A new storm in the tea cup

By?N Sathiya Moorthy

The controversy surrounding the ?forced entry? of Minister Jeevan Thondaman as general secretary of the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), the largest trade union in the plantation sector, into a tea factory in the hill country, has raised more concerns than provide any answers to long-pending problems.

At the core of the current issue is the government?s gazette notification after discussions with all stake-holders, including management association(s), to increase the daily wages to LKR 1,700, including a special allowance of LKR 350, which the government says, it intends handling tough and straight.

Of immediate concern however is Thondaman?s allegation that the management of a particular management had locked up 60 women employees, all of them Upcountry Tamils of recent Indian origin, or Indian-origin Tamils (IoTs). The purported reason for such managerial conduct was to force the women to remove the ?pottu?, or ?forehead stickers? and also ear-rings, as they could fall into the plucked tea.

This was the only management to have flagged concern in the matter, that too citing ISO standards in the matter. However, the CWC has cited the 10 principles of the FSC or the Responsibility of Forestry by the same company that seeks to ?uphold indigenous rights, community relations and workers? rights?.

Cultural homogenisation

Whether or not this particular estate management meant it, asking the Tamil women estate labour to remove their traditional practices that have serious personal significance to each one of them, may only be the latest in a series of majoritarian targeting of Tamil cultural identities, both of the SLT and Upcountry varieties, over the past several decades. It had begun with the era of ?Sinhala Only?, when after a series of physical assaults on the SLT community in particular, their women stopped wearing traditional saris and also the ?pottu? at least in open spaces, where they would stand out and could be targeted.

Today, in cities like Colombo and other Sinhala-majority areas, SLT women cannot be distinguished from their Sinhala sisters in matters of attire and accoutrements. They wear the very same slit-skirts and tops/shirts, tie their hair like any Sinhala colleague in the work-place, and sport no ?pottu?.

In a way, it was/is only a first step towards cultural homogenisation of the SLT community. Of course, the Upcountry Tamils living in mixed communities, and in Colombo and also suburban districts, too fell in line even without being told ? or, were they too told in unmistakable and unforgettable terms?

Of course, to date, SLT women in community-concentrated North and parts of the East have been living their lives the way their ancestors had done ? other than in terms of contemporary politics and politics-driven ethnic context. So were the Upcountry Tamil women in their own unpolluted hill localities. Not any more, it would seem.

Until proved otherwise, one has to assume that there was nothing ?majoritarian? in the estate management?s overnight insistence on Tamil women labour removing their cultural identity-markers that have much more significance than otherwise understood ?or acceptable or both. The ?pottu? on the forehead is an indicator of the woman?s marital status.

Of course, young girls, pre-marriage also wear the ?pottu? but the importance is that widows don?t do so. That is to say, the removal of the ?pottu?, especially any forced removal, portends misfortune. That is the traditional belief of the average Tamil woman and also to her family and larger community.

Two centuries and after…

One can only assume that the estate management, even 200 years of working with Upcountry Tamil labour, is unaware of this fact and its deep significance for everyone concerned ? the individual, her family and the larger community. Or, else, it has to be seen only as a sign and symbol of the continued oppression of the estate Tamil labour by the estate management and possibly the administration, much of which is yet to shed its colonial past even seven decades after Independence.

It used to be said of the Colombo Seven elite ? Sinhalas, SLT and whoever ? that they used to pull out their woollens when it?s winter in London. Some of them changed tack and began pulling out the woollens when it?s winter in Washington, especially in more recent decades. This is truer of the hill-bound estate manager, more than their city-dwelling owners and directors. They still live with the inherited vestiges of a colonial past, celebrating it all as a legacy, still.

Going by media reports, only the CWC has flagged the issue, and Minister Thondaman too has been dubbed ?rowdy? and criticised for ?thuggish? behaviour, in seeking to free the 60 women allegedly locked up in the tea factory. There are two sides to the same coin even otherwise.

The minister says that a middle-level police officer barged into a meeting between the management and the union and openly took the former?s side. He said it was uncalled for as the instruction for local cops all along has been not to get involved in what essentially was a ?trade union issue?. The other side sticks to the version that Jeevan forcibly entered the factory.

If true, the minister has no business demonstrating his union power this way. As a minister, he could have taken up with the relevant ministerial colleague or President Ranil Wickremesinghe personally, from wherever the women labour were forcibly locked up ? and sought their immediate intervention.

Thondaman?s physical act may have something to do with the upcoming presidential and parliamentary polls, the latter, whenever held ? yet, he could not and should not forsake his responsibility and respectability as a minister. That?s if he had behaved in the way described.

Poll-time drama

For now, State Minister of Plantation Enterprise Reforms and Finance Ranjith Siyambalapitiya has clarified that the government would take back from managements that renege on the wage agreement and allot it to others, including those that were implementing the pact. This will be done after following the due process in terms of finding new lessees, he has said further.

The minister / government has begun well with this threat, but will it hold in the medium and the long-run, especially if the affected management moves the courts, where the entire process could get stuck for years, if not decades. In the interim, the question will remain if the courts will direct the ?errant? management to pay the committed wages. If not the rest of them too would want to renege, and so would be their association, the signatory to the tripartite agreement.

It is anybody?s guess if the government has already consulted the Attorney-General in the matter, to find a way to avoid a stale-mated situation of the kind alluded to. For, without immediate enforcement, the current initiative would be seen only as a ?poll-time drama? by the government and President Ranil Wickremesinghe in particular.

The fact remains that there is Sinhala labour too in the estate sector. Conventionally, they used to be considered as supporters of the centre-left political entities, now possibly the JVP, still. Long before the JVP was born, there were those who had complained that the first post-Independence government of Wickremesinghe?s UNP to disenfranchise the estate Tamils and also render them ?stateless? all at once, was aimed also at weakening the traditional left that had captured the imagination of the working class, including the upcountry populace, Sinhalas and Tamils.

The Upcountry Tamils had a grievance then: that the SLT polity voted with the government party on the questions of disenfranchisement and statelessness. Today, when another Upcountry Tamil leader in former Minister Mano Ganesan, who is now in the Opposition SJB combine, has been defending the SLT cause, even when not sought, no SLT leader thus far has spoken about the ?pottu? and ear-ring issues targeting the IoTs…

Politics, did you say?

(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)