Farewell, beautiful people!

It was I believe in January 2000.  I received an email from a friend, copied to others including some close friends.  Ayça Çubukçu, then an undergraduate at Cornell University, addressed the recipients as ‘Beautiful People’.  She wrote in indignation and with hope.  The cause of her agitation was a mischievous news report in the campus newspaper, ‘Cornell Daily Sun’.  I can’t remember what it was about, but there was blatant and utterly unacceptable misrepresentation.  Ayça had a proposal.  She wanted us to help her start a newspaper. It was to be called, she suggested, ‘The Cornell Nightly Moon’. 

We met at a café in Collegetown, Ithaca, called ‘Stella’s’.   If it was to be in opposition then it should be ‘Ithaca Nightly Moon,’ someone pointed, referring to the political economy that frames town space and the university.  Someone observed that we just didn’t have the resources to produce a newspaper on a daily basis.  A monthly, then, someone suggested and all agreed.  We moved quickly to content, leaving name to be decided later. 

We talked of target audience.  Someone said ‘we have to accept the fact that some people in this world are destined to be shoe-makers’.   That led to a lively discussion on the worth of shoes and shoe-makers, and of course the relevant under-valuation and exploitation.  The entire political economy of global capitalism was laid out thick and in detail then and there.  The majority sided with the shoe-maker.  This gave a name for the paper.

‘The Cobbler’ was a popular monthly newspaper solely dependent on contributions and a few advertisements from friendly and politically conscious small businesses in the town.  I left Ithaca after the 4^th issue came out and the paper ran for several months longer.   There were arguments, disagreements, tantrums, walk-outs and embraces.  There was photography and poetry, serious pieces and things to laugh about.  ‘The Cobbler’ made the ‘left’ campus paper, ‘The Progressive’ more progressive.  It had space for everyone who gets left out or needed space to say things there was nowhere to articulate.  There was nothing ‘beautiful’ about ‘The Beautiful People’ except perhaps that they kept doors open, knew how to laugh and were not ashamed to cry.  We covered issues, local and global. 

I remember a day in early June 2000, just before I left Ithaca.   Ayça and I were attending the memorial service of Jean Finley, a long-time and indefatigable activist who produced hundreds of shows for the local cable station, even though chronic kidney disease had condemned her to a wheelchair.  She went about in this wheelchair, attending protests, distributing leaflets and keeping people cheerful.  Ayça and I had talked about dedicating the next issue of ‘The Cobbler’ to Jean.  I received a copy in the post.  It had Jean’s portrait as cover with a simple headline: ‘For Jean’.  That day, at the memorial service, a young man came on stage to speak a few words. He said he needed someone to hold his hand.  The young man was in a wheelchair.  I only remember one thing he said: ‘Jean made it ok for people like me’.  And he wept. 

‘The Cobbler’ was about people like that.  I remember the beautiful people.  Ayça, Maceo, Michael, Balam, Mutaamba, Carson and Molly.  Chad, Raj, Dia, Lehlohonolo, Andrea, Mecke, Gerard, Joaquin,  Andrew and Aaron came on board at different times and with varying intensities.  Katie and Neil Golder, Paul Glover, the extended Grady family and many other good people in that quaint and spirited township helped with word and in deed.     

I remember all these beautiful people today. They’ve all moved on to different planets where I am sure they make flowers bloom on barren ground simply because they choose to walk, even as their feet bleed.  I remember them today because that was my first close association with a newspaper.  Back then I was a doctoral student. I duly dropped out and came home. I wandered into newspapers courtesy an invitation from the Editor of the Sunday Island, Manik de Silva to whom I owe much. 

I remember all these people because they helped create in my mind a sense of what making a newspaper is all about.  It takes a lot of people, and a lot of heart.  It takes people, let me repeat, and not all of them are journalists.  I got to know more when I joined the Sunday Island.  The typesetters, proofreaders, subeditors, tea-boys, drivers and others also count. 

It’s different perhaps for a freelancer, for we are non-contact or less-contact contributors.   Today, writing these lines for what will be my last ‘Morning Inspection’, I remember the Chairman, the editors who gave me space, the subeditors who cleaned my copy, the illustrators and others who picked appropriate photographs to decorate the particular article, my dear friend Errol Alphonso, alas no more, who crafted my copy (which I seldom went over) and others whose names and designations I will never know.  I remember the beautiful people relevant to ‘The Morning Inspection’, the readers and those whose lives I wrote about.

And I remember the beautiful people my friend Ayça sent that email to, more than a decade ago.  It is all about heart, they taught me, especially Ayça, and heart is never imprisoned, not by newspaper, policy frame, word limit, tragedy or triumph.  That’s a thought that brought me to newspapers and it is with that thought that I leave, two years and over 500 articles later.  Farewell, all.

[Courtesy, Daily News, October 15, 2011] 

www.malindawords.blogspot.com (msenevira@gmail.com)

Read more

Banking for the Poor or Banking on the Poor?

There are people who still believe that the British built our roads and railways.  This is utter rubbish.  The labour was Sri Lankan.  The funds were obtained by taxing our people.  As for the roads and railways they were not designed to get Kusumawathi from Anuradhapura to Kataragama but to streamline resource and value extraction. 

This is how power imbalances play out.  The powerful are able to make the powerless inhabit a version of reality they (the powerless) have no say in authoring.  Bishop Desmond Tutu in his more progressive days, speaking on the colonial encounter in Africa and in particular the ‘priest’-accomplice of the sultans of destruction and resource extraction put it this way: ‘In the beginning we had the land and they had the book; they said ‘close your eyes, let us pray’ and when we opened our eyes, we had the book and they had the land.’ 

I have over the years found it safer to treat with suspicion those who wear benefactor-garb.  I am thinking here about a new buzz-term in the development discourse: microfinance.  It is not new, really.  ‘Banking with the Poor’ is a couple of decades old already, but it was buried in a heap of other buzz-words for years. 

Today microfinance is seen as the magic formula for poverty alleviation.  Sorry, it is SAID to be the magic formula for poverty alleviation.  The distinction is important and is indicative of my cynicism. 

Discussions on microfinance tend to be liberally laden with references to poverty alleviation and how it is important to rope the poor into formal banking systems.  It is the unsaid that makes the most interesting reading, though.

Those who talk about banking with the poor will not tell you that banks have always needed the poor.  First of all, money doesn’t fall from the sky.  Value has to be created.  Profits have to be EXTRACTED. It is called ‘exploitation’.  I don’t have to re-write Kark Marx’s Labour Theory of Value here. Someone gives and someone takes, to put it simply. There are TERMS of extraction and these can even be legal. 

Next we get to savings.  Who saves?  The poor!  The rich don’t save. They invest.  Take the People’s Bank, the Bank of Ceylon and the National Savings Bank.  They are made of poor people’s money. Salaries. Pensions. The little something put aside every month in numerous savings schemes.  Who gets the loans?  The rich! 

The rich have always banked ON the poor. They NEED the poor.  ‘Microfinance’ in its banking-only manifestation then is nothing else than the banks realizing that little drops of water can make big bucks at the end of the day.  The margins are obtained by volume.  They have figured out, these rich microfinance gurus dressed as do-gooding poor-lovers have, that the poor outnumber the rich by about 100 to 1 or more.  Any idiot with even an iota of business sense would see this as ‘potential’.  You can get the one rich guy to save 100 bucks or get the other 99 to save 10 bucks each.  That would make 990 rupees or an 890% difference.  It’s good business, ladies and gentlemen.  Now factor in the loans, the micro-credit and the profits from interest.  Astounding!

The problem with microfinance is that it is marketed as a delivering-all kind of tool. It is nothing of the kind.  Stripped of rhetoric and promise it remains just another banking product.  It has a sound-good feel to it, yes.  It is made to fatten CSR portfolios, yes.  At the end of the day, commercial bank are interested in profit and little else. 

Microfinance in its thrift-and-credit avatar was essentially a collective effort that was governed by cooperative principles.  Today, microfinance is a term that the ace defenders and approvers of shameless resource extraction and labour exploitation, the World Bank, has appropriated.  Today it is a concept that the World Bank has re-defined and is dishing out to each and every naïve and/or pernicious taker who does a google search, courtesy the CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the Poor). CGAP is ‘addressed’ at the World Bank and focuses on financial services. 

The focus itself tells a story.  The assumption is that it is all about money.  Well, it is.  At least from the point of view of the banking outfits that micro-finance.  How about the poor, though? 

Where issues of comprehensive betterment of a given community are not addressed, when sustainability is not a concern, when culture is factored out, when national development frameworks are not referenced, when training and education so necessary for resource and potential identification are ignored, you don’t get poverty alleviation. You get PLAYED.  In your name.  That’s the beauty of banking on the poor.  You don’t say you need the poor, than you are literally banking on them, you say you are doing it with them.

To me, banking WITH the poor is like raping WITH the victim.  There is an element of ‘consent’ that gets scripted in.   You can say ‘We are doing it with you, brother,’ even as you do him in.

The British, they tell us, built our roads. Microfinance is a road, I think.  The poor are building it. With their money and labour.  Someone is using the road to take out cartloads of value away from the places that the poor inhabit. 

Roads are good though but only as long as those who build them decide what kind of road to build and from where to where and why.  Microfinance is not that kind of road, I am afraid; certainly not in its dominant articulation. 

It boils down to a simple matter: who owns the road.  Let’s think about it.  

Read more

For Mekala Thirunavakarasu, wherever she may be…

My sister Ruvani, ‘Nangi’ or ‘Nanga’ to everyone in the family since she was the youngest, for reasons of birth order, was closest to me.  Well, I like to believe this, let’s say.  She was two years younger and was eminently qualified for teasing. I put this down to the fact that our older brother Arjuna was serious, stronger and certainly not willing to suffer any teasing.  I like to think, in retrospect, that this hardened her against the horrors of this world.  The truth is, she’s tough.  I think that’s because she is incredibly sensitive and tender.  Sounds like a contradiction, I know, but that’s how it sometimes crumbles. 

She was always the grandmother of the family, even as a child.  A voracious reader, endowed with sharp tongue and enough debating skills of the black-white kind to drive fear into siblings, cousins and even aunts and uncles. Grandparents indulged; they weren’t overawed. 

I remembered Nangi today for two reasons.  I remembered her because the 13^th of October is the second death anniversary of our mother, Indrani Seneviratne.  I also remembered her because for her love was thicker than loyalty.  Of a particular kind, of course. 

I remembered her because of ‘motherhood’.  She’s a mother, but that’s not why.  After our mother died, although replacement was not planned or possible, there were many people who became ‘mother’ to me.  First and foremost, my wife Samadanie who understood me as much as my mother did.  Nangi, being grandmother, quickly and without even planning to, became the Matriarch of the family and as caring, worrying and celebrating as our mother.  When I see her with her children, I see her mother in her.  Perfect replica.  Makes me smile and how certain things don’t end with death. 

There were other mothers and this is not the place to name them all.  Among them was Aunty Saji who I got to know through email correspondence and who I’ve met just three times in my life.  She writes to me almost every day, comments on what I write, questions, comments and chides.  I remembered Nangi because I remembered Aunty Saji.  I will tell you why, by and by.

Loyalty. I remember teasing her, bullying in fact, by asking her to imagine that I am not who I was but an imposter who appears in the form of her brother.  This would terrify her and the fear in her eyes made me quickly reverse gears and put her at ease.  Once I told her ‘I have a terrible secret; I will tell you but you must not tell anyone’.  She swore not to.  Then, with appropriate facial expressions to indicate gravity, I told her, ‘I have a cancer and I am dying; no one knows’.  She believed and was determined to tell our parents.  I said ‘you promised!’  She brushed it all aside.  For her, love for more important. 

Back to Aunty Saji.  She wrote something a couple of weeks ago that made me sad for reasons I can’t identify and therefore will not get written.  It was in response to something I had written about kites.  This is what she said:

‘I know all about 'collecting' and all about 'giving away' and destroying, too. I also know about flying kites with Mano and the kids on the hills of Diyatalawa, on the beaches of Batticaloa and on Galle Face Green.  They are the more beautiful of recollections and experiences-and the children still remember. We gave away a lot of books along the way. Almost two years ago I destroyed the most poignant of my collections- the hundreds of letters I received when Mano died. I read each one and cried as I read them and burnt them. But I kept just two- one was written by a girl of sixteen, a friend's daughter, in Kitwe, and the other, written by Shanti Perera (Elmore's wife).’

I asked her what was special about those two letters. 

‘Shanti married Elmore and were our neighbours in Dla-occupying the same thakarang hut that we had, earlier. They became good friends. She wrote a long appreciation when Mano died-it was published in the papers, I believe. But her letter to me (in Harare) was more personal-she said that Mano and I had taught her what married life should really be. I had never, until then, thought of 'us' as models of anything. We just respected each other.

‘Mekala Thirunavakarasu, was the brilliant eldest child of an engineer in Harare. The family came over in '85. Kids were all Tamil educated- so her English was not perfect. They used to come home and borrow books, ask questions about our lives-and were generally delightful-all 5 of them. Mano had an incredibly untidy office-so he badgered them into cleaning and dusting it once a month, poor kids! They loved him.
She also in her letter made the comment- 'of all our friends in Harare, I envisaged you and uncle as the ideal couple. I want to marry a man like him!'

I asked” ‘And did she?’

‘I don’t know. They migrated to Tasmania and then moved to Australia-I know Mekala did brilliantly well in all her studies-summa cum laude, all the way. I've lost touch.’

Aunty Saji prefers quietude.  She is the most vibrantly alert octogenarian I’ve met.  She wouldn’t ask for help unless she really needed it.  I offered to try and locate her.  She simply asked if this were possible, pointing out that she hadn’t been in a fit state of mind to correspond and that the girl may have married and changed her last name. I googled the name, but nothing came up. 

I know Aunty Saji could very well be angry with me for writing all this.  But my love for her is thicker than loyalty.  I write in the hope that Mekala, wherever she is will read this someday, or that someone who knows her will inform her that a lady who admires her loved her so much and appreciated their long-ago encounter enough to retain a letter she had written decades ago, one of only two she kept from the hundreds she must have received. 

Aunty Saji is like a mother to me.  She is not my mother and never will be.  Right now, though, I can’t think of a better way to pay tribute to the life my mother lived and gave, or her immense reserves of generosity and love, than to do my little bit to find someone just so a lovely lady’s lips will break into a smile she has not yet smiled. 

I know that Nangi will understand, being a mother, being sister and friend. 

So, if anyone reading this knows or knows of Mekala Thirunavakarasu, please tell her that Saji Cumaraswamy has a letter she cherishes. A letter written by her.  And for once, in my name of my late mother, Indrani Seneviratne, I want these words to go all over the world, into every household and heart. 

She is waiting, Mekala. 

[Courtesy, Daily News, October 13, 2011]

Read more

You and I are the beggars being bludgeoned, didn’t you know?

There are jokes and there are jokes.  Some are witty, informative and thought provoking. Some are tasteless and derogatory. Some are witty and tasteless.  I remember two from probably the decades ago, both of the car-sticker type.  The first was ‘Preserve wildlife, pickle a squirrel’.  The second was as bad, ‘Eradicate poverty, shoot a beggar’. 

A couple of days ago, when I wrote about the shoot-out in Mulleriyawa (‘Local Government Election and an unscripted post-mortem,’ Daily News, October 10, 2011), a friend of mine made a sobering observation: ‘There is certainly a lack of sympathy, which augurs ill for the state of mind in the country, as a whole. I think the 'education' must start at the lowest levels; behaviour patterns have to be re-taught, in schools and in homes. In 30 years our people have lost the natural courtesy which we always had. I like to think that the villages have been relatively untouched.’  I asked her if she had heard about beggar-bludgeoning. Her reply was short: ‘Yes, I rest my case.’ 

Beggar-bludgeoning is the word on the street. It is the act on the street as well.  Not too long ago there was a spate of beggar-killings in Colombo, especially on the pavements between Kollupitiya and Mt. Lavinia.  Around 20 such murders have been reported from the first quarter of 2010.   The perpetrators have not yet been brought to justice.  After the initial set of killings, there appears to have been a lull.  It’s started again.

Seven killings have been reported from Kelaniya and surrounding areas. The modus operandi has been brutal and brutally simple: a large stone dropped on the victim’s head.  Among the dead has been a resident of Galgamuwa, who had apparently had to stay overnight and didn’t have anywhere to go.  That’s not unnatural.  There are many who travel from faraway to attend to something urgent. They don’t have relations or the money to check into a hotel.  They use bus halts, train stations and also pavements purely because they don’t have any other choice.

In the absence of leads and arrests, speculation has a field day.  There are theories about drug addicts robbing these people of their day’s takings.  There is talk of an insidious and surreptitiously implemented policy of ridding the city of mendicants as part of the overall beautification plan. 

Now I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that lays the blame for all societal ills on the system.  The system does create poverty, I agree.  Misery, however, is part self-birthed and I am not talking here of the karmic endowments one brings along.  I am not talking of the sociological reasons for violence here.  Cogent arguments can be made about the reasons for the proliferation of guns and other weapons as well as the rise in criminal behavior.  There is a lot that is wrong about this society.  The ills can be traced to systemic flaw and even cultural tendencies that make institutional arrangement obsolete.  Here, however, I am thinking of human beings who, for whatever reason, happen to be homeless.  I believe that the moral worth of a society can be measured in many ways but never more emphatically as in the way it treats the less fortunate and most importantly how it reacts to violence.

There is a lot to be horrified about but perhaps the most horrifying is the apathy regarding the horrible.  ‘Not my problem’ is an easy out.  Until things travel far and wide and deep and settles in an unsettling place called ‘My Problem’.   It’s not only about beggars and beggar-bludgeoning of course, but there is something barbaric about the business and the look-askance of the response.  The police need to get their act together but that’s not enough.  One can think ‘I will never end up on a pavement’ and that might even be a reasonable prediction.  Still!

My friend, perhaps as an after-thought subsequent to resting her case, emailed me a story: ‘When I was quite young-about 12, I think- my two uncles were my father's partners in his law firm, in Kandy. The elder was my mother's second brother. He had a framed picture on the wall of his home, which I have always remembered. It was a small photocopy of a water-colour painting by a local artist, simply framed and pastel shades. Two village women in cloth and jacket, baskets on their heads, walking down a path. A beggar seated under a tree. One woman had her hand outstretched, dropping a coin into his plate. The caption, in small italics, was “only the poor give the poor”.’

I’ve heard that beggars are uniting.  They have taken to sleeping together, in clusters, to stop would-be murderers.  I’ve heard that there are protests in all major cities of the United States of America, the agitators claiming that they make the 99% who have no say in how the economy is run.  They are not beggars, true, but they are still impoverished in many ways.  They don’t own their lives, their presents or their futures. 

Perhaps Marx got it wrong.  Perhaps it is the beggars of the world who should unite (for) they have nothing to lose but their lives.  Perhaps there’s something to learn from a line penned in a barrio in South America: ‘Welcome, middle class’.  Perhaps we are living a monumental lie.  There’s no ‘perhaps’ however in the fact that we are silent witnesses to a monumental crime and that our silence amounts to approval and encouragement. 

No one will help us.  We are our solution and solution-provider, us beggars, disguised as the middle-class and self-hoodwinking shamelessly.  Perhaps this is why, at this moment, I really don’t know what to do.  Except saying ‘THIS IS WRONG’.   

 [Courtesy, Daily News, October 12, 2011]

Read more

A reading of the ‘Colombo Result’

The leader of the United National Party (UNP) Wickremesinghe has a special message to electors on the eve of the local government elections:  "vote for the UNP and give a message to the government that we want a good life and that we are no longer agreeable that our democratic rights are taken away."  Well the results are out and it is time to assess the response to this call. 

The UNP was the Colombo Municipal Council or rather retained this important local government body it had secured through a proxy in 2006.  The UNP lost everything else, including its traditional strongholds.  There was a sense though, in the run up, that the UNP would be happy to win Colombo, even if it lost elsewhere and as such there is reason for that party to be euphoric.  The call was ‘let’s begin with Colombo’. 

In 2006, despite the handicap of having to use a proxy independent group (the ‘spectacle case’ as it were), the electorate returned 23 members having cast 82,500 votes (40.24%) for the party.  The United People’s Freedom Alliance got (UPFA) 57,158 (27.85%) and 14 seats. This time the UNP got 101,920 (43.01%) and 24 seats, while the UPFA got 77,089 (32.53%) and 16 seats.  The absolute numbers have gone up (for the UNP) but the percentage increase has been small. The UPFA has done slightly better in this regard, but this improvement cannot be cheered, considering the unprecedented improvements in the city orchestrated by the Government. ‘Abuse of state resources’ has been a constant and its impact appears to be insignificant when number-change is considered.  

In 2002, with the natural advantage of incumbency, the UNP secured 32 seats, garnering 136,845 (57.83%), while the UPFA got just 8 seats (38,002 votes or 16.06%). 

In 2011 (like in 2006), the UPFA enjoyed incumbency-edge, indicating clearly that Colombo remains a UNP bastion (and as overall results indicate, the only one remaining).  What is important to note, however, is that retaining a bastion does not indicate a significant change of fortunes (for the UNP), and moreover that the overall result, even after factoring in incumbency-edge (for the UPFA) has shown a marked decline in popularity.  

One must also keep in mind that this is the second local government elections held under the stewardship of Mahinda Rajapaksa. ‘Regime-fatigue’ does not seem to have been a factor.  Even if one were to adjust for ‘abuse of state resources’ and the obvious advantages of abusing the option for holding elections on a staggered basis, the gap is still very significantly in favour of the ruling party.  Thus, with reference to the UNP leader’s call, it would seem that the electorate is happy with things as they are or at least are not too disagreeable about them.  The other possibility is that they’ve just not heard Wickremesinghe or, if they did, they don’t have any compulsion to side with him even if they were not necessarily happy with the UPFA. 

The UNP, then, needs to sober up about the results, even though it is good to have something in the pocket, or at least have the satisfaction that this last devalued coin has not slipped out of a hole the leadership itself has created.

The JVP should be even more worried.  In 2006, the JVP polled 6,145 in Colombo, securing 2 seats.  In 2011, that party has slipped across the country (bested by even the LSSP in one case), and has got just 3,162 for a dismal 7^th place finish. As for the most vociferous advocates of devolution, the NSSP, they’ve barely bade it into double digits wherever they contested. 

What is the overall result?  The local government elections indicate that even if one were to ‘correct’ for inherent advantages enjoyed by the ruling party, the country still stands with the President, for better or worse, even if the President and the UPFA happened to be the consolation option for the majority.  The Colombo result does not indicate any kind of ‘resurgence’ of the UNP. It’s just same-old, same-old. 

More importantly, the ‘Colombo Result’ may tell us why the ‘Sri Lanka Story’ abroad is so slanted.  The story-tellers live for the most part in Colombo. They hobnob with the upper classes, typically diehard UNP loyalist who are conversant in English and for this reason alone (by default, as it were) are talked to/with by the story-tellers, i.e. diplomats, UN employees, INGO workers.  It would be silly to expect such people to offer analyses/opinions of those who disagree with them.  So they talk their talk, lay their versions thick on the table and it is all lapped up by a well-meaning (perhaps) but possibly naïve and ill-informed set of foreigners.  What happens next?  I don’t think elaboration is required.

The ‘Colombo Result’ is then an invitation for the well-meaning, open-minded would-be story-tellers to take a walk out of the municipal limits of Colombo.  They should not let their conversations and would-be respondents be screened by their pro-UNP friends in the cocktail circuit. The biggest mistake would be to think that those who know and can speak well in English are necessarily smart or smarter than those who don’t.  It’s just a language.  People are not stupid.  They weigh costs and benefits.  They are not naïve.  They are not blind.  They are not dumb.  Take the cross section, if you want to form an informed opinion about how this country thinks and acts.  That’s my advice for the story-tellers. 

As for the ruling party, it should take the results and try to figure out the impact of incumbency as well as abuse of state resources.  My guess is that they would still have won by a comfortable margin.  The question then is ‘why abuse?’  Insecurity, perhaps?  That’s a ‘chink’ and there should be no illusions about it.  People notice these things.  Friends as well as enemies. 

[Courtesy, Daily News, October 11, 2011] 

Read more

Local Government Elections and an unscripted post-mortem

Just desserts aside, transgression requires response from the Law

It was not a war worthy of making songs about.  There is nothing historic about it and it is certainly not anywhere close to the epic stand of the Sinhalese against the invader several centuries ago.    It was a home-and-home match.   At the end of this petty turf-war a prominent politician is dead along with several loyalists while the erstwhile other of the story is still in critical condition after having several bullets surgically removed from his head.

These are not the first politicians who have opted for gun-brandishing, bullet-spewing modes of being and operation and sadly and even disturbingly they are not likely to be the last for quite some time to come.  What is important to note is that the issue is not about who fired the first shot but that there were shots ready to be fired and fingers ready to pull triggers.  It makes it difficult for people talk about ‘the law’ or ‘law and order’. Indeed, it forces all of us to add a question mark after such terms. 

It’s not new, yes.  The ‘gun culture’ has a long history.   Indeed it is no small miracle that democracy, even in the reduced parameters within which it can be described, has survived despite the proliferation of guns among those who don’t have the license to carry them nor the heads to handle them. 

In the run up to the Colombo Municipal Council election, many parties and candidates vowed to keep the city clean.  The truth is that the city was getting cleaned even without a Council.  ‘Clean’ has other connotations and one of them has to do with eliminating criminality.  There is no point in beauty if the ugliness of mismanagement, corruption and criminality are not dealt with decisively. 

Few, if any, would have surplus sympathy to spare for victims of gang-warfare, which is how the incident is best described.  Those who take the law into their hands or deliberately leave the law out of it when it comes to dispute settlement or indeed prods the law to do their dirty work for them, are not deserving of the ordinary citizen’s tears.    The fact that the main protagonists happened to be seasoned politicians with experience at all levels of representation indicates how serious the problem is. 

The consolation, if it can be called that, is that the victims included the order-givers; usually it’s the henchmen who attack and kill each other, leaving bosses to have a good laugh and offer a camera-moment after the long day’s thuggery is done. 

Some blame turf-wars to the preferential voting system but that doesn’t explain everything.  The two persons concerned were not contesting. Their proxies were, however, and they were being used to see who had the great testosterone reserves.  It’s all spent now, though.  There’s little to show for the energy except a manifest absence of sympathy. 

For me, it emphasizes the fact that Colombo needs to be cleaned up, comprehensively.  The thugs come in all colours, shapes and sizes and are not averse to wearing whatever disguise suits the moment, even the garb of politician.  Colombo needs to be cleaned up and not necessarily in ways like this, where the worst elements clean each other up. 

Dayasiri Jayasekera made a point in Parliament the other day.  It was about gun-toting politicos and their henchmen roaming around Mulleriyawa.  He was unceremoniously evicted from the House.  He has every right to say ‘I told you so!’ 

Political parties survive assassinations, by and large.  Others step in.  Some actually benefit from the human losses suffered by parties as a result of such violence.  Jayasekera in the after-word made the easy but necessary point that only the near and dear suffer.  Whether or not these ‘near and dear’ have what it takes to spare a thought for the ‘near and dear’ of those attacked, maimed and killed by their newly departed or hurt ‘near and dear’ we really cannot say.  Institutions don’t have patience for that kind of thing. 

For me, only one thing matters.  The incident shows that the institutional arrangement is full of holes.  We cannot have a decent Colombo where key institutions that are responsible for law and order are porous.  The Urban Development Authority has done an amazing job, no one will dispute this, but the UDA cannot erase the kinds of blots that criminality leaves in its wake.  It cannot deal with guns and gun-toting thugs or politicians who think they have some kind of right to take the law into their hands.  Something has to be arrested and it is not just errant individuals. 

The one positive is that apart from this incident, election day was relatively peaceful and a far cry from those terrible and blood-drenched elections of the eighties and nineties (held during the stewardships of J.R.Jayewardena, Ranasinghe Premadasa and Chandrika Kumaratunga).  The United National Party won one local government body, the CMC, and lost the rest.  Not altogether unexpected of course, but it would certainly give that party a much-needed boost.  The JVP has gone from bad to worse in terms of performance.  The ruling party made gains in Colombo but these gains have to be read in the context of the natural advantages of incumbency (nationally) and the tweaking of election laws by way of misusing state resources.  The winners will celebrate, the losers will find something to cheer about.

In Mulleriyawa, though, there’s very little to cheer about.  The lessons are there to be learnt and they are not being touched by those who so badly need to be educated.  Dayasiri Jayasekera had a point, in the middle of all this.  Few were ready to listen to him.  Pity. 

[Courtesy Daily News, October 10, 2011]

Read more

India is cute!

India says that it doesn’t want to thrust policy down Sri Lanka’s throat. Instead, India tells the Government of Sri Lanka, ‘talk with the Tamil National Alliance (TNA); sort it out with them’.  ‘How very understanding and good neighborly of India!’ one might think.  Dig deeper and the bonhomie doesn’t really look inviting.

For years, the TNA was the mouthpiece of the LTTE and this is something that the likes of Sumanthiran are not comfortable to talk about.  For years, the LTTE was Delhi’s creature, armed, fed, funded and trained.  The LTTE was used by Rajiv Gandhi in his determined plan to ‘Bhutanize’ Sri Lanka.  The Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) tasked with Bhutalization later found that Delhi’s terrorist baby had grown to be an incorrigible pest.  Spanking Prabhakaran was not as easy as was first believed.  Slaps were exchanged. The Bhutanists packed bags and went home.  Bhutanism did not die, of course. Prabhakaran did.  India helped, but not in a ‘friendly way’ but in a pound-of-flesh manner. 

Today, Delhi feels fit to conduct tuition classes to Sri Lanka.  Not all students listen and learn. Not all charges end up being pawns or teachers’ pets.  Some, like the TNA, have no choice perhaps, but what is clear is that the TNA is taking orders directly from Delhi.  Perhaps there’s a mouthpiece-need that has grown into party psyche and this is why the end of the LTTE left R. Sampanthan and his pals looking for another ‘big brother’.  Delhi, still in Bhutanization Mode, could not have been happier.  So when Delhi says ‘talk to the TNA’, Manmohan Singh is essentially saying ‘do as we say’. 

It is against this context that one has to assess the analysis offered by Dayan Jayatilleka in the Daily Mirror of September 29, 2011 (‘Defending and protecting Sri Lanka’).  For him India is ‘the single critical or crucial variable for Sri Lanka’.  Critical and crucial, yes.  ‘Single’, I am not sure.  We can always do with friendship and support, especially from our neighbours.  Dayan claims that this is what India has been, ‘friend’ and ‘supporter’, especially in international forums.  He adds that India’s friendship is important but not sufficient, that Sri Lanka also needs Russia and China.  Sri Lanka also needs others.  Then he turns it all around and says that other countries take their cue from India, reverting to the argument that it is India’s friendship that counts, nothing else. 

In an earlier piece, Dayan confessed that there’s a price to pay for such support as he claims Sri Lanka gets and could get from India.  He called it ‘concession’, implicitly admitting that the whole devolution-as-solution (to grievances that have nothing to do with territory, suffered by a community that is not territory-bound) is a sham but which has to be called ‘legitimate’ just to get ‘big brother’ to get ‘bigger brothers’ off our back.   Well, recent world history has shown that when big name thugs want to bully some nation, diplomatic niceties are unceremoniously deleted from the engagement equation.  It is not about truth, legitimacy, morality or righteousness. 

What Dayan is arguing for is pragmatism (albeit a pragmatism that is based solely on his assumptions, biases and preferred outcomes).  Put another way, it boils down to conceding ‘pound of flesh’.  What for though?  The legitimation of false claim and carving out an ‘ethnic territory’ from a swath of land that is not ethnically identifiable in terms of geography, history or demography!  We do that, it keeps Delhi happy and what do we have left in terms of dignity, territorial integrity and sovereignty apart from meaningless trappings?  That might be ‘ok’ for Dayan, but he cannot expect the people of this country to purchase such anti-intellectual and treacherous rubbish.   

Solid support from anyone is welcome; the only condition is a solid ‘something’ to the answer ‘what for?’  India can be pivotal in global machinations, no one disputes this.  Dayan lays out the challenges well:

‘We must certainly strive to countervail the mounting anti-Lankan opinion in Indian civil society and the media, militant opinion in Tamil Nadu and the lobbying of certain Western elements.’ It is in the ‘how’ of it that he errs.  He says, ‘We must secure Delhi’s support and swing Indian public and political opinion firmly over to Sri Lanka’s side. This cannot be done by purely verbal means but by policy reforms’.  So, we need to tailor policy reform to Delhi’s preference parameters?  Let’s suppose we did this.  What then is our status in the United Nations?  Client State of India?  India’s New Bhutan?  Would all our diplomats thereafter take a cue from Dayan and take policy directives from the Indian missions in countries they are posted in? 

A UN-based ‘top official of Sri Lanka’s firmest, most powerful international friend’ (according to Dayan) had told him ‘short of capitulating on or compromising its vital security interests, Sri Lanka must do what it takes to help its friends to help it’.  That’s a cute way of saying ‘do what Delhi says and Delhi will help you’. 
India is not ready for friendship.  It was and is ready for Bhutanization; if they can get it with guns, they would (tried, could not), if they can get it through their Sri Lankan pawns (TNA) they would, if they can use threat to get it they would and rest assured they would use any and every means at their disposal to obtain preferred outcome, including longtime agents adept at frilling submission as Utopia. 

If friendship has to be meaningful, ‘machination’ should be thrown out of the window.  If not, Dayan and others should stop using the word ‘friend’ to refer to pound-of-flesh associates.  That’s trade and not friendship.  Friendship is about honesty.  If India really wants to help Sri Lanka, that’s fine.  Friendship requires Sri Lanka to say it as it is.  Friendship requires India to point out flaw in conceptualization and/or inadequacies in information laid out.  Friendship requires decent, respectful exchange of views and is not about tuition teachers talking down to students.

Friendship aside, national dignity and sovereignty demands that Sri Lanka states its case and ‘case’ here must include relevant information about ‘grievances’ including how they have been inflated or constructed, the truth about demography, relevant archaeological evidence and historical account.  If Delhi’s ‘friendship’ is to depend on a summary tossing out of all this, then the relationship cannot be called ‘friendship’.  If the best we can do is to refuse to get bogged down in misnomers, then that’s what we should do.  Call a space a spade.  Pound of flesh friends are not friends.  They are bullies.  Dayan, perhaps, is not able to call a bully a bully given he is a diplomat, but then again he was not always one.  There is only one consistent in the man’s long history of political maneuvering: abject slavery to Delhi’s whims and fancies.  Tells.

Delhi is cute.  Dayan is cute too.  Makes a good pair. 

[Courtesy, The Nation, October 9, 2011]

Read more