Tamil Nadu chief ministers like being festooned with honorary doctorates, a fashion set in train by the current incumbent. This is aimed, apparently, at lending a touch of verisimilitude to their otherwise suspect erudition, as expressed, for example, when the remote Czechs and Slovaks are dragged in by Karunanidhi as the example for Sri Lanka to emulate.The problem is there is no comparison. The Czechs and Slovaks have always regarded themselves as separate nations, joined together in 1918 not out of any sense of shared identity but to secure themselves from foreign aggression and separated in 1992 because that external threat ceased to be.The roots of this separate identity lie in the integration of Slovakia into the Hungarian Empire for a thousand years from the tenth century on.Meanwhile, the Czech national identity developed independently, with the establishment in the tenth century of a separate political authority in the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, which today constitute the Czech Republic. The Kingdom of Bohemia was proclaimed in 1212 and remained separate from Slovakia all through the many changes of rulers right up to the Habsburgs in the mid-18th century. With the establishment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867, the two provinces of the Czech lands became, like Slovakia, mere administrative units, political authority vesting entirely in the imperial throne.While there was much fellow-feeling between Czech and Slovak in the shared urge to emerge from under the shadow of what both nationalities perceived as an alien imperial imposition, the declared aim was the liberation of two distinct nations, the Czech and the Slovak, from the dead hand of the Habsburgs.The opportunity came with the First World War, in which the Habsburgs and the Ottomans sided with the Germans and came a cropper. The political action had, in the meanwhile, shifted to the Czechs and Slovaks living in exile in the United States. There, the great Czech lea-der, Tomas G. Masaryk, persuaded the exiles that it would be in their common interest to establish the new Republic as a composite Czechoslovak state because Slovakia would face a threat from its Hungarian neighbour while the Czech lands would be coveted by neighbours Germany and Poland.This bit of realpolitik was embodied in the Pittsburgh Declaration of May 30, 1918, and endorsed by the Slovak National Committee on October 30, 1918. Tragically, however, the boundaries of the new state, confirmed by the Ve-rsailles peace settlement of 1919, were challenged fr-om the start by all its neighbours, confirming Masaryk's wisdom in arguing that if the Czechs and the Slovaks did not hang together, they were bound to hang separately.This, in fact, is what happened when Chamberlain caved in to Hitler's demands at the notorious Munich conference in 1938. The immediate consequence was the change in the name of the state to its hyphenated form as Czecho-Slovakia and the constitution of an autonomous Slovak government. A few months later, on March 14, 1939, an independent Slovak state was procl-aimed. Two days on, the Germans ma-rched into Prague, dissolved the Czech part of Czecho-Slovakia and established what they charmingly called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.While through the duration of the Second World War, Czech and Slovak were separated in their homelands, in exile they once again came together to fight the common aggressor. But the end of the war only brought in the Soviet empire till the collapse of that empire on November 17, 1989. Notwithstanding efforts by the communists to impose an artificial unity on Czech and Slovak, both nationalities took the utmost care to preserve their respective identities. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the external pressure to remain even nominally united. Hungary, Austria, Germany and Poland had long ceased to be the enemy they had historically been. Russia too was gone.Thus, Czechoslovakia, free at last after half a century of thralldom, did the inevitable: split into two. The proximate cause was the elections of 1992 which brought two irreconcilable political parties to power in the Czech lands and Slovakia respectively (shades of what happened in East and West Pakistan in the elections of 1970), making it impossible to form a coalition government to run the composite state. The impasse was resolved by dissolving the union and the two nations going their separate ways with effect from the first day of 1993.How does any of this constitute a parallel for Sri Lanka? Tamil and Sinhala did not come together to fend off a common enemy. The enemy, if any, was within. The nation of Sri Lanka secured its freedom through the joint efforts of the Tamils and the Sinhalas. Unlike Czechoslovakia, it was not two nations who mutually acknowledged each other as distinct that came together in an act of re- alpolitik to protect their newly won frontiers from marauding neighbours.On the contrary, it was the foolish attempt at pushing Sinhala majoritarianism, particularly post-"Sword" Bandaranaike's election victory of 1956, that sparked the demand for a Tamil nation. If Bandaranaike had not gone back on the pact he negotiated with the Sri Lankan Tamil leader Chelvanayagam in 1957, the Tamil United Liberation Front might have stayed with Chelvanayagam's celebrated speech of August 1952 at Jaffna University where he had argued the conditions for a composite Ceylonese national identity.In other words, the assertion of a separate Tamil nationalism was not the consequence of any two-nation theory rejecting a Sri Lankan nationhood, but the consequence of secularism having given way to Sinhala chauvinism over the first decade of Sri Lankan independence. Clearly, equality and regional autonomy within a wholly democratic order, based on equal civic and political rights for all communities, and guaranteed human rights for all individuals, is what is required to re-establish the sense of a common national destiny which informed the freedom movement in the island. The LTTE does not understand a word of this which is why it represents no one but its fascist self.Happily, President Kumaratunga is more than prepared to do her duty. But it does not help when half-educated nostrums are thrown at her from outside - particularly by a member in good standing of the coalition that is running the Government of India. "A little learning," as Alexander Pope reminded us, "is a dangerous thing" and honorary doctorates no substitute for the real thing.
