“Lastly, Dayan makes a claim of surpassing ignorance that I wish he never did when he says that, “In the case of Sri Lanka the case of pluri-nationalism is patently absurd, because one ethnic group constitutes almost 75% of the island’s population, and according an equal status of nationhood to a far smaller formation is logically untenable. With such overwhelming preponderance of one community, how could the entity that is Sri Lanka be described as pluri-national or bi-national?” He then goes on to substantiate this claim with exactly the same kind of asinine analogy from international relations that I have previously said makes the argument in his book more unpersuasive than it should be.
There is a book to be written as to why this is complete nonsense, but suffice it here to say one thing. There is nothing ‘patently absurd’ about this. Every plurinational state is dominated by a large majority nation. That is a fact, a given, a reality, and as can be seen from basic statistics, this is even more pronounced than in Sri Lanka in
the three most advanced plurinational states in the world.”
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Asanga Welikala’s response to Dayan Jayatilleka article can be read in full here http://groundviews.org/2014/06/12/can-the-anti-mahinda-camp-think-straight/#comment-1433504510
source: http://groundviews.org/
