[TamilNet, Monday, 18 May 2026, 12:19 GMT]
18 May is not a day for empty remembrance. It is a day that tests whether Eezham Tamils will remain faithful to the political meaning of Mu'l'livaaykkaal and Vaddukkoaddai, or allow both to be folded back into a ‘safer’ language of accommodation. The issue is not whether formulas can be drafted. It is whether a people whose claim rests on homeland, sovereignty, and the insistence that Tamil political status was never validly surrendered should once again be pushed into recasting that claim as an internal arrangement within the very state whose legitimacy they dispute. That, in essence, is what lies behind the current push toward “maximum devolution” and similar formulas. Rather than opening a new path, it risks drawing Eezham Tamils back into the constitutional grammar of containment.

On 18 May, remembrance loses much of its meaning if Eezham Tamils are once again pushed into drafting exercises that internalise their own subordination.

TamilNet has seen a confidential draft now being circulated in Tamil political circles, and its language is revealing: it speaks not of restoration but of “an initial settlement” that “permits autonomy within the existing state of Sri Lanka”.

This is not a minor tactical choice.

It forms part of a wider conditioning project that assigns Eezham Tamils the task of translating an inalienable political claim into safer constitutional language, as if they have not already learned, through history and loss, the limits and failures of federal dead ends.

On a day bound to Mu'l'livaaykkaal, non-ceding, and the unfinished question of sovereignty, that approach reads less like a serious political response than another familiar exercise in containment.

This is the deeper problem with the current push around “maximum devolution”.

Its defenders will present it as moderation, pragmatism, or strategic realism. But the issue lies in what is being asked of the Tamil side at the starting point.

If the claim is one of historical homeland, prior sovereignty, and the insistence that Tamil political status was never validly surrendered, then the burden is not on Eezham Tamils to draft a constitutional scheme that treats Sri Lanka as the unquestioned container and merely negotiates space within it.

The effect is to move the issue away from restoration and into the narrower terrain of accommodation, and to recast a question of political status as one of administration.

That reduction is not new. It is precisely the pattern that Tamil political thought had already begun to move away from long before Vaddukkoaddai. The significance of the pre-Vaddukkoaddai discourse is that it shows the sovereignty line was not a late excess or a post-1976 improvisation.

It emerged from repeated experience with constitutional formulas that promised room while securing subordination. The movement away from parity and federal hope toward the language of nationhood, homeland, constituent power, and restoration was not rhetorical escalation. It was a conclusion drawn from failure.

C. Suntharalingam had already moved beyond the language of accommodation. His conclusion was stark:

Whether one agrees with every part of that formulation or not, its significance is clear. The issue was no longer being framed as one of better internal adjustment, but as one of restoration after the collapse of constitutional remedies.

In the June 1958 draft proclamation attached below, he went so far as to call for the excluded Tamil territory to be constituted as “a distinct and separate Dominion and Eelam” within the British Commonwealth.

That historical record matters now because there is once again an attempt to assign Eezham Tamils a constitutional homework exercise, as if the issue were one of drafting skill rather than political legitimacy.

There is a reason why earlier Tamil political thought became increasingly sceptical of settlements framed within the grammar of the Sri Lankan state. It had already seen what such exercises do. Such exercises do not begin from the Tamil claim at all, but from an imposed constitutional order within which Tamils are then asked to define the terms of their own subordination.

This is why the judgment reached by S.J.V. Chelvanayakam in 1976 still matters.

He did not speak ambiguously. He said:

That statement should not be treated as a ceremonial relic.

It speaks directly to the present effort to recycle federalism in new packaging.

Thanthai Chelva's point was not merely that previous arrangements had fallen short. It was that federalism itself, as a Tamil-authored objective, had proved incapable of recovering what had been lost.

He was explicit that the movement was no longer asking for a federal constitution.

To return now, on the fiftieth anniversary of Vaddukkoaddai itself, to another Tamil-authored federal or devolved formula should not be mistaken for sophistication.

It amounts instead to a regression toward an older and already discredited line.

The distinction between evaluating a proposal and originating one is therefore crucial. Others may make proposals. They may carry the burden of showing that what they offer addresses the underlying issue of consent, political status, and security. The nation of Eezham Tamils may examine such proposals with care. But that is very different from asking them to formulate the ceiling of their own claim in sub-sovereign language.

A people cannot preserve an inalienable right by drafting it downward in order to appear ‘reasonable’.

The political principles already articulated on the Tamil side are clear enough on this point. They treat sovereignty as historical, earned, remedial, and moral. They insist that it was lost but never ceded. They reject the idea that the post-colonial constitutional order ever acquired legitimacy through Tamil consent. They warn that constitutional processes can become traps that compel Tamils to cede what they never ceded. They also reject any future constitutional clause declaring the state indivisible. These are not decorative formulations. They exist precisely to guard against the kind of re-framing now being attempted.

The constitutional consent question remains central.

If the Tamil homeland has never been brought into the Sri Lankan constitutional order by free democratic consent, then there is no basis for treating that order as politically settled simply because it has endured.

Constitutional repetition is not constitutional legitimacy.

A framework rejected at its origin and later reproduced without a democratic mandate from the people most directly affected by it does not acquire moral force through duration.

The real question is therefore not how powers may be distributed within a settled order, but what kind of political compact, if any, could ever be legitimate where the underlying issue of consent remains unresolved.

This is why the language of “maximum devolution” is politically deceptive.

It sounds expansive, but in practice it performs a constraining function. It takes the broadest possible Tamil claim and recasts it in the narrowest acceptable constitutional vocabulary. It asks Eezham Tamils to prove seriousness by lowering their own horizon. It rewards those who speak the language of accommodation and treats any insistence on restoration as excess.

Whatever name is given to this process, its effect is not neutral mediation but the domestication of the claim before the real question is addressed.

The same pattern has been evident in much of the international treatment of the Tamil question since 2009.

Pressure does not usually come in the form of an open demand to abandon self-determination. It arrives through softer substitutions.

‘Development’ takes the place of political recognition. ‘Governance’ language replaces sovereignty. ‘Reconciliation’ displaces accountability.

Constitutional workshops are offered in place of addressing political status. The aim is less to resolve the dispute than to translate it into terms the existing order can absorb.

This is one reason remembrance itself has become contested terrain.

Mu'l'livaaykkaal is too often pushed toward a humanitarian register stripped of political consequence. It is turned into grief without argument, a generic lament that leaves the issues of sovereignty, militarisation, and continuing domination untouched.

Yet the problem is not only a past atrocity. The structure that made that atrocity possible has not disappeared. Any formula that treats the Tamil question as though it were now merely a matter of better institutional design is not only inadequate; it also evades the political character of what remains unresolved.

The same applies to the dilution of the May 18 remembrance itself. Business gatherings, cultural showcases, and the ordinary forms of diasporic social life may all have their place at other times. But when they begin to crowd out the political content of the remembrance week, a pattern increasingly visible across diaspora spaces, they do more than distract. They contribute to a reordering of memory, turning a month that should carry political insistence into one shaped by managed sentiment.

The issue is not culture as such. It is whether culture is being used to soften political memory into something safer.

Mu'l'livaaykkaal Remembrance should also not be framed as passive victimhood.

Grief is real, but remembrance is also bound to political continuity. What ended at Mu'l'livaaykkaal was not the right of self-determination. That right was not surrendered there, and it cannot now be surrendered in carefully moderated policy prose.

This is where V. Navaratnam’s warning retains its force. It speaks not only to an earlier phase of struggle, but to the pressure that appears whenever the Tamil claim is to be softened in the name of compromise.

He wrote:

That paragraph matters because it helps explain the ethic of non-capitulation that came to define the struggle, including in the final days before 18 May 2009. One need not reduce history to slogans to understand its significance. The point is that, within that political tradition, compromise was not seen as a neutral procedural option. It was understood as the stage at which the claim itself could be narrowed, recoded, and lost. That is why the pressure to accept externally induced formulas, especially those drafted within the framework of the Sri Lankan state, cannot be treated as politically innocent.

The same warning applies now.

There are Tamil circles, especially among diaspora groupings aligned with projects promoted through Swiss and London-based channels, who continue to imagine that if only the wording is careful enough, externally acceptable enough, and moderate enough, the next formula will escape the fate of the others.

But this is not a problem of insufficient drafting skill.

Eezham Tamils do not need to be instructed in federal language. They know the history too well. They know the long record of pacts, constitutional promises, and carefully drafted schemes that left the underlying structure intact. They know what Westminster-derived constitutionalism did not protect.

The essential trajectory is not from Vaddukoddai to Westminster, but from the Westminster-imposed unitary model toward the sovereignty-centred political vision articulated at Vaddukoddai.

They know what the Soulbury framework failed to protect and what it helped bury.

They know why later Tamil political thought moved beyond the belief that federalism, especially when framed as the Tamil demand itself, could secure political existence.

Even at the regional level, the same uncertainty remains.

India has had long enough to recognise that the 1987 framework and the 13th Amendment do not answer the Tamil question.

Whether New Delhi is prepared to think beyond that exhausted line, or whether it will settle for the lesser models now circulating through G7-linked channels, remains unanswered.

In that space, the significance of Tamil Nadu inevitably grows.

That is why even a phrase such as “initial settlement” deserves close attention. It sounds cautious, but its function is larger than caution. It asks Eezham Tamils to enter the argument from the wrong side. It places them inside the constitutional frame first, and only then offers autonomy within it. But if the legitimacy of that frame is itself in dispute, then that reverses the proper sequence. No people in that position should be induced to validate the container before the status question is addressed.

At the very least, any serious proposal would have to proceed on the basis of an explicitly external or internationally guaranteed compact between peoples, not merely a devolved arrangement inside an indivisible state.

Even that would only begin the argument.

A confederal logic would be more intellectually honest than a federal one if the aim were genuinely to address coexisting political entities rather than to absorb one into the other.

What is now being circulated under the label of maximum devolution does not meet that threshold. It remains within the familiar horizon of internal settlement.

That is why 18 May requires clarity, not another rehearsal of old evasions.

Others may put forward formulas if they wish. Let them carry the burden of showing that what they propose addresses the real problem rather than concealing it. Eezham Tamils may examine such proposals. But they should not be pushed into drafting their own reduction and then praised for being realistic.

Vaddukkoaddai and Mu'l'livaaykkaal cannot be honoured by translating non-ceding into managed devolution.

What is presented as a way forward is better understood as the return of an old trap in updated constitutional language, asking Eezham Tamils to commemorate loss by rehearsing surrender.

Chronology: