ABSTRACT
Majoritarian chauvinism is almost always seen as a natural, if not a fitting, response to fascistic tendencies within a minority community. Sri Lanka has been no exception. The manner in which the triumphal advance of the island-nation’s armed forces into the northern bastion of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have been welcomed the world over, and particularly in India, indicates this has indeed become established wisdom. Besides, it would be grossly inaccurate to trace the genealogy of LTTE’s autocratic vision of Tamil nationalism to the elitist ideological moorings of the original movement for Tamil autonomy. The emergence of revolutionary guerrilla groups through the mid-’70s to the early ‘80s, which either avowed a left-wing nationalist or a Maoist position, shows that nationalism of Sri Lankan Tamils had progressed beyond its elitist beginnings in the quest for federal autonomy towards a politics that sought to envisage national self-determination in terms of a larger project of militant social transformation.
