Goodbye Emergency, hello again constitutional flaw

Check-points: from 'almost non-existent' to 'no more'

Sri Lanka is a polity that is strangely willing to live with all manner of citizenship anomalies in general, especially those stepping from a flawed constitution.  Perhaps this is one reason why the announcement that Emergency Regulations will be done away with has not seen mindless euphoria spill into the streets of Colombo or elsewhere in the island.  There can be other reasons too.   

We’ve had ‘Emergency’ for so long that it has become a fact of life.  Like breathing.  We do it all the time, but rarely take cognizance of the fact in the manner of self-acknowledgment: ‘I am breathing in now; now I exhale’.  We breathed in and out emergency regulations. We had to, courtesy the LTTE and its many apologists.  As has always been the case, one real enemy necessitating extraordinary measures lead to those very same measures being employed to extract things totally unrelated to the threat.  A forgiving and grateful polity chose to indulge, by and large. 

On the other hand, the existence of laws does not necessarily mean they are enforced, and this holds for both the good and necessary and the bad and unnecessary.    Perhaps we are not being euphoric today because we haven’t really experienced the application of rule to the letter.  We lived through a time of check-points and barricades, routine security checks and general unease about one another and each unexplained parcel as we moved from place to place, in and out of buses and trains, and other crowded places.  We saw, post-LTTE, the barricades disappearing one by one, fewer and fewer checks, less and less traffic-stops to facilitate movement of VVIPs in convoys of anything between 10-75 vehicles, and a gradual easing of the military presence in and around the city.  That phasing out, I believe, was a gradual and necessary.

Still, a nation cannot be said to be a decent enough democracy, until such time the ability to apply such regulations at the will of the political leadership is removed.  Whether or not the rules are used or abused is irrelevant, especially since the magnitude of the threat has diminished to a point where regular law and order mechanisms can function effectively.  I am glad it’s going. 

I was surprised though that Ranil Wickremesinghe has saluted the decision but cautioned that democracy should also be protected.  Strangely, the Emergency Regulations played a critical role in expanding to extraordinary dimensions the space for democratic discourse.  If not, we would still be having the LTTE around, having to fear bomb attacks and be worried when we big goodbye to loved ones if we’d see them ever again. 

Well, all that’s in the past, and Ranil’s crimes of omission and commission (and of course the complicity of people like Jehan Perera and Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu) can be forgiven (but not forgotten, of course).  What is strange about Ranil’s democracy demand is the manifest aversion of the man to the idea in his own personal political life and that of his party.  What seems to me is that although Emergency Regulations were in place, the people of this country were hardly affected by them, whereas although no such regulations exist as far as the United National Party is concerned, the will of the party rank and file is consistently brushed aside.  And it’s not as though Emergency Rule stopped the UNP or Wickremesinghe from being more effective political entities, right? 

There was a time when elections were made of unbridled intimidation of voters, massive voter-impersonation, tampering of ballot-boxes, threatening of elections officials at polling booths and violence against those in other political parties. We still see some of this, including clashes and killings during campaigns, but we have come a long way from 1988-89 and from the kind of violence and rigging we saw in 1999 (both the Wayamba Provincial Council Election and the Presidential Election).  The end of the LTTE, moreover, helped reestablish the franchise in the North and East.  It is a credit to the electorate in these areas that they exercised their franchise despite and against the thuggery of certain political groups. 

There’s more self-censorship than there is censorship, and in this sense too, we’ve come a fair distance from the time when the ‘Competent Authority’ saw to it that large swathes of national newspapers were literally blacked out.  All told, ‘moving in the right direction’ seems to be a decent conclusion with respect to democracy. 

The most important thing to keep in mind is that removing these regulations does not mean that the system has returned to ‘normal’, for ‘normalcy’ includes the citizens having to live with a flawed constitution.  Issues of accountability and transparency remain.  The existing laws are inadequate.   There is unnecessary foot-dragging on the matter of instituting effective right-to-information legislation.  ‘I have nothing to hide, so ask me,’ is a bold statement, but is a weak response to the lack of proper laws.  The simple and damning response is as follows: ‘what if you are replaced by someone who has something to hide (assuming we believe you, that is)?’  If there is room for mischief, the innocence of the person who refuses to use such loopholes as there may be is hardly consolation for a nation that ought to streamline things in a way that institutions matter more than personalities.  Living on largesse is not healthy for a democracy or one in the making. 

The bottom line is that while we can be amused about Ranil Wickremesinghe’s want-democracy whine, democracy-lack will not be sorted out by a few laughs on our part.  I am happy to see the Emergency go.  I would be happier still if loopholes (for miscreants who are capable of slipping through right now and those who would not be averse to slipping through later) as such there exist are blocked up too.  Not worried about the UNP’s loops, but this nation is still looped, although we’ve come a long way. 

I am waiting. 

[Courtesy, Daily News, August 27, 2011] 

www.malindawords.blogspot.com

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The wakeful dreams of a reluctant insomniac

Four o’clock in the morning (or is it "night", I have never really figured that one out) is a time for dreams. And I find myself wide awake. Not entirely true. I am consciously driving away the sleep fairy and who knows what other monsters, for there is work to be done and the night (morning) is getting old. Wide awake I am. I keep telling myself that, fervently believing that the words have some therapeutic value against slumber.

Anyway, suffering as I am from semi-insomnia (shall we call it), I am perfectly aware that dreams aside, reality, when it is shod of deceit and decoration, has a pervasive nightmarish quality. And I am not talking about the solitude of this moment, nor the ghostly appearance of a line of computers facing me like policemen standing in the way of undergraduates intent on storming the high towers of power. I am thinking about a torture chamber where the most inhuman of atrocities were perpetrated. I am told it was called "Liberty". I am thinking also about a prison where political rivals were routinely tortured and done away with. It was called "Freedom". I am thinking about people talking about regaining the country in the same breath that they haggle about its sale price with potential buyers.

"Four o’clock in the morning (or night) is certainly not the time to think of such things," Rational Man argues, sleepily. Irrational Man responds, "what is worse is not to think of such things at all!" Rational Man rebuts, "Your readers are not interested buddy! Give us a break, say something nice. You know, so that people don’t start the day on a sour note?"

Irrational Man will not be outdone. "What is this? An argument, a prescription for self-censorship?" he asks. Rational Man draws a bed sheet over his head after having made sure that the mosquito coil had not gone out, turns over, saying "forget it pal, I forgot that you can’t be anything except irrational." "That’s a cop out response," Irrational Man thundered. "You know very well that this rational-irrational thing is a false dichotomy. It is all relative. We live in a society where things are re-defined and mis-labelled so that no one knows whether we are coming or going, or who they are for that matter!"

Rational Man, mis-labelled, mis-defined or otherwise, was already snoring. Irrational Man, infuriated, pulls off the bed sheet, and grabs him by the throat. "Self-preservation," thinks Rational Man and fights back. They wrestle each other furiously and disappear into the dark interiors of the unconscious.

It is a quarter past four now. It is not the time to debate about rationality. It is the time to take a little stroll outside, breathe in some fresh air and catch a thought that helps re-imagine the world, a picture-target that I can work towards. Actually I would settle for much less at this point. A cup of tea would have been ideal, but then again, not at this time. I know I am not living in Utopia. Who knows what’s outside, or what the outside has to say? There is no one around to ask. I have to check it out myself.

What does a single star its glitter unvanquished by the glow of the harbour lights say, I wonder. "Paalu anduru nil ahasa mamai, aetha dilena thani tharuwa ayai" (I am the dark, lonely sky and you, you are the single star shining far away.), I hear Amaradeva, his voice, even more than the words, expressing the condition of solitude. In this play of "you" and "I", what happens to "us"?

Rational Man emerges from the shadows of the unconscious. "There is no ‘us’, actually. There is only ‘I’. ‘You’ does not exist, it is but an imaginary creature ‘I’ creates to fill the vast regions of ‘my’ solitude. Like how God is supposed to have made Eve as a companion for Adam. Or how Calvin "creates" Hobbes. Or indeed how Man made God in his image.  Irrational Man has to make his presence felt as well. "Hey, you are beginning to talk like me, chum". I watch them quarrel over nothing and determine not to raise any question that might provoke either of them to test their debating skills against the other.

Since dreams are what I should be seeing and nightmares were what I was actually experiencing (and what grotesque nightmares too!), the logical thing is to dream.

Achieving realisation, someone once said, is like catching a butterfly. If you chase it, it will fly away. It is too quick for you. But if you keep very still with your arm stretched out there is a good possibility that it will alight on your outstretched palm. It was in this manner that dreams came to me. I dreamt of a thousand butterflies, distinct from one another by colour, shape and temperament. They came streaming through the dimly lit and wavering region between slumber and wakefulness. They flitted from dream to dream like a train moving from station to station.

I dreamt of a boy with a kite. He was outside in his garden. The string ran through my front door, into my bedroom, through my heart and through the window far away into a sky I could not see from where I lay. The boy was happy enough. I dreamt of all the aerial routes the kite could take and the particularly graceful path it chose.

I dreamt of a woman by a street corner, surrounded with baskets of flowers. I dreamt of the things she could buy with the money she earned, dreamt of her three little children whose names I did not know, dreamt of the purest smiles dancing on their lips.

I dreamt of a placid lake, a tear and an ocean. There was a bead of sweat that descended from a weary brow and fell on the still waters of a deep pool. I saw love running in waves towards shores too far away for me to see. I dreamt of the fire that is a sunset sky. There was a horizon that the morning sun was igniting. And the last thing I dreamt of before the light worked wakefulness into my eyes was that dreaming will always be possible, that it is neither salve nor fiction nor the refuge of the defeated.

As I rubbed my eyes, there stood before me, by the river and under a giant Na tree, two children. They were collecting leaves of all shapes and sizes. They had not yet decided what to do with them, whether to press them among the pages of a book of poems, string them all together into a crown or to organise them on the sand in different patterns.

I recognised instantly the two individuals whose squabbles had disturbed my sleepy wakefulness not too long ago and I remembered something I had figured out many years ago; not in a dream or as a result of serious reflection, but something that came like a dream attended by butterflies wearing the colours manufactured in a fairy tale. Not profound, but simple; not of earth-shattering clarity, but still true. This is what I remembered: "The night ends, the dawn breaks and all equations are altered; some even beyond recognition."

[Courtesy, The Island, February 23, 2003]

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Got tyrant-preferences, people?

Perhaps it is some intrinsic political tendency, genetic if you like, of the human condition, but we consistently interpret events in ways that justify our preferences or buttress our beliefs.  I am thinking of course about the recent developments (perhaps ‘development’ is too positive a term?) in Libya. 

This is supposed to be the tail-end of the so-called Arab Spring.  Those who coined the term (sections of the media that is slavishly pro-Washington) and those who orchestrated the whole operation (and let’s not kid ourselves that it was spontaneous citizens’ uprisings and nothing else!) quite happily conflate categories, use universalistic language and treat not just countries but entire continents as geographical and social monoliths.  We’ve seen crass generalizations regarding the countries and the uprisings.   

First of all, each country is unique and is uniquely constituted by class structures and other social layers.  They have different histories and have different structures of governance.  The people enjoy or suffer different benefits and deprivations respectively and live under different kinds of systems.  There are similarities, yes, but the distinctions override. 

The Washington-loving media speak of Egypt and Libya in the same breath. That’s not just shoddy journalism but indicate appalling levels of submission to the Washington View of the Word (WVW).  The disparities, corruption, dictatorial realities and assets of the two countries are starkly different.   Different too is the methodologies used by Washington to down regimes.  In Egypt a relatively more popular uprising was managed in ways that a regime was installed that could do what Mubarak had done for years.  So it was a matter of an unpopular but friendly tyrant whose use-by date had passed being nudged out and replaced by a regime that was as friendly to the USA. 

In Libya the USA and others of the Evil Axis, namely Britain and France, wrangled a UN Security Council Resolution to justify what was made out to be limited military operations ‘to prevent civilians being harmed’.  The ‘civilians’ turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of brigands funded and armed by Washington.   The Air Force of the USA and those of Britain and France have carried out over 7,000 bombing attacks since March 19, 2011.  They’ve sent special operation ground forces and commando units to direct the military operations of the so-called ‘rebels’.  It is, as Brian Becker, National Coordinator of ANSWER Coalition (‘The truth about the situation in Libya’) puts it, ‘a NATO-led army in the field’.

Dissatisfaction with the Libyan leadership is no doubt a part of the story, but impoverishment was not.  Libya, post-1969 not only cleared the nation of all foreign military presence, but put in place processes that resulted in a remarkable improvement in living standards.  The most pertinent fact is that Libyans are certainly not in charge of script-writing the rebellion nor will they be masters of the outcome.  It’s now months since anyone spoke of the Security Council resolution regarding the use and abuse of Libyan air space.  The protectors quickly became predators, perpetrating the crimes they set out to prevent. 

It’s all about oil.  Just as Iraq was and is about oil; Alan Greenspan who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, has confessed in his biography: 'I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.'  US-UK forces killed 1.2 million Iraqis for this, according to a report by the British polling agency, ORB.  So when Barack Obama goes ga-ga about Muammar Gaddafi taking pot shots at civilians, I can't but help think of kettles. 

Libya has the largest oil reserves in all of Africa and moreover her oil is particularly coveted due to its superior quality.   As Becker points out, if it was about democracy and civilization, then NATO had better start bombing Saudi Arabia right away. In fact NATO should have launched an attack against that country decades ago!

But Saudi Arabia will not be made a Libya.  Ronald Reagan insisted that the despotic, tyrannical monarchy will be protected against insurrection.  Barack Obama, for all his liberalist and outwardly enlightened rhetoric is proving to be a not-so-closeted Reaganite.  The same goes for Bahrain, where the regime has unleashed and continues to unleash violence on an agitating population that makes Gaddafi’s operations against ‘rebels’ in Libya seems like a water-pistol fight between schoolboy gangs.  But Bahrain will not be censured.  The people will not be armed. NATO will not drop arms nor send commandos to direct field operations. 

The reason is not hard to fathom. It’s about who is ‘My Kind of Tyrant’ and who is not, as far as Washington is concerned.   There are tyrannies, ladies and gentlemen, that will be suffered and celebrated and there are democracies that will be censured.  It’s about friendship. 

Did I hear someone mutter ‘integrity’ in a questioning tone?  No, that cannot be and anyway it can’t be about Barack Obama or the liars and brutes in NATO who are on his friends’ list.    It’s all very simple.  Libya is not Egypt II or Tunisia II, this we know.  Neither Bahrain nor Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, will be permitted to be Libya II.

Labouring the point seems meaningless.  There are other things to be done and I don’t have to elaborate. 

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The political and apolitical of ‘Androcles and the Lion’

An old friend, now domiciled in Australia, after urging me to set up my own blog and not finding any enthusiasm on my part except for ‘yes, I’ll think about it’ each time the subject was broached, she went ahead and did it.  She reads, corrects, and suggests improvements almost every day.  I didn’t write anything for Tuesday (August 22, 2011) and therefor picked something I had written over a year ago to post on the blog: The counter-democratic and communalist thrust of re-inventing ‘ethnic’ conflict (‘Daily Mirror’ of April 18, 2010). 

My friend (let’s call her Manel) appeared in ‘chat’ and said ‘this is an old one’.  I told her I picked it randomly from my files and found the content still relevant. 

‘Yes, I gathered you might not have written anything,’ she said and recommended that I ‘leave politics and write about something else today’. 

‘Such as?’

‘Sex toys!’ 

She was kidding.  I asked her to pick a random book, turn to a random page, close her eyes, place a finger on the page and tell me what’s beneath it.  She mentioned some social research text book so I told her that I would prefer fiction.  She came up with the following exchange in the script of a play by (yes, of all ‘non-political’ people!) George Bernard Shaw:

Androcles and the Lion

Lentulus: Centurion: I call on you to protect me.

Centurion: You asked for it, sir. It's no business of ours. You’ve had two whacks at him. Better pay him a trifle and square it that way.

Lentulus: Yes, of course. [To Ferrovius] it was only a bit of fun, I assure you; I meant no harm. Here [he proffers a gold coin].

Ferrovius: [taking it and throwing it to the old beggar, who snatches it up eagerly, and hobbles off to spend it] Give all thou hast to the poor. Come, friend: courage! I may hurt your body for a moment; but your soul will rejoice in the victory of the spirit over the flesh. [he prepares to strike].

This is from ‘Androcles and the Lion,’ in a collection of his plays published by Colorgravure Publications, Melbourne.  Page 691.

My last encounter with Bernard Shaw was when I played a drunkard in an abridged version of ‘Major Barbara’ written by Prof Ashley Halpe and produced by the Peradeniya Dramatic Society.  My first was when I acted out an extract from ‘Androcles’ for a Speech and Drama examination, probably over thirty years ago, trained by the evergreen Lakshmi Jeganathan, who not only taught me my ‘Eai, Bee and See’ but made me appreciate literature. 

The political intrudes, I am sorry to inform Manel.  It can be about boys and lions and thorns, but Bernard Shaw framed it all in subtle political commentary.  This reminds me of the late Gamini Haththotuwegama’s production of Hamlet in Sinhala way back in 1991.  A Shakespearean tragedy made of love, betrayal, palace intrigue and the machinations pertaining to power.  The particular iteration was of youth being drawn into the political, often reluctantly.   

It is nice to think the world is not just about things political, but politics pervades apolitical life; politics informs choices and manufactures choice-lack.  Politics is about power and power is not just about parliamentary composition, the clash of ideologies, the articulation of dissent and the meeting of dissent with force. 

It is not only about relative strengths of political parties, the structure of the state, the health of institutions pertaining to governance, the overall focus of policy or the relative value of factors in the political equation of a community, electorate, province, nation, region or the globe.  It is about power-manifestations in all things, including relationships, professional and personal, in social, cultural, economic and even ecological spheres of engagement.  It is about privilege and privileging, footnote and footnoting, even as it is about making choices, limits on choice-making and the modes of conduct vis-à-vis all these things. 



George Bernard Shaw

‘Androcles and the Lion’ is from Aesop’s Fables and is a story that speaks of gratitude, where a slave boy who escapes and befriends a lion is later left alone by the lion when the two find themselves as players in an arena with the emperor present to see a hungry beast tear to pieces a hapless boy. 

In the play, written in 1912, i.e. a century ago, the story is used to comment on earnestness and the pitfalls of hypocrisy, the latter being a characteristic of the Christian Church that Shaw condemned.  Indeed, in the preface that complemented the print version of the play, Shaw claims that Jesus was nothing more than a benevolent genius who eventually bought into popular ideas of his divinity and impending martyrdom (or else that’s how his story was mis-written by the his followers; a deft political move, one might say in the context of this discussion).  Shaw claims that the teachings were lost with the crucifixion and that the teachings and philosophies that are collected in his name are but those of Paul or Barabbas. 

I didn’t know all this in those early Androcles days of mine and hadn’t heard of Shaw either.  I don’t know enough to either reject or endorse Shaw’s version of events that happened 1900 years before his time, or are alleged to have happened.  Faith is a highly personal thing of course, but when faith is wielded like a flag, it cuts like a sword, for the faithful, regardless of the intensity of their fervor or indeed on account of it, can never be equivalent to divinity. 

Divinity itself is in a sense largely a construct or at least a frill of frail-human extrapolation.  There is a lot of machination and hypocrisy, which in turn dilutes that which is embrace-worthy of philosophy and relevant practice.  This is why when someone says that “God should be ashamed of himself for having created a creature as vile as man”, it is not entirely illogical or even blasphemous. Similarly thought-provoking is the twin contention, “God is man’s silliest creation”.  Like all things, in the final instance, it is the human being, the individual, who has to come to terms with his/her notion of the cosmos, life, afterlife, the moral universe, the dimensions of retribution and reward, and fashion ‘way of life’.  Belief in or disavowal of divinity are reference frames and useful in their own ways. 

‘Androcles’ is a political story, but that’s perhaps just me. Manel might not think so.  I was not planning to write about lions, human frailties or questions regarding the existence of the divine.  There is power, though.  And there is agency.  There is decision. There is need to cut through the vague and indeterminate.  There is need to figure out location in a moral-amoral continuum and choose journey-direction. 

There is a need to write a column and a need to oblige a friend.  There is a need to apologise and appreciate. Sorry Manel, and thank you.  

Courtesy: Daily News 24 August, 2011

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The counter-democratic and communalist thrust of re-inventing ‘ethnic’ conflict

I am amused by the way that individuals, interest groups and certain political parties have reacted to the results of the recently held Parliamentary Elections. Having bet their all on secession, federalism or quasi-federal arrangements that can be essentially described as ‘Eelam at a later date’ propositions, they are either livid that the forces they once vilified as being Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinists or being fixated with the ‘unitary’ concept have won. Comprehensively.  This is not surprising, given the transformations we have seen in terms of ideological control over the past decade.

The honeymoon days of the Chandrika Kumaratunga regime when Eelamism made respectable reached its orgasmic peak with the Ceasefire Arrangement when the key articulators of that ‘ism’, the LTTE was elevated to ‘partner’ in an historic ‘accommodation’ of ruthless terrorism which can only be described, politically, as ‘surrender’.  The dream-disc was changed by a disc jockey called Political Reality in 2004.  The United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) ousted the UNP.  Forty members of the UPFA belonged to the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), whom the federalists liked to call ‘Sinhala Nationalists’ when they felt generous and ‘Sinhala extremists’ or ‘Sinhala chauvinists’ when they were drunk with frustration.  The strong showing of the newcomers, the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) was also ‘disconcerting’, naturally, given that party’s strong opposition to accommodations with terrorism and/or Tamil chauvinism in whatever form. 

It went from bad to worse.  In 2005, Mahinda Rajapaksa won the Presidential Election.  The Rajapaksa regime prevailed over all efforts to derail things, both by local and international forces, and did the unthinkable by defeating the LTTE militarily (actually this eventuality was ‘scienticised’ to be ‘impossible’ by political analysts and (un)think-tanks such as the Centre for Policy Alternatives).  Then there was a ‘ray of hope’ in the form of former Army Commander, General (Rtd) Sarath Fonseka going against Mahinda Rajapaksa for the Presidency.  The ‘black cloud’ of a Rajapaksa re-election caused a lot of understandable anguish among the federalists.  Few would have bet against the UPFA winning the General Election, but fewer still would have believed they would win this handsomely.  The bad dream was not officially a nightmare.  What to do? Well, there is the last resort: begging.

Today we see all these federalists of various hues begging Mahinda Rajapaksa to be ‘magnanimous’ in victory.  They are referring to what has been their ‘bread and butter’ for decades: ‘resolution of the ethnic conflict (so-called)’.  They want Mahinda to be charitable, to do something for the poor minorities.  That’s insulting in the first place.  Secondly, Presidents and Governments are not required or equipped to be philanthropists or charities, respectively.  They go before the people with manifestos and are given mandates to implement the same.  That’s it.  They are not required to deliver promises that other people made in their manifestos.  Translated into the present context, neither President Mahinda Rajapaksa nor the UPFA Government, recently elected, are required to deliver the pledges contained in the manifesto of the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), the Tamil acronym of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA). 

But this is exactly what some people want to President to do.  The thrust of the manifesto that Mahinda Rajapaksa and his party went before the people with, Mahinda Chinthana – Idiri Dekma is DEVELOPMENT.  There’s nothing about ‘devolution’ in the document. 

With respect to the concerns, grievances and aspirations articulated by different minorities, their representatives and advocates of ‘solutions’ for these issues, the wording is essentially about broadbased reconciliation.  That’s a post-conflict catch-all term which is in a sense politically pragmatic and in a sense mischievous.  Whatever one chooses to call it, it is what we have in terms of pledge and consequent to election result, mandate.  What Mahinda Rajapaksa and the UPFA Government choose to do with it is another matter altogether.  Whatever they do, one thing is certain, we passed a corner in our historical journey as a nation.  The various forces played their hands and a conclusion was reached, whether one likes it or not: we will put myth-modelling and fantasizing behind us. 

Does this mean that grievances of those who did not vote for Mahinda Rajapaksa or the UPFA should go unheeded? No.  Mahinda Rajapaksa is President of Sri Lanka and all Sri Lankans.  The UPFA is not a party that forms a Government for only those who voted for it.  It is a Government of and for all Sri Lankans. Every grievance articulated through legitimate channels should be taken up and if there aren’t mechanisms for such articulation or such consideration, those need to be set up, not because minorities have to be placated but citizens have a right to a voice and to redress in the event of being wronged. 

Mahinda Rajapaksa paved the way for a national embrace by defeating the biggest impediment to reconciliation, the LTTE.  The next step is winning the trust of those who perhaps feel they ‘lost’.  Talk is not what is important now. It is work. It is rehabilitation, resettlement and development. 

Dayan Jayatilleka attribute the inroads that the UPFA has made in the North and the East to the work of his friend Douglas Devananda. That’s the silliest explanation I have heard so far.   The Jaffna District is not Kayts, this ‘analyst’ forgets.  The man likens Douglas to G.G. Ponnambalam and S.J.V. Chelvanayagam and warns that if he is not listened to (meaning, if Douglas’ whine for a 13^th Amendment or 13^th Amendment Plus ‘resolution’ is not implemented), the Government will lose him and with him find Tamil people rushing to grab guns and grenades and an extremist banner (by implication). That’s like Dan Quayle debating Lloyd Benson (in the run up to the US election of 1988) comparing himself to John F. Kennedy; Benson silenced him thus: ‘I’ve known the man you compare yourself to, but Senator Quayle, you are no Jack Kennedy!’  Douglas is small fry and of little relevance to a Tamil population that is currently struggling to define its political identity in a post-LTTE Sri Lanka.

The confusion of this analyst is clear when in the same article (‘MR’s hat-trick: New start, last chance or old cycle?’) he says the ITAK is a ‘moderate Tamil party’ and later acknowledges that the ITAK ran on the old-federalist platform of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) which, at whose udder Tamil chauvinism and LTTE terrorism fattened itself.  Dayan is not a Rajapaksa-hater, but he most certainly loves India more than he loves Sri Lanka and prefers federalism and devolution to any other form of ‘resolution’ of the so-called ‘National Question’ never mind the fact that history, archaeology, demography and geography rebel against such arrangements, not to mention that it is not tenable economically speaking given resource distribution and the prerogatives of regional units under devolution.  

He wants Rajapaksa and the UPFA Government to come to a ‘historic compromise’ with the ITAK/TNA.  How democratic is that?  We are talking about a party that is in decline; down to about 12 MPs from 22 in 2004.  We are talking also about a politics that has generated much violence; meaning, the entire discourse about traditional homelands.  We are at a point where we have to take the questions pertaining to grievances seriously, remove the political frills (made mostly of academic jargon) and obtain their true dimensions. These and not myths are what we should resolve for.  In this, the ITAK/TNA or anyone else has the right to bring its set of grievances to the table and have the Government take note and act.  The ITAK/TNA or whoever else that chooses to do so will have to come with adequate substantiation of course and be prepared to have ‘history’ and related claim contested.  If not, we would be just skirting the issue as we have for the past century. 

I believe the federalist lobby senses that they don’t have a case; hence the appeal to magnanimity. 

Dayan poses an important set of questions:

Will he (Rajapaksa) use the moment and the momentum to press the re-set button on Sri Lanka’s Northern Question within the first hundred days of the new cabinet and parliament? Will he press the re-set button to move forward to psychological unification and reconciliation through a ‘grand bargain’ with the ITAK (TNA) on constitutional reform, or to move backwards to non-consensual centralisation and the abolition or dilution of existing provincial autonomy through its substitution by sub–unit devolution? Will we move backward (not least constitutionally and legislatively) to 1977-83, 1972 and 1956, or forward to the 21st century?

Now, he’s jumping the gun, asking leading questions.  By inserting the word ‘backward’, he is implying that being ‘progressive’ at this point is to compromise the mandate given by the people who voted for Rajapaksa and the UPFA by way of cutting a deal with the Eelamists.  That would be, in my opinion, the ‘going backward’, i.e. the strategy of pandering to Eelamists.  That would be the ‘old cycle’. 

There are no ‘last chances’ unless you have a very short time-frame in mind and have restricted vision.  What we need is a ‘new start’ and that would be abandoning the baggage that Eelamists and their Marxist allies have saddled our polity with for far too long. 

No resolution of grievance should include mandate received being kicked in the gut.  The people have spoken. They shall not be short-changed by the losers and their ideological fellow-travellers.  I doubt if Mahinda Rajapaksa is ready to purchase the rubbish dished out by federalists even when they put him on the pedastal and genuflect to the point of embarrassment.   

[Courtesy, Daily Mirror, April 18, 2010]

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The enemy within: Ignorance

The website www.maithri.com  [http://www.maithri.com/]  offers a neat exposition on the notion of ‘I’ in its section on ‘Ego and desire’:

‘The feeling of a separate "I", which we call ego-consciousness, is directly related to the strength of ignorance, greed, and hatred. The deepest meaning of ignorance is the believing in, identifying with and clinging to the ego, which is nothing but an illusionary mental phenomenon. But because of this strong clinging to ego-consciousness, attachment/desire, anger/hatred arise and repeatedly gain strength.’

Ego and desire are likened to two sides of a coin and even more interestingly to the pedals on a bicycle.  If ego is projected desire and desire projected ego, ‘then it is like pedalling a bicycle; if we go on pedalling, the bicycle keeps moving!’  The one feeds the other, in other words. 

Ignorance, greed and hatred not only feed on one another but makes for a grip on ego so tenacious that extrication becomes extremely difficult.  These are of course notions that require deep study and experimentation through practical engagement, observation and arrival at conclusion.  On the other hand, this side of such engagement leading to bicycle-stop, so to say, i.e. in the everyday of our doing and being, reflection on the notions of ignorance, greed and hatred can have positive outcomes for both the particular individual and the collective he/she interacts with. 

Let’s start with ignorance.  The simple, common sense meaning of the word is ‘not knowing’.  An extended meaning could include ‘not knowing that one does not know’ and ‘believing erroneously that one knows’, the latter containing an element of arrogance.  I have found that the greatest obstacle to acquiring some degree of humility is the refusal to acknowledge the dimensions of our ignorance.  The sum total of human knowledge still amounts to nothing more than a grain of wisdom-sand compared to the limitless universe of human ignorance.  What an individual knows is in turn a grain of sand compared to the vast dimensions of accumulated human knowledge.  Individuals and collectives, therefore, are prone to err at every turn.  Assertion, the professing of full knowledge, totalizing claims and such are essentially indicative of ignorance, i.e. the not-knowing of knowledge-limit.  

This ignorance or the acknowledgement of knowledge-limit does not necessarily have to inhibit action or for endless second-guessing.  There are ‘truths’ that are context bound, there are odds that can be played given experience and recognition of pattern. 

It is tough enough even at the individual level.  It can’t be any easier when one has to decide for collectives.  Not everyone is an expert on several fields.  Politicians, for example, are ‘experts’ at reading and playing with and within the power equation.  While people from any profession can enter and even thrive in politics, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are experts on things they have no training on. 

This is why they need advice.  This is why effective governance structures are those that consistently facilitate the appointment of right people for the right task.  Where governance structures do not facilitate this, politicians are forced to rely on their own understanding of things they may not know much about, both in decision-making and in appointments.  The room for error is naturally great. 

The cultivation of humility always helps, but it does not insure against error.  This is why the astute politician or leader will err on the side of institutions rather than personalities; it is a better insurer against error in the long term and, again in the long-term, has a positive impact on the particular individual’s (or party’s) political future. 

If politicians can move from ‘I know’ to ‘I think I know’ or even ‘I may be wrong, but’, if not in statement but in thinking, then the collective can hope for a minimizing of error and even rectification of flaw.  Greater reflection on the nature of things and the underlying principles of their being and becoming, as indicated at the beginning of this essay, would certainly help, for recognition of the dimensions of ego and desire is perhaps first step in the battle to vanquish ignorance and the arrogance it produces. 

It’s all there in the Grade 9 Buddhism text book, pages 81-85, if I remember right.  No, not the deep philosophical engagement that seeks to understanding suffering, its cause(s) and the pathways to end it, but simple, day-to-day engagement in the public sphere.  Or indeed, any sphere where ‘collective’ is relevant. 

[Courtesy, Daily News, August 22, 2011]

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On offensives and counter-offensives

A few days ago I was invited to speak on the above topic at the launch of a website  (www.outofwar.com) and a series of books, a) The LTTE: The most disciplined fighting force, b) Unpardonable crimes against humanity, and c) Our of the cage: the greatest hostage rescue operation in the world.  I offered some thoughts briefly, which I reiterate here with some expansion. 

The subject at hand was of course the direct threat to sovereignty posed by the LTTE and the moves on compromising the territorial integrity of the nation via various articulations of separatism, including the nauseating hurrahing of the 13^th Amendment by those who ignore political realities, historical tract, demographic and geographical facts and the practicalities pertaining to regional resource anomalies.  A nation that has had to struggle against terrorism for three decades cannot be faulted for laying it thick on the articulation and not the purpose. 

Offensives can take different forms and can be launched by multiple actors.   The purpose remains simple: extraction of resources, creation of markets, and the exploitation of populations.  It’s a by-any-means-necessary business.  Impoverishment, political instability, disunity, distraction and cultural effacement are among the many methodologies used to achieve the ends envisaged. 

Most pernicious among them is causing rupture in cultural values and the fracturing of civilizational memory and sinew through desecration of artifact, burning of books, purchasing of faith-loyalty, denigration of things held sacred including philosophies that have functioned as both civilizational glue and unguent that heals inflicted wounds.  In this sense phenomenon such as terrorist movements are essentially distractions and costly ones too.

This is why, the end of that war did not coincide with the end of the 500 years long war or the old war of resource plunder, market-securing and labour exploitation.  The end of the terrorist distraction merely gave way to the other and older decoy of non-gun separatism, namely the discourse of mythical homelands, aspiration frilled as grievance and a strange fixation on lines on a map that make no sense in terms of geography, ethnic composition/density, archaeological record, administrative efficacy or resource distribution, but were the product, we have to conclude, of whimsical doodling by some foreigner. 

Even then, this is only indicator of and not the substance underlying intent.   This is not the place to enumerate the full range of offensives that are in operation and could very well be launched for the purposes mentioned above.  Each offensive will have its particularities and each will demand particular strategies. 

What is important to understand is that it’s not new, that it didn’t begin when Prabhakaran murdered Alfred Duraiappah in 1975, when Tamils who made around 10% of the population wanted 50-50 representation in the 1940s, when S.J.V. Chelvanayakam of the ‘little-now, more later’ methodology of executing land theft came up with the Tamil State Party, when Ponnambalam Ramanathan wanted the first local university located in Jaffna and other landmark moments of Tamil chauvinism, or indeed the Sinhala chauvinistic feeders to this process or the buttress provision by Marxists and Christian fundamentalists either due to ideological confusion or on account of operating on the logic that if you hurt the Sinhalese, you invariably hurt a lot of Buddhists, respectively.   All this is frill and more of the means-to-the-end of resource plunder.  That process is 500 years old now. 

It must be kept in mind that ‘threat’ is not always ‘external’.  The external threat has a potent accomplice within.  That accomplice is a facilitator of external-born offensives and indeed, the most wily of the outsiders will for reasons of efficacy often employ elements within the polity and even make out that debilitating policies are actually good for the nation and its citizenry.  All those who pander to Eelam myth models and conjure non-existent monsters such as ‘Geo Political Realities’ or at least make out that irritating bugs are actually vicious werewolves are members of the enemy within.  Everyone who creates chinks in the armour or make bigger the loopholes through which the enemy can slip in, are by omission or commission partners in the fact of offensive putsch against the nation. 

If we have chinks in governance and nothing is done to correct flaw, whoever is responsible is guilty of being an accessory after the fact of invasion.  If there is corruption, power abuse, deliberate erosion of citizens’ rights, erosion of law and order, inequality in the dispensation of justice, compromising of meritocracy, lack of mechanism and will to address articulated grievance, obtain the true dimensions of complaint and so on, each of these things help the offensives against the nation. 

What is relevant to keep in mind is that we are endowed with a philosophy which contains the theoretical foundation that is more than adequate to execute successful counter-offensives regardless of the form that the offensive could take.  In a word, Buddhism. 

Each generation will pick and choose weapon, but the efficacy of particular strategies will always be tested in terms of fidelity to a methodology of engagement that is more than 2500 years old.   Where the political leadership shows fidelity to the Dasa Raja Dharma or the ten-fold charter on governance, if the leaders and a vigilant citizenry regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation are capable of being kind, compassionate, treating things with equanimity and rejoicing in the happiness of others, we are on a sound footing.  If we have it in us to show compassion and also exercise wisdom, we can face most challenges.  If we were only compassionate, there is no doubt that we will all be slaughtered.  If we only had wisdom to depend on, we would quickly turn into the enemy that we try to defeat, such in the nature of human intercourse. 

If we are arrogant, are ignorant and are greedy, then all victories won will soon be divested of lustre and meaning; what was won on the battlefield would soon be squandered in the arena of more civilised but equally debilitating power games. 

In the end, what will save us is not the friend among the powerful, quick footedness in diplomacy or superior technique in all spheres of warfare, with and without weaponry.  These things help, no doubt, but if we don’t fight on the firm territory of ethics, we will be fighting an uphill battle standing on quicksand.  The enemy is right now on shaky ground and that’s a plus for us.  The enemy’s lack of integrity, however, is not reason enough to be complacent and it certainly does not guarantee victory, especially not if we fudge ethics ourselves, in the issue that is at hand or in other matters. 

In short need to get our moral position right as a nation.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my take on offensives and counter-offensives at this moment. 

[Courtesy, Sunday Island, August 21, 2011] 
                                                                                                                                   

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