• Stretch …

    Even as Sri Lanka pledges to carry out the tax reform sought by the IMF, The Sunday Leader newspaper points out another of the system’s quirks:

    Two stretched limousines were recently imported with state duties being sharply reduced because they were classed as … buses.

    The logic? The limousines had multiple seats – one seating 18 and the other 13.

    Meanwhile, the IMF this week queried the Board of Investment’s (BOI) long-standing strategy for attracting foreign investment: giving tax holidays.

    This is what the IMF’s resident representative in Colombo Koshy Mathai told LBO:

    "Rather than having the BOI operate as a tax concession generating machine, the idea is now for the BOI to be re-purposed to be an investment facilitating agency."

     

  • Powder Keg

    In the run up to last month's referendum in South Sudan, it was widely accepted that the overwhelming majority would opt for independence. Similarly, even before Kosovo unilaterally declared independence two years ago, it was widely agreed that the majority of its people endorsed the move.

    What is striking, therefore, is what went before in these places. Sudan's civil war raged for four decades before the 2005 peace agreement. And when the international community ended the post-Cold War firestorm in the Balkans with the 1995 Dayton Accords, the Kosovars, despite their pleas, were actively excluded. Instead, they were told to make the best of it under Serbia's rule. Even the international intervention in 1999 established a peace that held independence to be both undesirable and unnecessary. Sudan's peace agreement required the South to seek unity with the North.

    The point here is not that the self-evident desire of peoples for self-rule is routinely ignored, and denied, by the international community - though this has largely been true. Rather, it is that, firstly, strident international opposition to a people's demand for independence is not necessarily forever, and, secondly, the future is utterly unpredictable.

    The past few decades have seen momentous changes in international order. The bi-polar world of the Cold War gave way in 1990 to a US-led international order based on the liberal international vision first articulated by the US President Woodrow Wilson in the aftermath of WW1. The recent 'rise' of China (like that of Japan in the eighties) is routinely posited as heralding the decline of US-led liberal order and the emergence of a 'multi-polar' world - though this remains to be seen (there is no evidence, for example, that China or any other major pole is seeking, like the Soviet Union did, to roll back a world order predicated on liberal democracy and market economics).

    The next few years and decades will undoubtedly bring further changes in the international system. Whatever is emphatically asserted today will not necessarily be so in future - as the cases of Sudan and Kosovo demonstrate. But, one principle will be ceaselessly pursued in an increasingly interconnected world: stability.

    It is the quest for assured stability that has led, especially since 1990, to the West-led effort to install liberal democracy and market economics the world over. Today's institutions and processes of international governance - including the UN and its agencies and institutions (the World Bank and IMF, especially) - turn on consolidating these principles. And it is easily forgotten how China, India and other emergent 'poles' are deeply committed to stabilizing and extending the market-led economic order that has been emergent since WW2. (Their united response to the 2008 financial crisis is a case in point).

    Indeed, the independence of Kosovo and South Sudan, once resisted on the basis of preserving stability, came to be supported precisely as the means to ensure it. As Kosovo declared independence, then British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, justified Western support on the basis this was "less dangerous than stifling secessionist feeling."

    It is unsurprising that in the wake of South Sudan's referendum, the argument that allowing - or even enabling - secession may be a useful step towards advancing peace is being made more widely. Of course, no two cases are the same. However, in a world where states do not wage wars of conquest, the principle of territorial integrity has less relevance as a cornerstone of world peace when powerful internal demands have to be violently denied in its defence.

    International commitment to Sri Lanka's territorial integrity - repeatedly asserted throughout the Tamil armed struggle for independence - was predicated entirely on the assumptions that firstly, most Tamils do not want independence (hence the logic of federalism), and, secondly, that once the war was over, Sri Lanka would 'resume' movement towards market democracy, thereby ensuring the life-chances of all its citizens. The internationally-assisted defeat of the LTTE has, however, produced the very opposite.

    Today's 'stability' rests entirely on the Sinhala state' militarized occupation of the Tamil homeland. In the coming years, the international community's anxiety over a peace being 'lost' will prove well founded. While the state will not, despite international entreaties, cease its efforts to consolidate Sinhala ethnocracy,  this very project will sustain and fuel Tamils' thirst for Tamil Eelam. It is therefore only a matter of time before Sri Lanka returns to the international security agenda, as Serbia and Sudan have in recent years.

     

  • Misery returns: floods hit east again

    Over 100,000 people have been displaced and more than 300,000 affected by a second wave of flooding in eastern Sri Lanka in less than a month, aid officials say.

    Over 43,000 have been marooned, Xinhua reported.

    Floods in mid-January displaced over 380,000 and affected over one million at their height, prompting the UN and its partners to launch a US$51 million appeal in support of the government.

    “The same districts that were hit the last time - Ampara, Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Polonnaruwa - have been experiencing heavy rains in the past few days,” Pradeep Kodippili, assistant director of the Disaster Management Centre, the main government body overseeing relief efforts, told IRIN on Friday.

    Sri Lanka's weather department says heavy rains could continue until May.

    File photo: Have rains swamped roads, villages and fields in Batticaloa and Amparai. AFP/GettyImages.

  • Killings after Katchatheevu

    An investigation by the Times of India found 378 recorded attacks on Tamil Nadu fishermen by the Sri Lankan navy (SLN) between 1983 and 2005.

    Interestingly, however, most cases were closed in a few months with the comment "action dropped" or "unidentified", the paper found.

    There have been many more attacks since 2005, with the issue repeatedly appearing in bilateral relations between the two states and prompting a bilateral agreement, which proved non-consequential, in October 2008.

    However, the paper quotes researchers as saying SLN attacks began well before 1983.

    "Firing and high-handedness by the Sri Lankan navy started in 1975, a year after Katchatheevu was ceded to them," said researcher L Selva Prakash.

    Katchatheevu, a tiny islet close to Rameswaram, was ceded to Sri Lanka in 1974. (See map and discussion of the deal here)

    In March 2010, Chinese and Sri Lankan naval personnel were reported to be training on the islet. In Jan 2008, the SLN planted sea mines near it.

    Most of the 1983-2005 reports filed by Tamil Nadu fishermen mention the place of the attacks’ occurrence as "Near Katchatheevu in Indian Waters" and the SLN as the accused.

    Also interestingly, see this June 2009 editorial of The Hindu newspaper, which has for decades been vehemently opposed to the LTTE and supportive of Sri Lanka's military. 

    Last week, the main opposition AIADMK in Tamil Nadu again said retrieving the islet was the only way to stop SLN attacks on local fishermen - the party's position for the past few years.

    During Sri Lanka’s armed conflict, which began in 1983, the SLN’s attacks on Tamil Nadu fishermen were lost amid its more numerous attacks on Tamil fishermen in the Northeast, and its clashes with the Tamil Tigers’ naval wing.

    That the attacks continue underlines the force of other drivers in Sri Lanka’s policies towards Tamil fishermen from both sides of the Palk Straits.

    "Hundreds continue to be maimed or killed," said organiser of the NGO People's Watch CJ Rajan.

    "The continuing attack on our fishermen shows the impotence of the Central and state governments.”


     

  • Foreign exit of Colombo bourse continues

    Foreign funds are continuing to exit Sri Lanka’s stock market, Reuters reported Friday, sustaining a trend since the end of the armed conflict.

    [See also our post: 'Sri Lanka's stocks: a closer look']

    Despite the bourse's main index doubling last year, foreign investors have been net sellers of the “overbought and expensive” market.

    Foreigners have sold a net US$ 25 million (2.8 billion rupees) so far in 2011, after selling a record net $236 million (Rs. 26.4 billion) through 2010.

    Sri Lanka’s bourse is described as ‘Asia's best performer’ with an 9 percent gain in 2011 after being the top performer last year, with a 96 percent.

    It is trading at a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 18, highest among emerging markets, compared with 13 in Asian markets and 11.9 in global emerging markets.

    P/E is the price paid for a share divided by its estimated future earnings.

     

  • Tamil Nadu wants stronger Indian naval presence

    As India again warned Sri Lanka that the killing of Indian fishermen by the latter's navy was damaging bilateral relations, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi Tuesday called for a stronger Indian naval presence,

    “The coastal waters of south need to be paid some attention through resources and personnel [just] as land borders in north, west and east are being attended to,” Karunanidhi said.

    “It is requested that our demand for more vessels, police stations and manpower, and better air surveillance capabilities may be considered favourably,” he said.

    [See also related posts: 'Terror in Jaffna II: blocking international efforts' and 'Sri Lanka's fishy story'.]

    Delhi Tuesday rejected Sri Lanka's claim a 'third force' was to be blamed for the attacks on Tamil Nadu fishermen and noted that such incidents don't happen even on the Pakistani border.

    Tamil Nadu killings

    Karunanidhi was speaking at the fourth Chief Ministers Conference on internal security held in New Delhi. The conference was addressed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and union Home Minister P. Chidambaram.

    The Tamil Nadu chief minister referred to the repeated killings of the Indian fishermen by the Sri Lankan Navy, saying:

    “Fishermen who cross international borders unwittingly and apprehended by other neighbouring countries in the west and the east are not subjected to physical harm.”

    “[However] Indian fishermen who cross the international maritime border off Sri Lanka are repeatedly subjected to physical harm, harassment and at times get killed.”

    Karunanidhi also said that the Sri Lankan government should abide by the October 2008 India-Sri Lanka joint statement on fishing arrangements that stated that there should be no firing on Indian fishermen.

    India - Sri Lanka ties

    On Tuesday India told Colombo that use of force against Tamil Nadu fishermen should not be repeated and asked it to take a decision that will not upset bilateral ties, NDTV reported.

    Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao raised the matter in “open and candid manner” with Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa, The Hindu reported.

    Sri Lanka has flatly denied its navy has attacked Tamil Nadu fishermen has instead blamed a ‘third force’.

    Responding, Ms. Rao told reporters:

    “I don't have anything to say about it... We are proceeding on the information we have; what our fishermen have given to us. What we have with us, we have nothing to corroborate what the Sri Lankans have claimed [on the existence of a third force in the region].”

    Noting that the situation today was different from 2008, when the first bilateral agreement on protecting fishermen was made, she said there was now no scope for ambiguity.

    “This is a post-conflict situation…We are of the view that [the October 2008 agreement] arrangements should be abided by and observed in both letter and spirit,” she said.

    Noting India’s cordial and friendly relations with Sri Lanka, Krishna said:

    "So it is in this context that the Sri Lankan Government will have to revisit the question and take some decision which will not upset the bilateral relations between our two countries."

    "It has been pointed out to Sri Lankan authorities that it does not happen with Pakistan or any other country and why should it happen with Sri Lanka alone?"

     

    Photo: India has commissioned a second squadron  of Israeli-built unmanned spy planes based in Gujarat. Photo rediff.com

    Meanwhile, Indian External Affairs Minister S M Krishna has also directed Foreign Secretary Rao to convene a meeting of the Indo-Sri Lanka Joint Working Group on the issue around February 15.
    including better air surveillance, in the waters between the two states, IANS reports.
  • Why should borders be sacrosanct?

    “It is clearly unreasonable to expect all disputing couples to behave like the Czechs and the Slovaks [who peacefully separated in 1993]. But is it reasonable in this day and age to set treat secession as somehow worse than unwilling union?

    “Countries and territories change. For one reason or another, the ethnic or religious mix shifts; technological advances may dictate a sharp rise or fall in economic fortunes. Why should state borders not be subject to pragmatic fluctuation, too?

    “Is it not ... where demographic change has been acute, and where many colonial-era borders already rode roughshod over older allegiances, that an adjustment of the border, or even the creation of a new sovereign state, might discourage a resort to force?

    Ending this taboo [about frontiers] would enhance, rather than detract from, international stability.

    - Mary Dejevsky, editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent. See the full text of her op-ed here.

  • Boycott campaign continues in London

    Groups of protestors outside retailers and business in Britain are not unusual. Most recently UK-Uncut activists launched a wave of sit-ins in and around corporations associated with tax dodging. That campaign turn on consumers not wishing to put money into pockets of those they believe are behaving unethically or exploitatively.

    Amidst other campaigns-through-consumer, Tamil activists are also continuing to push for a boycott of Sri Lankan products.

    Last weekend TYO-UK (Tamil Youth Organisation) leafleted and canvassed in the London suburbs of Ilford and Kingston, focussing on streets on which firms like Marks & Spencer stocked made-in-Sri Lanka items.

    Other recent actions include those on Oxford Street, London’s world-famous shopping strip, and other shopping centres in the city’s suburbs.

    Building on the impact of international media reporting, TYO-UK activists handed out leaflets and conversed with shoppers. ‘Check-the-label’ and ‘Boycott-Sri Lanka’ were the themes.

    Bundled up in his fluorescent jacket outside an M&S in Ilford, TYO activist Athi also persuaded passing youth to join him.

    “We gave out my thousand leaflets in the space of an hour and a half,” he beamed later, rubbing his hands together in the biting cold.

    “Normally people don’t want to take their hands out of their pockets in weather like this. They just want to hurry home for a hot drink,” he said.

    “But Sri Lanka raises interest [now]. Some people stop to chat about the situation. People are genuinely horrified when their spending is linked to the repression there.”

    “News agencies cover Sri Lanka’s situation and people have seen the 2009 mass protests in Westminster, so aren’t surprised to see us outside their local shopping centres,” TYO’s local coordinator explained. “Even the retailers understand the logic, though they’re obviously not happy.”

    “What we need to do is explain [to consumers] how they can help to alleviate the situation back home. Once the link is understood, most agree to check the label and not buy Sri Lankan products again. Some even return purchases!”

    It was in London that the international boycott of South Africa was initiated in 1960 - three decades before Apartheid rule finally ended.

    As the ANC (African National Congress) website recalls, the boycott emerged when,

    “In London a committed group of South African exiles kept in touch with events back home and worked to alert British public opinion to the evils of apartheid.”

    The campaign struggled to gain momentum at first, but later, “Britain provided fertile ground for the campaign.”

    The actions are part of TYO’s on-going efforts to raise public awareness in Britain of the link between Sri Lanka’s exports abroad and its oppression at home.
  • Future Tense

    "There is no reason to believe that Sri Lanka will return to a rights-respecting government any time in the near future.

    “Until wartime abuses are prosecuted, minority grievances are addressed, and repression against the press and civil society ends, only the president and his family members in power have reason to feel secure in Sri Lanka."

    - Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. See HRW's summary of Sri Lanka's section in it annual Human Rights report.

  • Sri Lanka to export war crimes

    “For now impunity is ruling the day.  So much so, that Sri Lanka is apparently seeking to export its brand of counter-insurgency to other countries.

    “Will the Sri Lankan method of dealing with rebellion and insurgency catch on elsewhere? Or will the long arm of international justice give pause to would-be war criminals?

    This is pretty much the defining question of international justice these days.”

    - Mark Leon Goldberg. See his comment for UN Despatch here.

    See here Sri Lanka's announcement of the international seminar in June by its military.

  • Why the world needs a radically new approach to secession

    Prof. Timothy William Waters, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, writes:

    The real danger to peace is not peoples’ desire to form new states. It is the willingness of the present world powers to resist that desire with violence. We have stumbled onto that truth in Sudan.

    “Since WW2 territorial integrity has been a pillar of our international order. ... Preventing inter-state wars of conquest is clearly positive, but the belief that fixed frontiers reduce internal violence is more assumed than proven.

    “Fixed borders create permanent minorities and majorities. Democracy doesn’t necessarily help – a minority can be voted down forever. Rights don’t provide adequate protection – they must be negotiated, and without the fallback of exit, minorities get sub-optimal deals. And although borders are inviolate, majorities often consider separatism treasonous and use violence to prevent it.

    Yet countries that acknowledge their people’s right to leave are often the most peaceful [while] It is often oppressive countries that are hardest on their own secession-minded citizens.

    Some separatists are violent; but few started that way, only turning to violence after being rebuffed.

    “We need to make the ad hoc approach taken in Sudan permanent, with a rule empowering communities to negotiate secession. Territorially compact, self-defined communities should have the right to vote in plebiscites to form new states.”

    “[Sudan] holds an important lesson about the sources of violent conflict within states, and shows that the world needs a radically new approach to secession. We should not have to learn it all over again, in every war, and every generation.” 

    See the full text of his article here in the blog of the European Journal of International Law.

  • Bank lending and ethnicity

    Figures released recently by Sri Lanka’s Central Bank reveal an increase in bank lending to the private sector (see p6 here). But an industry body said this week major exporters were not borrowing  as they are gloomy about economic prospects.

    What could this contradiction mean?

    Rising bank lending is usually a sign of a growing economy. Businesses borrow, invest in production and repay loans with profits from sold goods and services.

    Banks also lend to consumers who purchase homes, cars, holidays and so on, generating income for businesses, who expand production and also hire new employees, who in turn spend.

    This is the virtuous cycle of business. Usually.

    However, in Sri Lanka there are other factors. Bank lending here signifies something else.

    State patronage

    To begin with state-controlled banks and pension funds control almost forty percent of all financial sector assets in Sri Lanka.

    An expansion of lending by these means the state is using its financial assets to give concessionary loans to preferred businesses and clients. Given the Sinhala-first logic of the state, these are largely Sinhalese and supporters of the state.

    When lending takes place for such reasons – i.e. state patronage – there is no guarantee borrowing businesses are either viable, or that they will (need to) repay their loans.

    Interesting, the recent rise in bank lending comes at the same time the government has introduced measures to protect those owing less than Rs 5 million from repossession proceedings.

    Such patronage, and its Sinhala-first logic, is not only peculiar to President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s SLFP (Sri Lanka Freedom Party) led government.

    The state owned banks, People’s Bank and Bank of Ceylon, are the two largest banks in Sri Lanka. Both are plagued with bad and non performing debts and have long been so.

    Twice during the 1990’s both ran into serious financial difficulties and had to rescued by massive injections of government funding.

    Plans to privatise them were abandoned when the President Rajapaksa came to power. 

    During the recent debate in Parliament, the main opposition UNP (United National Party) – often considered ‘pro-business’ – called for protection from repossession to be extended to those owing up to Rs 50m.

    Ethnic privilege

    As one scholar of Sri Lanka, Deborah Winslow, put it (see p31 of her 2004 book).,

    never, in independent Sri Lanka, has economic policy been isolatable from issues of ethnicity, because how the government has chosen to define and to resolve economic difficulties has consistently been informed by ethnic politics, just as ethnic politics has been informed by economic choices.”

    Eighteen months after the end of the war, while Sri Lanka’s government is today providing cheap finance to Sinhala recipients and protecting them from non-repayment, Tamil entrepreneurs’ efforts to set up industries in the Northeast is being actively hampered.

    The Sinhala population also benefits from the services of state owned agencies such as the Sri Lanka Mortgage and Investment Bank (SMIB), which provides cheap, long term loans for housing to middle and low income customers.

    37% of SMIB’s total lending is non performing, the LBO reported. In other words, over a third of borrowers are not making repayments.

    Meanwhile, in the war devastated Tamil-speaking areas the state is blocking international efforts, led by India, to reconstruct desperately needed houses for a million displaced people. The Ministry of Economic Planning recently ordered that there should be no new building of houses in the north and east.

    In Sri Lanka, increased lending does not mean development and growth is underway, bring peace, but the reverse: the state banks is pouring money into creating an economically unviable vision of a Sinhala first economy, whilst at the same time asphyxiating revival of a Tamil economic base on the island.
     

  • America and Jaffna

    This is what US Ambassador to Colombo, Ms. Patricia Butenis, said Monday at the opening of the American Corner in Jaffna:

    “Not everyone may realize that Americans have a long relationship with the people of Jaffna.

    American missionaries arrived here in 1813, almost two hundred years ago. They taught English and learned Tamil, founded the first printing press in Jaffna, started the first Tamil language newspaper anywhere, and established Sri Lanka’s first medical school.

    “The opening of the American Corner today is a symbol of our sustained commitment to the people of Jaffna.

    “The American Corner is a place that will connect Jaffna with the rest of Sri Lanka, and with the world.”

    See the full text of her speech here. (See also TamilNet's report and pictures here)

    A reminder of what Tamil Guardian’s editorial of June 2, 2010 argued:

    Before Sinhala domination began in the late 1940s, the Tamil homeland had been connected in myriad ways to global flows for millennia. Quite apart from the time of South India-based imperial networks, even during Western colonial rule the Northeast was well connected to the rest of the subcontinent and other parts of the world.

    “Since the island’s independence from Britain, however, the Sinhala-dominated state has sought not only to concentrate power in the South, but also to isolate the Northeast, making Colombo the sole gateway between the world and the Tamil homeland.

    “Unless the Sinhala stranglehold on the Northeast is first broken, the Tamils will continue to be largely – and deliberately - excluded from global economic flows.”

    This is what Indian Foreign Minister S M Krishna said in Jaffna last November:

    “Over centuries, Jaffna has always stood at the crossroads of history, culture and religion, kings and kingdoms, trade and commerce, and arts, dance and literature. Jaffna port was on the main sea route of its times. … It’s time to revive those links.”

    See our earlier posts:

    - India and Jaffna

    - Jaffna and the world

    See also our analysis here of US and Indian efforts to restore normalcy in Jaffna and rest of the northeast, and Sri Lanka's resistance. (See also this)

  • Why Sri Lanka’s exporters are gloomy

    Despite credit being readily available, Sri Lanka’s exporters say they don’t want to borrow because they can’t expand their businesses in the present economic conditions - despite the end of the war.

    “Exporters are not borrowing because they are not expanding,” National Chamber of Exporters (NCE) President Sarath de Silva said last week.

    High electricity tariffs, the loss of trade concessions from the EU and US, and a stronger rupee made it difficult to survive in the global export market, he said.

    (See reports in The Island and the Sunday Times)

    Exporters had no need to borrow to finance expansions that were simply not taking place, de Silva added.

    Despite the end of the war, NCE members felt that opportunities were slipping away with government policy weighing down the export sector, The Island reported separately.

    The rupee

    The central bank has been holding the rupee at around 112 to the dollar, the highest since December 2008, when Sri Lanka was in the midst of a balance of payments crisis.

    The high rupee makes Sri Lanka’s exports expensive, relative to competitors in other countries.

    But Sri Lanka insists the rupee must appreciate. Central Bank governor Nivard Cabraal said last month it was in ‘the national interest’.

    What does that mean? A stronger currency help ease the cost of living in an import-dependent economy.

    "We thought by depreciating the rupee we were doing a great job, that export income goes up, but where did that get us?" he asked.

    "Each year our debt increased, our balance of payments became negative every year and our macro-economic fundamentals became weaker and weaker."

    Sri Lanka’s dilemma is that making exports more competitive (cheaper) by weaking the rupee also makes the cost of imports, including food and fuel, expensive.

    “It's like somebody wants sunshine and someone else wants rain (at the same time)," Cabraal says.

    And Sri Lanka's exporters are not generating enough revenue to make the government prioritise them over keeping imports cheap.

    Powerless

    Meanwhile, exporters are asking the government for some breathing space to strengthen their weakening positions by deferring an electricity tariff hike for another year or two, The Island said.

    Sri Lanka has some of the highest electricity tariffs in south Asia. The state-run electricity company has been making losses for years and, under IMF pressure, Sri Lanka is trying to end the Ceylon Eletricity Board's reliance on subsidies.

    Unhappiness amongst Japanese firms already invested in Sri Lanka is dissuading others from doing so, LBO quoted Hirofumi Hirano, head of a visiting delegation of Japanese parliamentarians as saying in December

    "When Japanese investors come to Sri Lanka they want to see how existing companies are doing. If the feedback is not good it will be difficult to attract investment."

     

  • Hawaii temple joins Thai Poosam celebration

    The Kadavul Temple in Hawaii was amongst the thousands of Saivite temples celebrating the festival of Thai Poosam this month.

    The Kadavul temple is attached to the Kauai Aadheenam or monastery, which traces its guru lineage directly from Jaffna’s well known sage Yogaswami.

    The guru lineage is named Kailasa Parampara, after the Kailasa mountain range in the Himalayas where the earliest of these yogis is said to have meditated.

    Kauai is the oldest of Hawaii’s main islands. The Kauai Aadheenam was established in 1973, by Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, an American priest initiated by Yogaswami in Jaffna in 1949.

    In 1986, the World Religious Parliament in New Delhi honored Sivaya Subramuniyaswami as one of the five Hindu spiritual leaders outside India who had most dynamically promoted Hinduism in the previous 25 years. He passed away in 2001.

    Thaipoosam

    Thai Poosam is the celebration of an ancient Saivite myth in which Murugan slays the demon (or Asura) Tharakasuran, to stop him from further wreaking havoc on the three worlds.

    Murugan, the Tamil warrior god is also considered the patron god of the Tamil language and people.

    Thai Poosam follows closely after the harvest festival in January of Thai Pongal - literally ‘the January overflowing’ (of food and abundance)

    The Thai Poosam festival usually falls towards the end of January or early February when the star cluster called Pusam, after which the festival is named, rises with the full moon.

    It is celebrated with Abhishekams (sacred bathing) to Lord Murugan in Saivite temples across the world and Murugan pilgrimage centres in Tamil Nadu.

    The festival is also associated with the practice of Kavadi – public penance where devotees pierce their bodies with small spear replicas of Murugan’s Vel (Spear) and walk barefoot carrying offerings on their heads or balanced off the spears, or perform other hard penance such as walking on hot coals.

    It is not unusual for up to 10 000 Kavadis to arrive at the Murugan Kovil in the South Indian Palani Hills for Thai Pusam, while the Batu cave temple in Malaysia often attracts over a million devotees.

    Aadheenam

    The ceremony last week at the Aadheenam was performed by the resident temple priests who have been trained in Jaffna and Southern Indian temples, and attended by the monastics headed by their present Satguru, California-born Bodhinatha Veylanswami.

    The festival was attended by the small but intensely devotional Saivite community in Hawaii, as well as some Tamil expatriates from the Diaspora.

    The ceremony follows the classical format of a series of Abhishekams where the deity is bathed successively in milk, water, sandalwood-infused water, rosewater and Panchaamritham blend-infused water.

    The Kadavul temple uses the Panchaamritham recipe of South India’s Chidambaram Temple -fresh banana, ghee, milk, honey, and jaggery.

    The successive offerings are each intended to invoke different blessings on those present and on the whole community – wealth, longevity, progeny and so on.

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