அரசியல் கோரிக்கைThe Political Claim
On the fourteenth of May 1976, in a small town in the Jaffna peninsula, a coalition of Tamil parliamentary parties resolved that the Tamils of the north and east constituted a separate nation. It was a parliamentary act. What followed was not.
The Vaddukoddai Resolution was passed by the Tamil United Liberation Front, an electoral alliance of constitutional Tamil parties. Its language was careful. It declared that the Tamil-speaking peoples of Sri Lanka were a nation distinct from the Sinhalese; that they had an inalienable right of self-determination; and that the restoration and reconstitution of the free, sovereign, secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam was the political aim of the Tamil people. The Resolution was, formally, a manifesto for the 1977 general election. The TULF contested the election on it. The TULF won it, in the north and east, by a landslide.[vaddukoddai-1976]
What the Resolution did, in international-law terms, was claim a remedial self-determination — the right of a people, denied internal self-determination within an existing state, to seek external self-determination as a remedy. The doctrinal anchor for that claim, in 1976, was already a half-century old: the Aaland Islands case before the League of Nations in 1920–21. Its modern formulation would come later, in the Canadian Supreme Court's Quebec Reference of 1998 and the ICJ's Kosovo Advisory Opinion of 2010. The chronicle records the genealogy. It does not assert the conclusion.[aaland-jurists-192][quebec-reference-1][kosovo-ao-2010]
What this chronicle can say is that the political claim was made through the franchise, by elected representatives, in a parliamentary process. It is the architecture of the state, not the architecture of the claim, that prevented the claim from finding a constitutional path forward. After the 1977 election the new Jayewardene government passed the 1978 constitution. Section 29(2) of Soulbury was gone, replaced by an executive presidency. The Sixth Amendment of 1983 made it a constitutional offence for any member of parliament to advocate the establishment of a separate state. The Tamil parliamentary leadership that had passed the Vaddukoddai Resolution was, by 1983, constitutionally barred from speaking it.[1978-constitution][sixth-amendment-1983]
It is here that the chronicle reaches the door it has been approaching since the first chapter. The political claim, made through the franchise, was answered by a constitutional amendment that prohibited the claim. What happened next did not happen in parliament. It happened in the Vanni and in the east.