Remembering ‘Tyre Sunil’: may his tribe increase

Sometime in the year 1991, Ananda Thilak Bandara Herath, a final year student at the University of Peradeniya (Arts Faculty) held a one-man concert called ‘Vihinsana’ which could be translated at ‘extreme violence’.  They were all new songs, written by friends as well as a couple of reputed lyricists.  The music, for the most part, was composed by his batchmate Nishad Handunpathirana, probably the most accomplished esraj player in the world today. 

Thilak, as he was known, was from Galgamuwa and teaches in a school close to home.  He sings, still and has recorded many originals. Someday he will be a better known name in the music scene. I remembered him and his concert because of one particular song, the title of which escapes me now.  It was about the loss of a son to that terrible period called bheeshanaya when thousands of unarmed people were arbitrarily abducted by vigilante groups unleashed by the then UNP government, tortured and summarily executed.  It was written by D.B. Sunil, then a second year student at Peradeniya, reading for a special degree in Political Science.  This is a story about Sunil and not the song he wrote or the concert in which that song was performed or the artist who won appreciative applause. 

D.B. Sunil is known to all his contemporaries as ‘Tyre Sunil’.  He was the thinnest boy on campus.  Probably the darkest too.  He was among the tallest in his batch.  He entered university in 1990.  This was immediately after the bheeshanaya.  It was a time when no one wanted to talk politics.  This was understandable.  It was as though the university was out of bound for politics.  Politics, however, does not take notice of such rulings.  It entered nevertheless.  Sunil, even as a fresher, argued that the political is not contained in the university and neither was the university insulated from it.  He wanted students to speak to issues that spilled over the university boundaries and indeed that activism should go beyond the Galaha Junction.  He was vilified by a student population that was averse to treading any path that may lead to the kind of chaos the eighties had seen.

‘Umbata tayar ekak udin yannada oney?’  he was asked (do you want to perish on a tyre?).  The reference was to the method of evacuation preferred by the vigilantes, tossing people on pyres made of old tyres and setting them aflame.  That’s how he became Tyre Sunil. 

Sunil was one of the brightest students at Peradeniya.  Life was never easy for Sunil, given the kind of background he came from.  He was tempered by the circumstances of his growing up and was mature beyond his years.  He had a girlfriend who ditched him around the time they graduated.  Supposedly due to a caste-mismatch.  He held no grudge.  He could not.  It was not in him. 

He sat the Foreign Service exam and passed.  He had answered all questions accurately at the interview. He didn’t make the cut for reasons best known to those on the interview board.  He worked for a couple of years as a data collector for the Agrarian Research and Training Institute, collecting price information from major markets.  He supplemented the meager income by giving tuition.

When he first started teaching, he had only 3 students.  The return on investment was minimal.  He told me then that he will continue to teach them because they had responded to the advertisement (a few handbills).  It was a responsibility.  He fell in love, married and had a son.  He purchased a small piece of land close to Peradeniya. 

‘I skipped lunch on certain days and had a plain tea instead.  When I wanted a cup of plain tea, I drank water.’

That’s how he saved the rupees and cents. 

I visited him in the year 2000 and spent a night at his place.  The house was not ‘half-built’.  It was less built than that.  Tyre Sunil treated me like a king.  I was given his ‘study room’ to sleep in.  ‘The Study’ had one bed and a table that held all the books he had, most of which were prizes he had won in school.  Among them was a familiar book, Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Gora’.  The English translation, that is.  It was familiar because, I found out soon enough, it belonged to me.  He had borrowed it way back in 1993 when he stayed at my place.  April 30^th, I remember, because we were planning to go out on May Day. 

I flipped through the pages.  It was full of notes.  Words were underlined and the meanings of the underlined words were written on the corners of the particular page, with pencil lines connecting word and translation.  Almost every page had such comments.  That is the kind of effort that Tyre Sunil expended to improve his knowledge of English.  It must have taken him a long time to read the book, even though he must have read the Sinhala translation before.  Tagore to Malalasekera and back to Tagore after every 5-10 words takes a long time, I realized. 

He had, by that time, got a Government job as a teacher.  His first appointment was in some small school in a remote corner of the Hasalaka electorate.  He told me that he was not looking to get a transfer.  He told me that a few weeks after joining the school, the principle had invited him to speak at the assembly.  There was a lot of pride when he said that he spoke about making the best of what one has instead of cursing those who had and lamenting over one’s lot. 

Sunil still teaches.  He has sold that property and purchased one closer to the Kandy-Colombo road.  A couple of years ago, when I visited, he was in the process of building a house there. It was more than half-built.  He has hundreds of students now.  He is as thin as he was as an undergraduate.   Works hard.  Goes out of his way to make sure his students do well and while learning about the subject learn something about the world around them as well. 

Sunil did not ‘go over a tyre’.  Many Sunils did, though.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the secret of the monumental human resource crisis our country suffers from,  as my friend Werawellalage Premasiri (Director-Development, Upcountry Development Authority), who hails from Kumarigama, Ampara points out frequently when our friends get together. 

[Courtesy, Daily News, October 1, 2011] 

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Necessary meditations on carelessness and callousness

I haven’t seen Regi Siriwardena’s play ‘The Blinding’, directed by Haig Karunaratne.  I was not at the preview at the ICES and not at the British Council more recently.  I haven’t read the play either.  Someone else was at both performances, Comrade Aunty Nimal Breckenridge. And, as she sometimes does when something irks her, she shared a story. 

‘Last evening I was at a play pre-viewed before a group of us. It was "experimental theatre": a hard hitting commentary on how we "ordinary" people lived our ordinary lives while corpses were floating down rivers and petrol soaked tyres hung round young men's necks incinerated them. When the show ended the director/producer (a friend of thaatha's) started a discussion. I made the first comment. Then a mobile blared; and as the owner scrambled in her bag and started a conversation.  I asked, “Could the public's carelessness and callousness be displayed better?”   And walked out.’  And this, Comrade Aunty Nimal says, after Haig had specifically requested that mobile phones be turned off. 

She added a disclaimer, the gist of which I reproduce here: ‘I am told that I should guard against expressing such comments. My reactions are always spontaneous and polite; never pre-schemed.’

There is something about that time, the bheeshanaya or ‘Period of Terror’ in the Sinhala short-hand that few Sinhala-speaking Sri Lankans would be ignorant of.  It was deliberate and systemic terrorism on the part of the JVP and on the part of the UNP Government of the time. Some 60,000 people were killed over two years or so. The body count at the height of violence was around 50 per day.   Very few, if at all, were killed in gun battles. 

In stark contrast, when the LTTE was decisively crushed in May 2009, there was no lack of chest-beating, tear-shedding crusaders begging and even demanding that the terrorists be let off the hook.  And now that preferred outcome did not materialize, there is no lack of the same kinds of crusaders wanting to down those who rid the country of the terrorist menace.  Back then, in the late eighties, it was all ‘fair game’. 

Was it that in the late eighties the ‘right kind of people’ were getting slaughtered, i.e. those who were better dead?  Was it that the world didn’t have the eyes it claims to have now?  I don’t know.  What is indisputable was that back then there was a kind of callousness and silence that was apparent among certain sections of the population.  The transgressions, let me repeat, were not alleged to have taken place.  They happened.  Well documented. Facts, not allegations. 

A death is a death and each dead is consigned the same state of being, in a physical sense (the jury is out on other senses): they are out of the scene and the equation.  The manner of dying however and the circumstances too can provoke different kinds of reactions and so too the identity of the dead, apparently, where circumstance and manner are roughly similar.  

I am not talking of course of those rare beings who have cultivated the ability to exercise equanimity when encountering the vicissitudes of life.  The lady in question obviously did not belong that that category.  Callousness and carelessness cannot be stopped by way of legislation.  It is human thing; ‘inhuman’ some might correct me.  Perhaps the performance was weak, I don’t know.  Perhaps it was seen as some kind of ‘that’ which was different from the ‘this’ of being obnoxious.  These all include value-judgments at one level or another, yes.   

Still.

It seems that some deaths and killings are not newsworthy, some not worthy of respectful silence, some deserving cheering and some so irrelevant that keeping-in-touch via mobile phone is a far more important matter than being civil and civilized.  These things cannot be demanded, Comrade Aunty Nimal would not disagree, I believe.   

It is easy, someone might say, to pass judgment.  Someone else might observe that it easier and indeed too convenient not to.  It is easy to pick and choose when to engage and when to look askance.  Why bother to attend this kind of theatre, if one was adamant not to engage, not to reflect and open oneself to self-interrogation, and to change ways if way-changing made sense, all things considered? 

Comrade Aunty Nimal, as I said, was present at the British Council when ‘The Blinding’ was performed there.  She had a comment that might shed some light.

‘The discussion at the end highlighted, as the play did, the enigma of the human condition. Who were “ordinary people”? My first thought was [a question]: were we, in that room, ordinary people? [This was] sharply followed by the thought “why not? How many of us when we left, had had our brains "re-wired" .........?’

She concluded ‘I think I will stop there for now.’

I will too.  And I will proceed to reflect on these not-easy questions the inimitable Comrade Aunty Nimal raised. 

[Courtesy, Daily News, September 30, 2011]

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The Group of ’72 won it all on a mystic Sunday

Gatherings of old friends is always nice, even if what occasioned the meeting happened to be something as somber and sad as a funeral.  My friend Janaka Perera’s father passed away last Saturday and as is often the case when someone close to someone close dies, close-people drop by, commiserate and help in whatever ways possible. 

There were lots of school friends who’ve known each other for more than forty years and some who I hadn’t met in decades.  Time passes, the world moves and when we move out of classroom and school to scatter like so much pollen in the winds of our aspirations and the water-movement of our circumstances.  Saturday night was for reminiscing.  Sunday night was also for reminiscing and of course chit-chat about random topics, re-telling of old jokes, political discussions, and the aa-giya (coming-going, literally and metaphorically) thorathuru or news of post-school lives. 

Sandwiched between night and night was a long morning and afternoon.  It was one of those annual events that I attend every 4-5 years or so: the inter-batch 6-a-side cricket tournament for old boys of my school.  There were two categories, Under 40 and Over 40.  Our batch had won both events on numerous occasions, but this was not our day; we were knocked out in the first round itself.  This didn’t dent the enthusiasm. In fact it only enabled more revelry outside the boundary line. 

I got there rather late in the day but was privileged to watch the semi-finals and the final.  I believe the Group of  2001 won the Under 40 event.  The ’88 Group won the Over 40 version, I believe for the 3^rd successive year.  To my mind, however, it was the Group of 72 that won it all.  More than ten years younger than the eventual winners, they saw off younger and clearly fitter teams in the earlier stages by sheer determination and team spirit.  They were bludgeoned in the finals and yet held their heads high. 

In an event made for big hitters and wicket-takers (I saw some batsmen hitting 3-4 sixers an over and a bowler who took a hat-trick), it was a fielder who impressed me most.  Susil Ranasinghe, was ragged by some exquisite batsmanship.  He was fielding at the cover boundary and had to cover about 40% of the field.  A late cut would send him scurrying to the fine leg fence.  The next would be a scintillating cover drive that took him half way to the long off end of the field.  The next would be another late-cut.  These shots were so well timed that Susil couldn’t save any of them.  And yet, he fought ball and speed and of course age to give it all he had.  He was, for me, the man of the tournament.

And so they lost.  They congratulated the winners and came off the field faces flushed and full of smiles.  They mingled with batchmates and schoolmates from their time and other eras.  And Udaya Abeysekera sang.  He sang Rookantha’s ’As deka piyaana nidaa ganna mata bae’ (I cannot close my eyes and fall asleep), Jothipala’s ‘Kothenaka hitiyath…’ (Wherever you may go) and Milton Mallawaarachchi’s ‘Avasara netha mata’ (I don’t have the right…).  Beautifully rendered.  No, I didn’t think he has missed his true vocation.  It was as it should be.  The right thing for the right moment. 

I am not saying that the winners lacked spirit or were underserving of trophy, but there was something gentle, giving and just-being about the ’72 Group that touched; a kind of wrapping paper to a gift that was being accepted after many years. 

Was it all about the particular school?  I don’t think so.  All intersections move us, although in different ways.  It was a kind of re-birthing of memory and times gone by.  And through it all, I remembered Janaka and the fracture he suffered from which he won’t recover easily. 

It was a strange weekend, all things considered.   We are nothing, alone, I realized.  And we can be so much, together, I also felt. 

[Courtesy, Daily News, September 29, 2011]

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Police Commando Camp No 69 issues a statement on legal murder

There was a shooting last Sunday (September 25, 2011).  It occurred within the precincts of the Police Commando Camp No 69 in Maha Oya, Ampara.  The victim was Assistant Superintendent Sisira Kumara.  The gunman, B.A. Jayatilleka was the Chief Inspector of the same camp.  After shooting the ASP, Jayatilleka shot himself and later succumbed to his injuries. 

Got me thinking.

I don’t know what it was all about.  It was reported that there was an argument.  The trigger-puller may have acted on impulse or else had planned to pull trigger right along.  Whether the suicide decision came before he entered the room, during the argument or after committing murder we shall never know.  It is however reasonable to assume that given his rank, Jayatilleka must have had enough sense to figure out the possible fallout of his actions, both in the immediate aftermath or, if it came to that, in the legal procedures that would no doubt have ensued. 

Whether he shot himself out of horror at what he had done or being unable to live through what he must have known would follow we don’t know. My question is simple: if the argument took place in a country where the death penalty is implemented to the last letter of the law (in Sri Lanka this is yet to happen) would the outcome have been different? 

There are lots of factors that come into play. First, the psychological makeup of both victim and assailant has to be considered.  Then there is the what-went-before that fed emotion and thinking to the point of trigger-pulling.  There is also the context, both physical and interactive, pertaining to the incident.  Did these contribute? I am sure they would have, to a greater or lesser degree of course. 

Jayatilleka was a police officer. A senior officer.  It is unlikely that he was unaware of how the law works in such situations.  He would know that the death penalty exists and that even if it wasn’t implemented, that the punishments for transgression would be dire indeed.  He would have not been incapable of figuring out how all this would impact his family. 

My point is that being aware, being informed, being able to analyze enough of the relevant factors to imagine the aftermath-landscape of being and especially its probable contours and boundaries, both for himself and those near and dear to him, did not stop him from squeezing out one or more bullets in Sisira Kumara’s direction.  He aimed to kill and kill he did.  By killing himself thereafter, he was essentially stating that he could not live with what he had done and/or had decided to mete out the punishment he felt he deserved. 

Sisira Kumara didn’t come back to life though.

I draw one lesson: capital punishment does not stop people from committing crimes of passion or spur-of-the-moment murder.  The murderer, typically, absolves himself at the point of transgression.  It is, for him/her a ‘has-to-be-done’ thing.  Consequences are typically erased from the equation and images of an electric chair, a hangman’s noose or a syringe containing lethal substance which if injected would cause death hardly have any impact value on decision. 

Even if there is guilt, the necessity to take life overrides.  If guilt settles in later, as it may have in this instance, it would have arrived too late to save the victim. 

I think it is safe to say that capital punishment does not deter the would-be murderer, as I have been arguing in a series of articles on the subject.  It can have meaning only in terms of penalty exacted for transgression and this I believe is also indefensible (see ‘Legal Murder: the eye-for-an-eye argument’ in the Daily News of September 24, 2011). 

I have no words for those left behind by these twin deaths.  Words, anyway, will not be salve enough to alleviate grief and sense of loss.  My words, here, have been put together to show that the threat of barbarism (capital punishment) does not prevent the barbaric or the barbarian or whatever sanitized terms you might prefer to use on act and actor.  I hope that this tragedy makes for sobriety that goes beyond incident.  

[Courtesy, Daily News, September 28, 2011]

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The perils of partial concessions for regime and nation

What transpired in Geneva at the Human Rights Council sessions clearly indicates where the anti-Sri Lankan forces are going.  Ban Ki-moon tabled the report authored by a panel appointed by him (illegally), against all norms of protocol.  Legitimacy was obtained by tabling the said report (flawed, malicious and clearly designed to hurt Sri Lanka with very little support of claims through substantiation) along with those documents submitted by the Sri Lankan delegation (one put together by the Defence Ministry regarding military operations and the other detailing the humanitarian efforts by the Government). 

By appointing a person to inquire into how the UN conducted itself during the last stages of Sri Lanka’s struggle to be rid of the terrorist menace, the door has been opened to pick and choose this and that, privilege malice over integrity, dismiss fact as propaganda and paint conjecture as truth, and do all the hanky-panky that agents of empire have done from time immemorial as and when such exercises are deemed useful.  Whether or not the Government could have responded to these moves in ways that would not have got us to where we are is a moot point.  We are, after all, living in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t kind of world.  What we can do is to do our best and keep in mind that ‘doing best’ is in the end about obtaining unity of purpose from the entire citizenry.  That is the arena where work has to be done and where work is being neglected. 

President Mahinda Rajapaksa has stated in NY (at the UNGA) that Sri Lanka should be allowed to find its own home-grow solutions to its problems.  ‘Home-grown’ is good.  It makes little sense, however, if there is no honesty and integrity.  While the TNA and other articulators of S.J.V. Chelvanayakam’s crass communalism have neither, this ‘lack’ does not give the Government license to engage in foot-dragging when it comes to calling their bluff.  If there are grievances they need to be articulated (there is enough of that) and the articulation must be supported with evidence (there is a little of that, but nothing that links substantiated grievance to proposed resolution).  

The TNA and it support cast (including those who toss around ‘devolution’ as ‘solution’ and as mechanism that mitigates conflict-threat) are not ready for an audit of history (so that the ‘traditional homeland’ issue can be sorted out), are not willing to discuss boundaries (arbitrarily drawn by the British), are not ready to talk about demographic realities (more than half the Tamils living outside the North and East) or population concentrations (most of the Eastern Province being ‘non-Tamil’ so to speak).  The Government can talk about all this, but does not. 

Then there are the issues pertaining to governance.  Where systems lack the safeguards that ensure transparency and accountability and where the public is not insulated from the politician, unity will be a hard buy.   The unifying cause is not helped when a lot is being made of securing the borders but the doors to resource extraction and labour exploitation by multinationals and other foreign interests are kept open. 

Being ‘nationalist’ doesn’t make sense when paradigms of development that are not only unsustainable but are ruinous and make for impoverishment of ordinary people are privileged over time-tested, environment-friendly and sustainable modes of engagement with nature and one another.  It makes for a political polarization that can only feed other kinds of polarizations (for example, those that are identity-based). 

There is palpable pressure being exerted on the regime by external forces and naturally there are local operators who are trying to make fast political bucks (in terms of outcome-preferences) from the situation, for example the Dayan Jayatillekas, Rajitha Senaratnes and others in the devolution cartel who argue that power-devolution will get these forces off the regime’s back.  They won’t say it that way of course; Dayan even posited himself as an exemplary nationalist for arguing for conceding devolution (his words, not mine; and they imply that there is no legitimate case for power-devolution apart from obtaining relief from external pressure – nothing to do with minority grievances, that is). 

Country-siege often manifests itself as regimes being besieged.  That’s one way of lulling a polity into thinking that the worst that could happen is for the leadership they prefer going down.  The regime obviously doesn’t calculate in the same manner.  It might sell threat-to-regime as threat-to-nation in order to mobilize support (for itself).  Politics is about multiple players playing multiple games.  This is why people like Jayatilleka will argue and try to persuade the regime to think that making concession (effectively to the Eelamists) would get the vile sections of the international community off its back and give the breathing space necessary to engage effectively in the domestic political arena.  Poppycock, if you ask me!

The regime would do well to see through the political sleight-of-hand.  Most importantly, even if it was about political survival, then the regime must understand that not only could such concessions as proposed by the likes of Jayatilleka spur separatists to ask for more and more as advocated by Chelvanayakam (A little now, more later), it would effectively amount to the regime having the political rug pulled from under its feet.  

Simply, Mahinda Rajapaksa would lose the core of his constituency, the vast majority who are not ready to make any concessions on the unitary character of the state.  The fight then would shift location. From being besieged from beyond the shores by way of threats issued (by the worst liars and criminals history has ever known), the regime would be besieged by within, this time not by enemy, but by friend. 

Devolution is not ‘partial concession’ or something that would buy unlimited time and space, but a full-slip and one that could very well land the regime on its proverbial back.  Possibly for good. 

Mahinda Rajapaksa needs the people more than the people need him at this point.  He is admired for certain things but would be erring if he read admiration as blind loyalty of the ‘forever’ kind.  Those who would besiege would love nothing less than besiege being complemented by internal chaos.  Partial concession by way of devolution will not win for the regime the full lung-freedom that the devolutionists within the Government envisage. 

That pressure will not go away.  There is a trap.  It is called the 13^th Amendment.  The devolutionists are inviting President Mahinda Rajapaksa to walk into this trap.  If he’s naïve and if only he will suffer, that’s quite ok by me.  My fear is that he will drag the entire country into it.  Now, that’s not something that thousands of soldiers had to sacrifice their lives to have happen. 

President Mahinda Rajapaksa has a lot of work to do in terms of obtaining unity.  He can very well do without compromising the unifying project further by swallowing the sugar-coated but poisoned seeni-bola called devolution (Eelamist Devolution, that is).  

[Courtesy, Daily Mirror, September 28, 2011]

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Legal Murder: does it help lower the crime rate?

One of the common arguments for instituting the death penalty is that it helps keep the crime rate down.  In the mid-nineties when there was a vociferous call for the implementation of the death penalty in Sri Lanka, the advocates of this practice vigorously waved crime statistics pertaining to the period after the last hanging (in 1976, if I remember right). 

They had a point.  The crime rate had indeed shot up after that last legal murder.  On the other hand, to draw a consequent-line from non-execution to rising crime assumes that all other factors that lend to criminality remained constant in the relevant period.  This is wrong. 

The entire eighties was a period of systematic dismantling of democratic structures. The so-called freeing of the economy was heralded by its principal architect, J.R. Jayewardene by the famous verbal license to thieve: ‘let the robber barons come!’  A predilection by the then regime to circumvent the law and ridicule the judiciary cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the matter at hand.  A horrendous look-askance in July 1983 when ruling party thugs (most affiliated with its trade union) orchestrated attacks on the lives and properties of Tamils and the deliberate cultivation of the underworld also ‘helped’.  

Attacks on students, trade union busting, harassment of the opposition and ill-informed and counter-productive measures unleashed to counter the growing threat of terrorism, all led to the development of a culture of violence, dependency on the coercive aspects of the state apparatus and a readiness on the part of certain disgruntled elements in society to mimic the violence of the perceived oppressor, all contributed. 

Still, it is not possible to determine whether or not the non-implementation of capital punishment added to the crime rate.  The data for notorious and racist criminal justice systems where the death penalty exist, sheds a lot of light.  In the USA, not all states have the death penalty. The crime data across all states does not indicate that capital punishment has contributed to lowering the crime rate. Indeed, the crime rate in states that do not have it are lower than those who do. 

In contrast Saudi Arabia, where crime is responded to with gruesome methods of punishment and where capital punishment is practiced, there is a significantly lower crime rate than in many country which don’t have or have abolished the death penalty.  This is why advocates of capital punishment frequently cite the Saudi Arabian example.  Interestingly, however, it has been found that not all crimes get report or make it official data sets in that country. 

Certain actions, which would be deemed criminal in other countries, do not register in enumerations.  Saudi Arabia is a destination point to workers from other countries who, on account of endemic poverty, subject themselves to conditions such as involuntary servitude, non-receipt of wages, confinement, withholding of passports and movement restriction.  It is also a destination for children trafficked from other Middle Eastern countries. 

The global data, in any event, does not show a positive correlation between capital punishment and crime rate, especially when it comes to violent crimes such as homicide, which I pointed out in an earlier article are passion-crimes where the perpetrator does not ponder over consequences and/or absolves him/herself of moral guilt before committing murder. 

Crime is a problem. Criminality is a problem.  Systems are necessary both to prevent and deter.  Systems need to be re-fashioned to remove the conditions that give rise to crime.  Some claim that poverty breeds criminals, but impoverishment is an inadequate plea for clemency in the event of a crime being committed.  It must be recognized that corporate criminality on the whole produces more loot in terms of volume than petty crimes.  Such criminality is not recognized by the law as infringement and some are forgiven and forgotten due to the nexus between politician and corporate criminal.  The death penalty (being imposed or being non-existent) has no impact in such transgression. 

In societies with huge disparities and horrendous terms of exchange, both produced largely on account of theft of something at some point, it would be naïve to think that use and abuse of laws (essentially set up to perpetuate a system of value extraction) would cease if hanging was reintroduced.  White collar crime is system-insulated and is more often than not politically insured.   Capital punishment has not stopped that kind of crime anywhere in the world.

[Courtesy, Daily News, September 27, 2011] 

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Legal murder: the deterrent argument

The last few days I’ve been commenting on the execution of Troy Davis, a man wrongfully convicted over the murder of a police officer.  In my article for Saturday (September 24, 2011) I discussed the issue of punishment matching crime, the eye-for-an-eye argument.  Today I shall dwell on another justification for capital punishment, that of its deterrent effect.

Obviously encouraging deterrence is not the only justification for punishment in general.  Criminals are incarcerated primarily on the basis of a social contract.  If one cannot abide by the rules, one must re-locate oneself in areas where the rules do not apply.  If such a place does not exist, then the transgressor must be kept away. That’s what jails are for.  The period of incarceration is determined after considering the nature of the transgression.  It is assumed that some appropriate time in the cooler will sober up the individual sufficiently to warrant release. 

Punishment, however, is not only for wrongdoer but for the potential wrongdoer.  This is why we often see warning signs where citizens are informed about the possible consequences of particular transgressions.  In the case of the death penalty, it is assumed that a general understanding that taking a life might cost you your own would make the potential murderer think twice before burying the hatchet for all time, so to speak. 

Is that how it works, though? 

Most murders are crimes of passion, spur-of-the-moment executions.  In such cases where split-second decisions are made to murder someone, the murderer cannot have the time or the inclination to reflect on possible consequences.  Indeed, in some instances, the murderer has already justified the act, especially when murder is committed in a fit of jealousy or out of political conviction, and most importantly is ready to face the death penalty.  The existence of capital punishment, therefore, will not deter such people from committing murder.

In the case of premeditated murder, the transgressor is probably very much aware of what awaits him/her in the event of being caught, charged and found guilty.  Once they’ve decided to act, all they are concerned is about being effective in the execution of plan and in getting away.  They are undeterred. 

There is another aspect that rebels against the deterrent argument: squeamishness.  If the death penalty is a mechanism which serves to deter people from committing murder, then the most logical thing is the lay it all before the public in ways that are so repulsive and are aimed at manufacturing fear.  Put simply, if deterrence is the issue, then public executions are a must.  In the times of vast strides in communications technology, public executions can be complemented by complementary publicity in all media, print and electronic. 

Potential Murderer A, the argument implies, would be less likely to kill Victim P if Convicted Murderer X is hanged at, say, Galle Face Green and the entire proceedings shown live on television and commented on via radio with live video streaming being made available online.  There can also be a before and after, to make sure that the point is driven home.  Newspapers can publish photo essays, along with quotes from the closest family members of the executed.  There could be before, while and after photos, carried without any editing.  If it’s a hanging and the hanged urinated, that too should be captured and passed around (the picture that is).  What his/her face looked like before must be juxtaposed with his/her death face.

The ‘before’ element of the story can include periodical interviews of the convicted, can enumerate on the things that led to that terrible moment and carry quotes from the murderer too.  The people (each and every one of them a potential murderer) must be told what it was like for the prisoner, knowing the date and time of his death as well the method of execution, and what he/she felt about this.    The murderers ‘every moment’ of incarceration must be recorded:  the joys and sorrows, the anxieties and justifications, the fears, the remorse (if any) etc. 

The point is that each and every one of us is a potential murderer.  If we are to stop ourselves and if staying the blow is contingent on being fully conscious about the extremities of the consequences, then the more we know, the better.  We need to know of all the horrors that the man or woman who is to be executed must necessarily suffer from the moment the judge reads out the sentence to the point where he/she is executed.  If we are too squeamish, then we can’t use the deterrent argument when justifying capital punishmet.

There are two things I know for sure: a) the vast majority (all potential murderers, let me repeat) would rather not see an execution and b) the relevant authorities are equally averse to showing.  Thus, over and above the questions regarding capital punishment deterring would-be murderers, most nations that sanction the barbarity seem strangely averse to going the whole hog in using the act to plant deterring seeds in the minds of the general public.  

Deterrence is a nice thought, but is irrelevant to the issue at hand.  At best, it stops with the rhetoric.  

 [Courtesy, Daily News, September 26, 2011]

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The JVP's identity crisis

The results of the 2010 General Election floored a lot of people, especially the JVP which suffered the biggest losses in terms of reduced numbers in Parliament.  From some 41 seats secured in 2004 courtesy of support from the SLFP voters in 2004, that party slid to the single digits, hooking up with Sarath Fonseka’s fledgling party saving the blushes.  That was in-your-face signal to engage in identity-seek.

The JVP is officially ‘left’, politically, and officially ‘Marxist’ in ideology.  Its actions over the past 40 odd years would however not fail to raise the eyebrows of Marxists and Leftists, considering the party’s many about-turns, flirtations with the Right and faith in terrorism (as evidenced in the JVP’s 1971 and 1988-89 avatars).  The 2010 result was an ideal reflection-call.  The JVP had tried armed insurrection before.  It had tried to piggy-back on nationalism.  It had gone the way of the Old Left (coalition-politics) and arrived at the same dead-end.  It was time to rethink.

Those in the party would of course know best, but like all Left-claiming organizations the JVP too had its divisions and among them the one between the hardliners and the take-things-easy types, the middle-roaders if you will.  Egos would have played in the party’s leadership equation, I am sure, and so too questions over priorities: party interest vs. national interest in times of threat to nation.

The JVP’s in-party face would know whether or not things played according to script, but it is pretty clear that the party’s political fortunes slipped after leaving the UPFA and took a nose-dive after siding with the UNP to support the ‘common’ presidential candidate General Sarath Fonseka. 

There’s always been talk of a ‘rahas’ (secretive) or ‘hora’ (clandestine) leadership hidden from the public eye, with Premakumar Gunaratnam as chief.  We don’t know for sure what the tensions were, but it’s all out now.  The public-face leadership and the hidden-face leadership are clearly at each other’s throats.  Little is known of Gunaratnam, younger brother of that exemplary, multi-talented, much-loved leader of the Inter University Students Federation in the eighties, Ranjithan, except that he didn’t share any of his older brother’s qualities and that he had one that his brother had not: a strong arm.  Ranjithan, moreover, was a nationalist and would never pander to separatist posturing for political gain.  Premakumar is a throw-back to the Lionel Bopage faction within the JVP: Eelamist.   At least this is what we can conclude from what’s being said regarding the recent fracture. 

Premakumar’s hardliners would think nothing of causing political instability if it helps the re-positioning of the party and making it more ‘relevant’ in national politics.  One must understand that relevancy does not imply a positive; the LTTE was also ‘relevant’ in that it had to be taken into account in political decision-making.  These are the types who would brush aside the deaths of tens of thousands that might be the price of relevancy as ‘can’t help’.  That’s political irresponsibility.

On the other hand, the Gunaratnam faction or any other group within that party does have a case when it comes to party identity.  The JVP, all things considered, has been a thene-hetiyata-ane (pick the nail to suit the spot) kind of party, i.e. opportunistic and even describable as populist. Most positions taken have been justified by calling it ‘strategic repositioning’ or some such thing.  That’s ok.  All parties do that.  That’s what power politics is all about, ideology being mostly frill.  The problem seems to be the realization that the composite has no integrity and is therefore running the risk of being everything and therefore nothing. 

In this sense, this ‘split’ would be a good thing for the party, although what’s good for the JVP (or any other party) is not necessarily good for the country or the people.  In the very least, it would help the general public locate the JVP in the political firmament.  Think about it.  The JVP had run with the Rajapaksas, bedded with the UNP and hunted with Fonseka.  It helped Mahinda Rajapaksa into power, used the UPFA as a prop to have a bigger parliamentary presence, saved the UPFA at the budget vote, played CIA-agent when that was thought to be convenient, abandoned principles, picked up gun, engaged in terrorism, condemned other terrorisms and helped defeat such tyrannies, echoed Eelamist rhetoric, rejected devolution, etc., and now there’s one faction calling for the affirmation of nationalism while another indulges in Eelam-speak.  That’s hodge-podge for you and more reminiscent of the UNP and SLFP than any ‘left’ organization that one can think of. 

We can’t predict the outcome of this ‘split’.  Given the gun-loving tendencies of the Premakumaras and the aversion of Somawansa Amarasinghe, Tilvin Silva and others to hide-and-seek, cloak-and-dagger politics, it is hard to think of amicable resolution.  Questions of legality are likely to play a role in yielding some kind of boldly outlined outcome.   If the moderates win out, the hardliners would have to (happily?) retreat to the jungles.  If the hardliners prevail, the moderates will have to form a party of their own and play an insignificant Old Left type role in the democratic space.  Either way, something definite is likely to emerge in terms of JVP-identity. 

Anyone taking the jungle path, particularly at this point, would only be playing into the hands of the salivating outsiders plotting and/or hoping for political upheavals that would help get them toe-hold in the island or else turn toe-hold into assertive presence.  The regime cannot be expected to lie down and die.  Gun-picking would script blood-letting into the political process.  That would be tragic indeed.  This side of such an eventuality, however, is where political cogency exists.  That’s not a bad thing for a political organization, up-down-and-confused though its history might be. 

We are in for interesting times, either way.  ‘Interesting’ is, unfortunately, not necessarily blood-free.  There is nothing intrinsically bad about being radical.  Maturity and a sense of responsibility would be good.  Wisdom to envisage outcome and therefore avoid unnecessary violence would be great.  We still don’t know how the JVP biscuit is going to crumble but the architects and beneficiaries of the crumbling ought to be adult about things.  The JVP’s history doesn’t make one hopeful, but we can play the wait and see game. 

However, it is a tad too late in the day for that party to have growing pains and be indulged as a result.  This should not be forgotten.

[Courtesy, 'The Nation', September 25, 2011]

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