Land For The People

One of the first books read to me as a child by my parents was a parable on land drawing from one of Leo Tolstoy’s short stories, made available in Jaffna by affordable children’s publications from the Soviet Union. The parable goes like this: that a man was offered as much land as he wished, provided he walked the perimeter of the land from sunrise to sunset on a certain day. Having set his expectations too high, and worried that he could not return by sunset, he ran back all afternoon to claim his large area of land. But soon after his arrival, he died of exhaustion, and all the land that he needed was just six feet long to bury him.

- Ahilan Kadirgamar

That parable, I find, might be appropriate for our tragic history and uncertain future. The great nationalist ambition of the LTTE in its protracted war for territory, and its suicidal end on that small strip of land in Mullivaikal is one instance. The great financial ambitions of the current regime in power to convert the sea off Galle Face into the land, and create a financial city, may with time prove to be the cause of its downfall. Regardless of the ambitions of those in power and their despicable adventures, it is the people who pay the price with their blood, sweat and suffering.

From colonial times to the present moment, the land question has been central to our history. Land as an asset for rural livelihoods, as a natural resource that sustains our environment, as territory constituted by borders and as vested in the sovereign state, are some of the meanings that it embodies. Aspirations for land and fears of losing it are tremendous challenges for coexistence in these times of authoritarian rule, majoritarian shenanigans and ethnic polarisation. In this context, I draw on a series of recent discussions initiated by the Jaffna People’s Forum for Coexistence on the question of land in the East and the North towards forming a progressive perspective on land

HOMES AND LIVELIHOODS

The questions I want to ask about land, are for what purpose and whose use? Six feet is all the land we may need when we die as taught during my childhood, but how many perches do people need for a dwelling and how many acres does a farmer need for a livelihood?