisation responsive to the aspirations of the one million-strong community of Indian Tamils. At stake is the 60-year-old organisation's very survival.

Indian Tamils are classified as a distinct ethnic group of Sri Lanka, different from the Tamils of the north and east. They are mainly employed as wage labourers in the country's tea estates in the five central districts of Sri Lanka.

Despite the apparent political clout of the CWC, estate workers remain amongst the economically most depressed classes of Sri Lanka despite though they form the backbone of the country's biggest foreign-exchange earning industry. They are also among the most backward in Sri Lanka on social indicators.

So far, the CWC leadership has concentrated on using this captive vote-bank in each election to form an alliance with one of the two main Sinhalese-dominated political groupings, specifically, the side that seems the probable winner, in order to share the spoils of victory.

The CWC negotiates a wage hike now and then for the tea estate workers. But it can no longer take for granted the loyalty of its membership at election time, especially after the death of its father-figure. In fact, the gap between the CWC's politics and the increasing aspirations of younger generations of workers was nowhere more obvious than in the three elections held since 1997, for the local government, the provincial government and the presidency. In all these elections, the CWC vote share reduced significantly.

``With every election, we have been steadily losing ground. It shows that the CWC has to be completely reorganised and decentralised,'' said Mr. A.M.D. Rajan, Member of Parliament and one of the dissident leaders of the party.

Ironically, it is the older members of the CWC who have realised, perhaps from experience, the urgency for adopting fresh strategies to keep the party from becoming irrelevant.

``If the CWC is to survive as an organisation, it has to become something more than a trade union. It has not yet been able to understand that wages and living conditions on the estates are no longer the only issues. The issues are now about access to educational, employment and other opportunities in the society at large,'' said Professor K. Tudor Silva of the Department of Sociology of University of Peradeniya in Kandy.

Few youth on the estates want to work as manual labourers. But opportunities for education are limited on the estates. Moreover, thousands of estate youth have no papers identifying them as Sri Lankan citizens. So they are unable to avail of other employment opportunities elsewhere.

The fear of being mistaken for north-eastern Tamils and harassment by security forces hunting for LTTE cadres, keeps many of them from going out of the estates. ``It is a highly vulnerable situation,'' said Prof. Silva.

Though there is no conclusive evidence yet, there have been reports of the LTTE making inroads into the hill country to exploit the bitterness of the youth. The elder Thondaman was seen as a bulwark against LTTE infiltration of the tea estates, but the separatist group has no similar respect for the present leadership.

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