‘Now’ can be a different time, I learned in Pakistan

Mazar-e-Azam of the National Mausoleum is an iconic landmark of the city of Karachi and refers to the tomb of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, widely known as the founder of Pakistan. Built atop the highest point in Karachi and surrounded by an elegantly landscaped 61 acre garden, the monument exudes the sobriety, peace and reverence appropriate to a man of Jinnah’s stature and accomplishment.

Nation-birthing is never a clinical affair. The politics leading up to the parting of ways between the Hindu dominated and Muslim areas of the subcontinent was traumatic, bloody, forgettable and unforgotten. Leaders never have it easy at such times and as a result invite much invective. They are revered even as they are vilified. Jinnah was no exception.

Pakistan today is and is not the Pakistan of Jinnah and Jinnah’s imagination.  Nation-birth does not mean national peace from birthday onwards into foreseeable future and tomorrows beyond imagination. So it was and is with Pakistan. That however is a longer story whose narration would necessarily be interrupted by the fractures inherent in unfolding. It is a matter for historian and political scientist.

In the inner sanctum there is silence. Outside there is enough space for reflection. Retired Major Ather Mir, Project Manager of the Bagh-e-Quaid had a lot to say about the leader and the history of Pakistan. He knew the details and slipped in anecdote deftly to colour his narrative with allusion to the ways of the world, in their generality and specificity.

A nation is not made by a single individual. A leader helps lay foundation and charts avenues into what are perceived to be better tomorrows. An edifice is not built by the architect. Everyone, from cement-mixer to bricklayer, craftsman to painter and countless others have to chip into turn design into visible monument to labour and sense of national belonging. It has to be inhabited too. No nation is ever built to perfection. Approximating perfection takes centuries. Pakistan is young, in a sense, and its achievements are considerable and applause-worthy given the circumstances in which it was born, the battering it has had to withstand since and the convulsions it had to suffer from within.

In its today and tomorrow, Pakistan like any other nation look to its leaders and its monuments, both those associated with founding and those that are resident in artifact, landscape and culture going back to the Harappan times.  There is history in this land. There is commerce and trade with centuries long histories. This land has known civilizational encounters second to none.  Culture have met, warred, embraced and synthetized into new ways of being. Philosophies too.  There is wealth in resources that many would envy. Then there are human beings, flawed as well as exceptional.  In the end it all comes down to what people do with what they have.

Pakistan will do what’s best for Pakistan.

Nations learn from one another. People too. I listened to a retired soldier. He spoke of a man called Sardar Abdur Rab NIshtar, a close associate and friend of Jinnah and Governor of Punjab. He was one of the 6 people who made up Jinnah’s first cabinet of minister. He was powerful, one might say.  He was respected and loved, Major Ather said. He belonged to a different time, literally and metaphorically, apparently.

This elected official was deeply religious. He prayed at the Data Durbar. Everyday. The mosque was located some 5 miles from his office.  As Governor, he had an official vehicle and a chauffeur. He walked. Everyday.   When he left office he didn’t have a place to stay.

This is a Pakistan story and a South Asian one as well. It is a global tale, come to think of it.  It belongs to the Book of Yesterday. Today, half a century later, almost, it is hard to see it as relevant to a collection of essay under a title such as ‘Our Today’. Things are never right at the present and that’s a truism that cuts across time and space. At best we would it to be a part of a collection called ‘Tomorrow’s Tales’.

Time-location notwithstanding, it is a story that we can read and move on or else make a part of who we are, as individuals and collectives.

Nations learn from one another. People too. A retired soldier and a statesman who has passed on wove a short story. I listened. 

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A postscript to journalistic quackery a la Channel 4

It was bound to happen. Channel 4 has suffered a serious case of egg-on-the-face, but it was almost inevitable. Channel 4 was motivated in the first instance by bitterness at having one of its correspondents deported for gross violation of expected professional ethics. Channel 4 has a considerable track record in dodgy and shoddy journalism. Channel 4 seems to have been intoxicated by the shrill self-righteous statements issued by British parliamentarians shamelessly pandering to the LTTE lobby hoping to secure electoral victory.  Channel 4 seems to have been outraged by the fact that all chances of preferred outcome materializing were buried on the shores of the Nandikadal Lagoon. 

‘Revenge’ was called for. Revenge was sought. And, as usually happens when delusion, hatred and greed inspire rather than deter, Channel 4 tripped. Over its own vomit, did I hear someone say?

A few days ago, in New York, there was a screening of the much advertised ‘documentary’ about what Channel 4 (and other interested parties including rabid chauvinistic elements among Sri Lankan Tamils overseas) want the world to believe happened in the last stages of the historic operation that rid Sri Lanka of the terrorist menace (interrupted by stoppages for snacks and chit-chat we are told). Major General Shavendra Silva who led the 58 Division at the time the 30 year war came to an end and now Sri Lanka’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, New York, in a matter of a few minutes stripped Channel 4 of all vestiges of respectability and trustworthiness.

This does not mean of course that Channel 4 will confess to media quackery, apologize profusely to all Sri Lankans, all viewers and especially to the Tamil people living in other parts of the world for preying on their fears, insecurities, communal pride and grief. It does not mean that Channel 4 will fold up operations or even stamp ‘Chapter Closed’ on the door of its malice-ridden operations pertaining to Sri Lanka. It does not mean that this will be the last such effort on the part of terrorist-backers such as the Global Tamil Forum and the British Tamil Forum nor their partners in crime in the British Parliament, the European Union, the US State Department, certain UN agencies etc.

Neither will see racketeers like Jehan Perera and Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu shut up; it’s their livelihood to vilify things Sri Lankan and bat for forces that are determined to divide the country. For all their bleeding-heart bawls about human rights violations, these ruffians have with full knowledge advocated strategies that make for blood-letting. The will do so in the future too, I am sure. It’s a profitable business, we know. The intellectually dishonest, such as R.M.B. Senanayake and Kumar David will continue to pander to Eelam interests. Guaranteed.

We do not live in a world where social and political processes necessarily move towards the consecration of truth and justice. Tyranny wins, nine times out of ten.  The end of tyranny is only comic relief for world history has shown that tyrannies are not necessarily succeeded by democracies, nor tyrants by the benevolent, but rather other tyrannies and tyrants respectively.

Still!

Channel 4 with all the resources available could only come up with a movie.  A cheap one at that. Sure, there was clever use of the age-old misleading and misrepresenting trick, juxtaposition, and the use of music to wrap the lie in tragic flavours. There was the expected deliberate misnaming of terrorists as artists and journalists. The characters were, as expected, developed with careful non-mention of key and extremely relevant facts about who they are and what they’ve done. Care was taken not to compromise the purported ‘independence’ and ‘respectability’ of those employed to vilify the Government of Sri Lanka.

Greed, hatred and delusion did their usual work. They produced a sloppiness that the frills of music, lie-narration and doctored imagery just could not hide.  As was the case with the report submitted by the panel appointed by Ban Ki-moon to advise him on Sri Lanka, over-enthusiasm was the undoing of the Channel 4 movie.

‘Killing fields’ was supposed to buttress efforts by various forces to get the UN to authorize an ‘independent’ investigation into the ‘last days’ of the war (i.e when the LTTE was wiped out, and not, as should be the case, the time period that makes sense, February 22, 2002 to May 19, 2009).  Some want the truth. Some want confirmation by hook or crook of a cooked up story. Some want closure. Some want to use threat and intervention to extract regime change from the political chaos they believe these moves would generate. Some want to make Mahinda Rajapaksa submit to the Chelvanayakam Option (A little now, more later) by fixing Eelam-boundaries via the 13th Amendment, thereby legitimizing Eelam mythology. Most know and most pretend they don’t know that these malicious moves will only give life to communal disharmony and postpone reconciliation, even resulting in a fresh round of blood-letting.


                     
Parts 1 - 3


                     

Parts 4 - 6 

Malinda Seneviratne, a journalist and political analyst based in Sri Lanka

debunking the claims made by the

Report of the Secretary General of the UN

on Accountability in Sri Lanka [Darusman Report]

        

Channel 4 need not worry. Darusman won’t lose any sleep and neither will Navi Pillai, Louise Arbour, Manfred Novak, David Miliband, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Bernard Kouchner, Robert Blake, Peter Hayes, Patricia Butenis etc.  Jehan Perera can take a lot of egg on his face.  So can Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu.  Kumar David might say it’s just facial cream.  R.M.B. Senanayake will offer a prayer and bat on in the sophomoric manner he has perfected.  Gordon Weiss might move to another exotic location where he can play ‘Conqueror and Subjugated’ and maybe write another book or two.

We must expect the above from these ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’, ladies and gentlemen.  They are not fast asleep. They are not deaf or blind.  They were not born with twisted tongues.  They are pretending, most of them.  Therefore it will take a lot to wake them, make them hear and see, and make them speak the truth.

They don’t own Sri Lanka and they will not either. There are people who can say ‘I am Sri Lankan’ and ‘Sri Lanka is mine’, not because those words come easy but the civilization, heritage, culture, ways of being and becoming and the philosophies that nourished all this runs in their veins and make their sinews.  They and not the above mentioned individuals won the war for us, made this land free.  They alone will protect this earth in which the ashes of their ancestors are buried. They will be stopped, tripped, hurt and humiliated no doubt.  That’s in the short-term. History is long, ladies and gentlemen.

There will be tyrannies, no doubt.  Still, no tyranny is so efficient that it can obliterate a civilization. That takes multiple and consecutive tyrannies over many centuries.  We went through such a period. It lasted 500 years.  We survived.  A poorly made film by a set of crooks who are at best journalistic quacks just won’t do it.  Sorry. 

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A note on smart-ass devolutionists

W hen they called it ‘separatism’ is sounded like a cuss-word. Separatists took time to get smart. Perhaps it would be more correct to say it took them a long time to recover smartness.  S.J.V Chelvanayakam hit the correct idea when he said it was possible to extract anything from the Sinhalese as long as it is done slowly, an idea he captured in the pithy ‘A little now, more later’. 

Leaving aside the notion that whoever did the ‘taking’ would be taking from all Sri Lankans and not just the Sinhalese, the slogan only pushed separatism to embrace terrorism while it rubbed the Sinhalese majority quite the wrong way.  Had Chelva thought but not said, separatism may have benefitted, but chauvinists and land-thieves often trip over themselves. G.G. Ponnambalam’s ‘Fifty-fifty’ for a little lover 10% of the population may have been the product of greed gone crazy but it also framed the dimensions of aspirations for more than half a century.  By 1976, Chelva himself lost his way, the Vadukoddai Resolution being nothing less than a go-for-broke adventure that wanted it all; not power-sharing but land and coast grabbing.  Blood-letting was the unscripted inevitable.  Close to a hundred thousand lives were lost.

When the LTTE was in fully cry Tamil moderates (so-called) either out of fear or awe or outright salutation went gear-down on devolution. The statements of the ‘moderates’, both individuals and parties (in coalition and isolation) make for a symptomatic reading on this aspect. The TNA’s election manifestoes of 2001, 2004 and 2010 would do in fact. Post-LTTE, devolution has been resurrected out of consolation-need more than anything else, one might argue, if not for Chelva’s Action Plan of incremental construction of Eelam.

The 13th Amendment’s most important contribution to the Eelam cause has been its utility as reference point. India fostered terrorism in Sri Lanka. India gave refuge, armed, trained and funded terrorism.  India took some sparks poured gallons and gallons of fuel, whipped up a roaring fire and then brought fire-size down (for a while) and now insists that where the fire is now is foundation-point for resolution. No mention now of what it is that is sought to be resolved.  No talk either of the fact that foundation-point is still a fire that anyone including India, Tamil Nadu, Tamil and Sinhala chauvinism included can add fuel to.

Today’s Prescriber is undoubtedly India. Today’s prescription-approvers are the Chelva-Tamils and wooly-headed Marxist-Leninists who are in a permanent state of denial about all that being passé. Other approvers include anti-Buddhist heirs of the Colonial encounter who are smarter than their 16th-20th Century ideological and political forefathers. Their logic seems to be based on the notion that if you rob from the Sinhalese it is the Buddhists who lose the most due to the sheer numbers. They are smart, because they are not running around burning temples in the way the Portuguese did or extracting conversion through the carrot of privilege and the skewing of institution and process against Buddhists. If you have any doubts about this, just check who the most vociferous approvers are, their ethnic identities, their ideological preferences and their faiths.

The smartest of course are those who say without saying. There are, for example, those who take ethnic identity and religious faith out of the equation and talk ‘development’. They know that the Indian Thesis crumbles in the fact of history, geography and demography. The history that is relevant to the discourse has always been that associated with the claims pertaining to traditional-homelands. Those who are devolution-smart talk therefore about a history of relative self-sufficiency and administrative decentralization which they conveniently argue indicate that power-devolution was always with us and indeed made us.

Anyone who has studied the extensive and intricate hydraulic system of this land as well as laws about resource exploitation and allocation would understand that while there were times of division, invasion and even anarchy, for the most part there was centralized control and decision-making. Had it been otherwise, there wouldn’t have been an anicut built in Minipe. We wouldn’t have the Yoda Ela or the Jaya Ganga. Kings would not have employed large quantities of resources to build large irrigation structures, temples or places of learning in places far away from the capital. Rivers would not have been diverted through a series of anicuts. Such schemes were not built subsequent isolated communities conferring with neighbours about how best to use the water flowing down a river.

True, there is a vast mismatch of resource-allocation today. Certain things don’t get done.  The devolution-smart say triumphantly that in a devolved polity things would get done. A decentralized administrative structure would suffice in most instances, but they don’t want to admit this. Neither do they acknowledge the fact that devolution would not have given resource-poor areas the kind of access to education that centralized decision-making has.  There is also remarkable silence about the bridges, reservoirs, hospitals and other infrastructural facilities and services that would have remained distant dreams had it not been for centralized decision-making if not for anything the sheer lack of resources and other necessary capacities. Nothing is said either of the fact that populations are not static, that they move, that we’ve moved a fair distance from (relatively) self-sufficient village-units, or that aspirations have spilled out of the idyllic ‘village’ and perhaps will never be containable in those territorial dimensions again.

What is needed is an overhauling of the entire governance structure and a streamlining of institutional mechanisms and processes to encourage enlightened decision-making. That this is an uphill task is used as logic for devolution. That’s being lazy and indeed irresponsible for there are no short cuts to peace and wholesome citizenship. In this case, any kind of devolution that takes current provincial boundaries as given (never mind their artificiality and pernicious association with homeland-claim – a convenient exaggeration of existing demographic patterns) will etch in such hard lines the Eelamist positions on the Sri Lankan political landscape that it would in effect transform into irreversible fact.

We can do better. We must.

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Kumar Sangakkara: a man, a heart, a residence for all Sri Lankans

It was bound to happen. Peter Roebuck, who knows something about cricket, zilch about politics and history, has a sweeping style of commentating that is well fed by an arrogance that ideally compliments ignorance, took away a lot of gloss of what’s being described as one of the finest innings at Lords.  Factual inaccuracies and wild extrapolations slipped in with cogent arguments offered by others made for a piggy-backing of the most nauseating kind. 

I listened to what Kumar Sangakkara had said at the MCC ‘Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture’ all over again. Sangakkara was sharp, critical, pertinent and hopeful; Roebuck was caustic, off-context, dishonest and pessimistic.  Sangakkara got a standing ovation of the kind that Roebuck would never have got for his cricket or for his pedestrian commentaries. 

There are codes of conduct and a man of Sangakkara’s experience, intellect and stature would naturally be aware of these. I am not sure what kind of fallout there will be, but I am sure Sangakkara would not be unaware of possible costs of bring forthright. 

He was applauded at the Nursery Pavilion at Lord’s on Monday night (July 4, 2011) and the applause has not died down yet. Indeed, there is no reason it should.  Most importantly, not here in Sri Lanka, where people across the political spectrum are appreciative of the home truths that needed to be told but aren’t. His words are important for even as they are about mal-administration in cricketing circles, they speak to mal-administration across all institutions and in all institutional arrangements; it is not something relevant only to sports bodies. 

A friend commented: ‘Here's a man who defines what being Lankan really is’. True. Sangakkara will be quoted and re-quoted for years to come. There are quotable quotes in that speech that cricket scribes will savour for a long time to come. This, for example: ‘Fans of different races, castes, ethnicities and religions who together celebrate their diversity by uniting for a common national cause. Those fans are my foundation, they are my family. I will play my cricket for them. Their spirit is the true spirit of cricket.’ 

If cricket is taken as metaphor there is a lesson here for every young boy and girl in this country and in the world. Family is larger than father, mother, siblings and other relatives. The collective is indeed a ‘family’, and it is for that family that one plays or ought to. That is the true spirit of nationalism and solidarity.

We live in a country and world where party-loyalty, genuflection before employer and silence on account of costs involved override all other things. Sangakkara points to a different way of being: ‘My loyalty will be to the ordinary Sri Lankan fan, their 20 million hearts beating collectively as one to our island rhythm and filled with an undying and ever-loyal love for this, our game.’ Our ‘game’ is not cricket. Well, it is cricket and is not. It is more than cricket. It is about healing and embracing, being and becoming, distinct as well as common. 

There are words spoken with heart and when heart speaks words go to heart like the rays of the young son. Exhilarates. Empowers. Makes us want to be more than we are and strive to stretch the horizons of the possible. Kumar Sangakkara said it beautifully: ‘With me are all my people. I am Tamil, I am Sinhalese, I am Muslim and Burgher. I am a Buddhist, a Hindu, a follower of Islam and Christianity. But above all, today, and always, I will be proudly Sri Lankan’. 

I feel at home in those sentiments and resident in the heart of that man. This is why I believe that many recognize that Kumar Sangakkara has taken up residence in their hearts. He has, in mine. I am proud that he has and I am proud I am Sri Lankan in a Sri Lanka which, for all its errors and disappointments, does not forbid residency of all peoples in one and one in all. 

Kumar Sangakkara is not perfect. He will slip, he may fall, but he can be assured that for this speech and the sentiments therein, there won’t be lack of people to help him up. For he’s picked us all up. All by himself. 

http://www.dailynews.lk/2011/07/07/fea02.asp 

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