[TamilNet, Saturday, 03 January 2026, 14:10 GMT]
When the now-defunct Tamil People’s Council (TPC) released its federal proposals in 2016, TamilNet warned that the draft risked diluting the Tamil national question under Colombo-centric constitutionalism and externally driven “solutions.” Nearly a decade later, those warnings warrant renewed scrutiny for a clear and concrete reason. The All Ceylon Tamil Congress, also known as the Tamil National Peoples’ Front (TNPF) and currently represented in Parliament by a single member, continues to uphold the TPC proposals as a valid political framework. At the same time, certain European institutions, often through externally funded initiatives, promote Belgian or Swiss models as templates for the island. This risks reframing the Tamil question within donor-driven containment strategies rather than addressing its political substance.

[TamilNet Editorial Board]

Such approaches risk dislodging the independent articulation of the core principles of the nation of Eezham Tamils in an occupied homeland, among a politically active diaspora, and through sustained overseas solidarity.

The collective articulation of these core principles is rooted in the 1976 Vaddukoddai Resolution, the 1977 TULF electoral mandate, the 1985 Thimpu Principles, the 2002 Maaveerar-Naa'l articulation, and the 2003 Interim Self-Governing Authority position.

The Eezham Tamil principled position has been sustained through sacrifices that refused to capitulate Tamil sovereignty, culminating in Mu’l’li-vaaykkaal in 2009, followed by self-mobilised diaspora referenda across multiple countries, the 2013 Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal verdict in Bremen, and the 2015 Northern Provincial Council Genocide Resolution.

This articulation has found expression not only in Eezham Tamil political thought and mobilisation but also in State Assembly resolutions in Tamil Nadu affirming the legitimacy of Tamil self-determination.

Any framework that sidelines this collective articulation in favour of imported constitutional models risks reducing a national question to a managed administrative issue.

This continued endorsement cannot be treated as incidental.

The leadership of the TNPF, including its leader, Mr Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, repeatedly asserts that neither he nor his party compromises on Tamil sovereignty or the inalienable right to self-determination.

Yet the framework being defended structurally undermines both.

A claim of uncompromised sovereignty cannot coexist with reliance on a proposal that neutralises constituent power, dilutes nationhood, and renders self-determination unenforceable.

The purpose of revisiting the TPC/TNPF proposals is therefore not to question sincerity, but to expose the disconnect between political rhetoric and constitutional substance.

If Eezham Tamil sovereignty, constituent power, and remedial self-determination are genuinely non-negotiable and rooted in an inalienable political status that predates colonial rule and the post-UN international order, then the framework advanced in their name must withstand rigorous scrutiny. The TPC/TNPF proposals do not.

The preamble of the TPC/TNPF proposals advances a strong, on its face principled political claim. It insists that the island's conflict cannot be resolved through constitution-writing alone and therefore requires a pre-constitutional political agreement in the form of a treaty, comparable to the Dayton Agreement or the Good Friday Agreement.

This treaty is expected to recognise the Tamil people’s sovereignty, constituent power, traditional homeland, and inalienable right to self-determination, and to provide for a remedial referendum should the Sinhala Buddhist majority unilaterally abrogate the agreement.

Crucially, the treaty is framed as operating beyond domestic constitutional law and reinforced by external guarantees, precisely because past arrangements failed under a majoritarian override.

Yet the constitutional draft that follows steadily dismantles this logic.

* * *

Plurinationalism without constituent or national clarity

Articles 1.1 and 1.2 describe ‘Sri Lanka’ as a ‘pluri-national’ country composed of “constituent Peoples and Communities,” listing Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Up Country (Malaiyaka) Tamils, and others together. This formulation collapses several distinctions that are fundamental to constitutional theory and Tamil political history.

First, it conflates people as a socio-cultural category with the nation as a political subject endowed with sovereignty. Second, it avoids naming the Tamil nation altogether. The document consistently refers to “Tamils” or “Tamil People,” but never to the nation of Eezham Tamils, a term that carries clear political meaning rooted in the history of the struggle.

This omission is not stylistic. The Eezham Tamils have rejected being described as “Sri Lankan Tamils” precisely because that terminology subsumes nationhood within a unitary state identity. By omitting the name of the Eezham Tamil national group, the TPC/TNPF draft weakens the very claim to constituent power it purports to advance.

Comparative constitutional experience shows that plurinationalism often serves as a framework for recognising diversity while preserving central supremacy.

In European contexts, plurality is managed through communities and regions, while sovereignty continues to emanate from a single nation.

In Latin American contexts, plurinational constitutions recognise indigenous peoples while also including strong unity and territorial integrity clauses that permit centralised intervention.

In neither tradition does plurinationalism, by itself, guarantee co-equal constituent nationhood.

By invoking plurinationalism while avoiding the explicit naming of the nation of Eezham Tamils and leaving sovereignty and constituent authority undefined, the TPC/TNPF draft reframes what should be a question of co-equal political authorship as one of managed diversity.

In doing so, it evades the core constitutional issue raised in its own preamble: whether the Tamil nation stands as a founding constituent of the State or is merely accommodated within a framework ultimately authored and controlled elsewhere.

* * *

Territory diluted through administrative language

Article 1.3 identifies the Northern and Eastern Provinces as the territorial unit of the Tamil people and describes them as “the areas of historical habitation of the Tamils.”

This phrase is not neutral. It is lifted directly from the Indo–Lanka Agreement of 1987 and its implementing texts, where it was deliberately crafted to avoid recognising the concepts of historical homeland or traditional homeland.

J. N. Dixit, the Indian High Commissioner at the time, together with Gamini Dissanayake, a Sinhala minister involved in the drafting process, crafted this clause precisely to deny political recognition of Tamil territorial nationhood while offering only a descriptive acknowledgement of demographic presence. The phrase “areas of historical habitation” was deliberately framed to be weaker than “traditional homeland,” thereby leaving room for state-sponsored colonisation, boundary manipulation, and administrative reconfiguration.

By reproducing this language verbatim, the TPC/TNPF draft imports into its framework a formulation that was explicitly designed to negate Tamil homeland claims.

Territorial recognition is thus framed through Sri Lankan administrative categories and colonial-era boundaries rather than articulated as an inherent political right of the nation of Eezham Tamils. Territory is once again acknowledged descriptively but denied constitutional protection.

* * *

Self-determination was declared, then made conditional

Article 1.4 initially states that Tamils constitute a distinct people with an inalienable right to self-determination.

Yet the same clause immediately requires the Tamil people to pledge commitment to a “united and undivided Sri Lanka” that respects and affirms that right.

An inalienable right cannot be conditional.

Once self-determination is made dependent on prior allegiance to an indivisible state, it ceases to be foundational and becomes derivative. This move collapses self-determination into self-rule or autonomy, a distinction Tamil political thought has long warned against. Autonomy can be granted and withdrawn; self-determination cannot.

Presenting federalism as a substitute for self-determination or as a stepping stone to a referendum represents not pragmatism, but retreat.

In the Sri Lankan context, where even minimal internal self-government has been repeatedly undermined, federalism does not preserve the pathway to a referendum; rather, it forecloses it by design.

* * *

Federalism and the established Tamil political position

This retreat is especially striking when viewed against the consistent Tamil political position articulated over several decades.

From the Vaddukoddai Resolution and the Thimpu Principles, through the 2002 Maaveerar Nal Statement and the 2003 Interim Self-Governing Authority proposals, the Tamil side has maintained a clear doctrinal line.

It has not proposed federalism as its own political solution.

Instead, it has asserted the right to external self-determination while remaining open to considering a federal or other internal arrangement if such a proposal were formulated and placed by the Sri Lankan State itself or by a credible third-party international mediator.

Crucially, this openness was never intended to entail the abandonment of the external right to self-determination or the referendum principle.

Federalism, in this tradition, was a negotiable outcome, not a foundational demand, and certainly not a substitute for sovereignty.

By advancing a federal framework as a Tamil-authored proposal while simultaneously neutralising the referendum and external self-determination, the TPC/TNPF draft departs from this long-established position rather than building upon it.

* * *

The “Indissoluble Sovereignty” trap

The danger inherent in the language of “undivided” sovereignty is not theoretical.

It is well illustrated by comparative constitutional practice, most notably in Spain.

The Spanish Constitution proclaims the “indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation,” a clause that has served as a constitutional barrier to the exercise of self-determination.

When Catalonia organised a referendum in 2017 to determine its political future, the Spanish State denounced the exercise as unconstitutional, invoked emergency constitutional powers, suspended Catalan self-government, and criminalised political leaders involved in the process.

This response has been described in constitutional scholarship as the deployment of a “nuclear option”: the use of supreme constitutional unity clauses to override democratic expression, suspend autonomy, and reassert central control.

Once sovereignty is declared indissoluble, any attempt to exercise self-determination is automatically reframed as illegality or rebellion.

It is precisely this trap that the mainstream Tamil political position has consistently sought to avoid. Terms such as “undivided,” as used in the TPC/TNPF proposals, or “undivided and indivisible,” as proposed in the Aekiya Rajya discussion paper, are not neutral reassurances.

They are constitutional triggers that foreclose the right of self-determination in advance.

Given the historical experience of broken pacts, unilateral abrogation, and violent suppression, such formulations cannot be reconciled with the Tamil struggle’s insistence on retaining an external self-determination option.

* * *

Clause 21.1 and pre-emptive suppression

These contradictions culminate in Clause 21.1.

This provision authorises the Head of the Federal Government, based solely on his subjective satisfaction that a State is seeking to secede and that such secession is imminent, to declare a state of emergency and suspend the elected State government through a gubernatorial takeover.

No objective threshold is defined. No judicial determination is required. No treaty-based mechanism is invoked.

The centre becomes the sole arbiter of political intent and constitutional loyalty.

This is not a minor inconsistency. It is a conceptual contradiction.

A people recognised as possessing sovereignty and constituent power cannot simultaneously be treated as a subordinate entity whose political aspirations are subject to pre-emptive executive discipline.

Constituent power implies co-authorship of the State. Emergency takeover implies subordination within the State. These two logics cannot coexist within the same constitutional framework.

* * *

The referendum was deferred, denied, and neutralised in the TNPF/TPC framework

Defenders of the TPC/TNPF proposals argue that Clause 21.1 does not preclude a referendum, contending that it remains available as a later remedy.

This argument is flawed not only constitutionally but also under international law and in light of historical fact.

Under international law, the right to self-determination is not infinitely deferrable, nor can it be rendered conditional once a people has exhausted all reasonable internal remedies.

The Eezham Tamil people pursued federal and autonomy-based solutions throughout the period of non-violent struggle, engaging every available constitutional and parliamentary avenue within Ceylon and later Sri Lanka.

That process culminated in a transparent and democratic decision in 1977, when the Tamil electorate overwhelmingly mandated independence through the TULF manifesto.

That mandate was never lawfully displaced.

Instead, it was forcibly nullified by the Sixth Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution in 1983, which criminalised the very articulation of a political aspiration that had already been democratically expressed.

This amendment was imposed under a constitutional order that itself lacked Tamil consent, as every Sri Lankan constitution enacted on the island was adopted in the face of explicit Tamil opposition and without a Tamil mandate.

The same illegitimate constitutional framework was then used to permanently bar the Tamil people from reiterating, revisiting, or reaffirming their democratic choice.

Subjected thereafter to sustained repression and genocidal violence, the Tamil people were left with no effective means of political expression.

Under international law, where a people is denied meaningful internal self-determination and subjected to systematic suppression, recourse to last-resort resistance, including armed struggle, cannot be dismissed as illegitimate.

That struggle, and the de facto Tamil state that emerged from it, were ultimately annihilated through a genocidal onslaught in 2009.

Against this backdrop, reintroducing federalism as a new “experiment” after 2009, while postponing or conditioning the referendum demand, is not pragmatism. It is historical amnesia.

It amounts to reinventing a wheel that the Tamil people have already turned to exhaustion and reopening internal remedies that international law no longer requires them to retry.

In this context, Clause 21.1 must be read and denounced.

A referendum is not merely a procedural clause inserted into a constitutional text.

It presupposes political space: the freedom to debate, organise, mobilise, and articulate constitutional choices without fear of suspension or punishment.

Clause 21.1 extinguishes that space entirely. By criminalising political intent rather than unlawful acts, it enables the centre to pre-emptively intervene before any remedial pathway can be activated. The very act of preparing for a referendum can itself be construed as “seeking to secede,” thereby triggering an Emergency takeover.

In such a framework, the referendum survives only as a theoretical abstraction. A right that can be indefinitely deferred, conditionally suspended, or pre-emptively suppressed by the very authority it is meant to constrain is not a right at all. It is a constitutional illusion.

* * *

Treaty beyond domestic law, undone by domestic override

The preamble insists on a treaty that operates beyond domestic constitutional law because the numerically dominant majority unilaterally abrogated past arrangements.

Clause 21.1 directly undermines this claim.

It allows a purely domestic executive mechanism to override constituent autonomy without reference to the treaty, its guarantors, or its remedial procedures. The treaty ceases to be foundational and becomes symbolic.

* * *

The TPC/TNPF proposals attempt to combine incompatible constitutional logics: a constituent-power model grounded in the sovereignty of the nation of Eezham Tamils, inalienable self-determination, and a remedial referendum, and a sovereign-supremacy model in which the centre retains unilateral authority to suppress constituent self-government.

In practice, Clause 21.1 enforces the logic of central control, while the preamble merely pays lip service to constituent power. The two cannot coexist, resulting not in balance but in contradiction.

Self-determination cannot be both foundational and pre-emptively punishable.

A referendum cannot be both promised and rendered unreachable.

A treaty said to exist beyond domestic law cannot coexist with unilateral domestic override.

Until these contradictions are confronted directly, the TPC/TNPF proposals remain not a pathway to resolution, but a cautionary example of how transformative language can be absorbed and neutralised by inherited structures of state power.

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