Snooty prescriptions for the yakkhos compromises yak-emancipation

A NOTE ON TEACHING/LEARNING ENGLISH(ES)

S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike was a clever politician in that he was good at picking the slogan most capable of turning idea into ideology, a population into a movement.  He plugged a thermometer into a polity afflicted with numerous anxieties and at the receiving end of all kinds of plagues, obtained temperature and recommended what was calculated to be embraced as panacea.  That doesn’t make him worse than any politician from any party or community of course.  There are things praiseworthy and things that demand censure. 

He’s been vilified, unfairly, for his language policy, mostly by Eelamists and by those who have an axe to grind with Sinhalese and Buddhists, adept at selective reference and mischievous extrapolation.  There is however a fair criticism as well.  He threw a baby with the bathwater. I am thinking about ‘English’. There was nothing wrong in celebrating Sinhala and Tamil and elevating these to their rightful place in national social discourse.  Language after all is the vehicle of culture and the colonial project was as much about plunder as it was about cultural genocide.  The latter required a colonial language policy as well as a policy about Buddhism and to a lesser extent Hinduism.  There was nothing innocent in the kind of ‘civilizing’ that was injected to our people. 

Recovering culture and injecting political agency to the marginalized required intervention in the field of language politics. SWRD knew this, felt the need, and, being good with words it was child’s play for him to come up with the rhetoric.  There was euphoria. Naturally.  The sons and daughters of those who did not belong to the English-speaking, Anglicized sections of the population felt that the citizenship anomalies pertaining to such issues would be resolved.  A lot of good came out of it.  The problem was that by omission or commission the language-related hierarchies and relevant tyrannies remained intact. 

The problem was that Sinhala and Tamil were promoted at the cost of English when all that had to be done was to ensure that elevating these to their rightful place would not compromise English.  What happened was that the numerical strength saw the ‘yakkhos’ slowly but surely securing the high seats of power, but still being downed in the discourse pertaining to the cultured.  There was no reason to insist (in a roundabout way) that the Sinhala and/or Tamil sword(s) should be picked but to English given a wide berth.  That’s how it happened, though.  So we have with us today a class of English speakers who genuinely believe that their superior knowledge of English confers upon them some kind of special elite status which requires, for purposes of affirmation and exclusivity, that they vilify the yakkhos.  The yakkhos, for their part, took one of two available paths: to adopt a high-minded and outwardly anti-colonial and even progressive stand of refusing to learn English (to their own detriment) and acquiring membership in Club Snooty English so that they could then vilify the yakkos. 

Today, when people talk about the ‘language issue’, sadly, the status of English and related politics is footnoted in favour of ‘parity of status’ matters pertaining to Sinhala and Tamil and of course the politics of identity-assertion which flow from/to language.  Some interest on the ideological issues, in particular the relevant cultural politics, has been ignited by the effort to promote Sri Lanka English through the ‘English our way’ programme.  The contention is that learning English is important but it is ‘Our English’ and/or ‘English Our Way’ that need to be focused on. 

On the face of it, i.e. in terms of de-hegemonizing language standards, this seems quite progressive.  After all, why, one can ask, should be give special status to the not-practiced-anywhere thing called BBC English?  Given that there are many Englishes and there’s no way to determine which is ‘authentic’ and/or which is ‘most pure’, a strong case can be made to elevate Sri Lankan English to a status-parity with any other kind of English, British-English included. 

There is of course the technical problem of how to determine what is ‘standard’ Sinhala English, who gets to make such determination, and how to construct a hierarchy of Sinhala-English (since there can be many of these).  My suspicion is that the ‘standard’ that the constructors/high priests will come up with will only entrench existing hierarchies, in effect re-hegemonizing language-standards.  What is more disturbing, to me, is the location of this kind of language politics in the larger political project of achieving emancipation from all the violence, subjugation and anxieties embedded in the post-colonial condition. 

We know for a fact that the current language divide related to English has on one side the self-styled elite, a minority of course, that looks down on the aforementioned ‘yakkhos’.  I have labeled the English(es) they speak as ‘Snooty’ both in the determined effort to keep it exclusive to that particular class of users and in the derision with which other English(es) are viewed by the exponents of these forms.  Interestingly, the argument for the establishment of Sri Lankan English as ‘Standard’ has come from this Snooty class and not the relevant subaltern, i.e. the Yakkhos speaking what I call ‘Yak English’.  The Snooty, then, want the Yakkhos to think that it is ok to speak Yak English.  They want the Yakkhos to believe that by speaking Yak English, some kind of glass ceiling is being transcended and that the tyranny of Snooty English, Snooty-English speakers and snooty English-speakers is getting dismantled.

Sorry, it doesn’t happen that way.  It will not happen until such time the yakkhos decide what kind of English they want to speak, what works for them and what does not, and design the politics of dismantling language tyrannies.  I offer that such a project requires that the yakkhos learn as many Englishes as possible, especially Snooty English, whether it is Snooty Sri Lankan English or Snooty English- English (the variety that some Sri Lankan English speakers use, the ‘elocuted’ form if you will). 

The yak-Englishing that the snooty English-speakers and Snooty-English speakers propose appears to be some kind of emancipatory project but it smack of arrogance until such time they recognize the whole project can have meaning only if it is seen as a part of a larger yak project to dismantle snooty tyrannies.  The oppressor or the beneficiary of hierarchy prescribing for the oppressed or the victims of hierarchy is funny if it was not pernicious and indeed a proposal for perpetuating the distinction. 

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On threat and threat-source: real and imagined

In October 1983, the United States of America invaded a Caribbean island nation.  Grenada was at the time governed by the New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop.  Bishop was assassinated on October 19, 1983 by troops loyal to his own Deputy Prime Minister, Bernard Coard. Bishop was no friend of the USA. The USA determined after the fact of assassination that Coard was a threat to US interests. On October 25, 1993, the USA invaded Grenada.  It was called ‘Operation Urgent Fury.  The New Jewel Movement was overthrown and a puppet duly installed.  Reason: threat to security. 

The ‘threat’ came in the form of an airstrip which Ronald Reagan thought would be used by Soviet war planes.  Grenada is 133 square miles in size.  It had at the time a population less than 100,000 people.  Some 10,000 pigs, someone said, I remember.  Possibly less than 1000 dogs. Some cats.  Maybe several hundred thousand mosquitoes and a similar number of flies. A threat to the United States of America, we were told. 

‘Threat’ is an often used reference for invasion and it’s been used so many times that it has got boring and funny. Not so for the invaded, let me add.  The United States is probably the most shit-scared nation on earth, considering how frequently and how violently that country has invaded by and large peaceful nations over the past 100 years. 

Grenada was a threat.  Oh dear! 

Then we had the ‘threat’ of Iraq harbouring ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (WMD).  More than half a million people have perished in the unsuccessful efforts to discover a single such device. 

Let’s put it all down to ‘cultural preference’. Maybe the USA has a cultural fascination with threats.  They are wont, by cultural gene, to see threats where there are none and to kill thousands and thousands of people while swishing sword and spraying bullets on phantoms. 

The latest ‘funny’ to hit the political headlines is the somber pronouncement from Washington that Wikileaks is a ‘global threat’.  I don’t know when Hillary Clinton assumed the role of global spokesperson, but I haven’t really heard the ‘globe’ expressing displeasure about Wikileaks.  She is upset that those exposed will be targeted by the bogeyman or some such creature.  Wikileaks ‘risks lives’, Washington screams.  Whose lives? Where? When?  Wikileaks has been around for 4 years and Clinton cannot name one person who has suffered a pinprick of harm outside of embarrassment they ought to have been ready to suffer when they did the down-and-dirty.  

As Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange points out, Washington has been two-tongued about the truth of abuses published by his outfit.  The US pooh-poohs Wikileaks, saying ‘there is nothing of importance’ even as they scream ‘You’ll risk lives, compromise national security and endanger troops’.  Can’t be both.  Assange therefore asks, ‘which is it?’

What’s really funny is the fact that the Obamas, Clintons and others who appear to be wetting their pants thanks to Wikileaks, are themselves even-as-we-speak endangering the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in various parts of the world and actually killing hundreds.

Here’s a choice quote from Assange which no one in the Evil Empire led by the US and UK have refuted:

‘US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.’

They have not refuted and probably cannot counter the following startling facts revealed by US diplomatic cables:  1. The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties.  2. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran. 3. Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran's nuclear program stopped by any means available. 4. Britain's Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect "US interests" (ref the ongoing Chilcott Inquiry). 5. Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament. 6. The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. 7. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. 8.  Australia’s Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

A bunch of rogue nations that declare war on whim and disguise real intent (securing access to resources and taking control of markets) as response to (imagined, nay constructed) threat, will naturally earn the wrath of those they wrong. If the Clintons of this world were worried about lives being risked and national security being compromised and need to identify source of threat asap, all they need to do is rush to the loo. I am sure most washrooms in the offices they inhabit come equipped with a mirror. 

[first published in 'The Nation' in December 2010]

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When poverty-producers propose poverty-alleviation

There is a month dedicated to ‘saving’ when all banks run ad campaigns urging people to save money.  Banks need savings because banks need to sell all kinds of loan products.  A nation needs savings because a nation has to invest money in various spheres in order to create jobs, generate income etc.  People need to save money because people are fragile and frequently find themselves in cash-strapped situations.  We are told that it is good to save for a rainy day, but no one tells us that we are in a year-long monsoon when it comes to financial needs. 

Financial institutions will tell you that saving is good for you and they are not incorrect.  On the other hand this ‘it-is-for-your-own-good’ business is just that: business!  For examples, banks that have ‘discovered’ just the other day a thing called ‘microfinance’ are going around telling the poor that they are in this business purely out of altruistic reasons and specifically to help them out of poverty are basically tapping a huge reservoir of customers they had hitherto neglected.  So, ironically, even as the banking sector indulges in activities that generate poverty, we also see a concerted effort to do business with the poor.  Not for love. For profit. 

There is a lot of irony when institutions that are dedicated to profit-making and promoting profit-making in ways that necessarily impoverish people and perpetuate cycles of poverty suddenly want to ‘alleviate poverty’ through microfinance.  It would be understandable if Banks, like most other corporate entities, think of ‘microfinance’ as just another CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) project, nothing more than a little feel-good, guilt-alleviating exercise.  What we are seeing today is however not something of that kind, not an add-on, a frill, a for-a-prize, image-building operation.  This is business ladies and gentlemen.

Microfinance is, as long-time practitioners would tell you, not coterminous with development. Resolving credit problems (i.e. access to sufficient amounts with minimal hassle, at the right time and at terms that are reasonable) is most certainly an important element in any initiative that seeks to enhance capacities of those sections of a population that truly require ‘development’.  Necessary, then, but certainly not sufficient. 

The problem with the dominant articulation of the microfinance discourse is that the above it the underlying logic.  The problem is articulated in purely financial terms. This is convenient.  Microfinance advocates from the corporate sector would not dare touch other related issues because it is not in their immediate interest and because delving into these would show them up for who they really are: business entities, doing business, seeking-profit and articulating the entire exercise as a humanitarian operation born in the depths of their bleeding hearts. 

If banks were really serious about poverty alleviation they would put a full stop to financing enterprises that create poverty.  Banks cannot be expected to be charitable outfits and we should not fool ourselves into believing that they would abandon their core operational thrust out of some professed love for all of humanity. 

Microfinance is not ‘new’ to most parts of the world. The world has known about thrift and credit for centuries.  A close reading of the Buddha’s thoughts on social engagement and his advocacy for the lay person and the household would show that thrift was a core element of his doctrine.  He advocated that a portion of one’s income should be saved and an equal portion invested.  He recommended that a third part should be used for consumption and the fourth gifted. 

In Sri Lanka, the household culture is replete with many clearly identified thrift-measures which are still practiced in all parts of the country and find considerable reference in folk literature.  Formal micro financing institutions have a history that goes back to the year 1906. 

Like most terms in the development dictionary, microfinance was appropriated, re-defined and re-marketed to the practitioners. The watershed event was the first Microcredit Summit in February 1997 in Washington DC, where there were some some 3000 people from 137 countries in attendance.  Thirteen years later, the ‘blueprint’ for all initiatives is downloadable from the CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the Poor) website.  CGAP is ‘addressed’ at the World Bank and focuses on financial services.  No prizes for guessing the agenda of the lords of poverty (generation). Yes, the within-brackets part of it is erased in the literature. 

Today, ‘microfinance’ as it is used has been extracted from the social, cultural and political soil in which it was born.  Today, shed of frill and conference-glitter, microfinance is essentially a matter of exploring the exploitation potential of hitherto neglected sections of the market.  Today, corporate entities have suddenly realized that they could make a killing by extracting little amounts from a large population.   This is why the microfinance literature and the best-practices archives are thin on sustainability and largely silent on the parallel processes of exploitation and impoverishment.  The moment such things are brought into the discourse, the legitimacy of the vast majority of corporate entities engaged in microfinance is brought into question.  This they cannot risk. 

Impoverishment is an inevitable product of profit-seeking enterprises.  Microfinance is a win-win situation for microfinance corporate players. It is like a factory spewing pollutants in a canal and then volunteering to clean up the particular waterway. For a price!

The next time someone utters that word it would be good, I believe, to ask about what other business that person engages in and talk about the consequences of such activities, including poverty generation. 

This year has been dedicated to microfinance.  Maybe it would be good if it is also dedicated to the telling of home truths about microfinance.

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A man, a pact and the earth-fragrance of Divulgane

Sometime in the year 1986 I came to an agreement with a friend, Ananda Thilak Bandara Herath.  Thilak and I were in our first year at Dumbara Campus, University of Peradeniya.  We shared a ‘chummery’ with 10 others.  There were 6 beds.  The ‘chummery’ was located about a mile and a half from the campus in Polgolla.  Thilak, when he entered campus didn’t know much English.  He knew the alphabet. 

We had a pact.  We spoke in English all the way to campus each morning and he sang all the way back at night.  Thilak teaches Geography in a small school in Galgamuwa.  He sings.  He appears on television now and then.  And he writes poetry. In English. 

Thilak didn’t come to Dumbara alone. He came with his classmate, I.M. Senanayake, ‘Senevi’ to everyone who knew him.  Thilak was from Madadombe, a small hamlet about 11 km from Galgamuwa.  Senevi was from Diulgane a few further away.  They both attended the school in Ehetuwewa.  They had known each other from the time they were very small.  They studied together for the A/Ls.  Senevi became a Social Services Officer and later passed the SLAS exam and is now the Provincial Director, Cultural Affairs, Central Province.  Senevi was one of the 12 in our ‘chummery’. 

Thanks to Senevi and Thilak I’ve roamed quite a bit in and around their villages.  Three or four of us would go there and stay for several days, bathing in one of the many tanks, visiting temples and spending afternoons in chenas roasting corn.  It was a slow time, a time of being and a time of making new friends.  Many new friends.  Of them all, there’s one I can never forget. Yase. 

Yasaratne studied for the A/L with Thilak and Senevi.  He didn’t make it to campus. He became a teacher and for many years taught at the Vikadanegama school where Thilak’s uncle, Bandara Jayatillake, was the Principal.  Yase would accompany us and would tell us stories about places and people.  He had soft ways. He had wit.  He told me one day, ‘maalinda, api nidi baddak gevanava….rupiyal dekai’ (we pay a sleep-tax of two rupees).  He added ‘maduru koyil’ (mosquito coils). 

Senevi and Thilak were brothers to Yase. We were too.  This was a time when we were playing and he was working.  Hard.  We appreciated and were humbled by this unassuming man who was born and lived two houses from the little katu-meti (wattle and daub) house where Senevi was born and grew up. 

People go their ways after leaving university and this is what happened to us as well. Still, we kept in touch, met at weddings and funerals and the occasional ‘get-together’.  Thilak, in fact, stayed for a year and a half at our house, to escape from the bheeshanaya.  Senevi survived. Barely. I would ask them about Yase.  And they would update.

I met him again a year ago.  Thilak’s Appachchi passed away last June.  At the time, they were living a kilometer from Galgamuwa.  All our friends came from all over the country.  After the funeral, we all decided to visit Senevi’s mother, who is in her mid-eighties now.  She was proud of her son; from the day he went to campus, she wanted him to be a disaapathi (a Government Agent).  Senevi is still Senevi.  A village boy with a strong sense of dignity and integrity, with feet firmly rooted in the varied soils of our land and determined to do justice to the education he received.  He put a lot of things right when he was Commissioner, Anuradhapura Municipal Council, things that were not getting done because some officials thought office gave a right to thieve, to misappropriate and to treat public property as personal endowment. 

I had one question.  ‘Where is Yasaratne?’ I asked.  I hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years. I went over to his place.  A little child ran out.  I asked for his father.  Yase came out.  Middle aged now.  His face was blank.  It’s been a long time, so I didn’t mind. I smiled and said ‘you can’t recognize me, can you?’  He murmured a name.  Then another.  Then I said ‘Malinda’.  He smiled and was immediately the Yasaratne who welcomed me (and everyone else) as though he had known us all his life more than twenty years before. 

Yase came out, spoke to the others and then asked me to go back to his place with him.  I went.  His wife made tea.  He wanted to stay the night.  I could not.  He wanted to give me a gift.  He said he couldn’t afford to give something to everyone who was there.  He took out a bag of kurakkan, took it to a make-shift workshop at the back of the house, turned on a switch and ground it to a find powder. 

Something was wrong, I realized, but couldn’t put my finger on it.  Senevi told me: ‘Yasayata es penenne nehe machang’. He was blind.  Apparently it had come slowly. Or gone away slowly, rather.  Even when studying for the A/Ls, Thilak told me, Yase would hold the books two inches from his eyes.  There was no mention of any of these things.  We spoke. Hands were clasped. We parted. 

In the year 1986, my friend Thilak and I made a pact.  We both learned something from each other.  Around the same time, our friend Yasaratne had made a pact.  With himself. With the earth upon which he lived.  That place, Divulgane, has a fragrance about it.  No, it is not nostalgia-laced.  It is a goodness thing.  A kurakkan way of life, of being and sharing.  Of encounter and reunion. 

We all make covenants during our lives.  Some are mandatory, some unimportant. Some are sacred.  They are fragrant.  My friend Yasaratne has vacant eyes. His heart is full though.  I feel privileged.

[First published in the Daily News, May 7, 2010] 

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Being and becoming Sri Lanka

Andare Smith, who claims to be the grandson of Adam Smith, and writes the column ‘Wealth of a Nation’, had a novel take on Sri Lanka.  He wrote, ‘After becoming the Miracle of Asia, we could become the Miracle of the East; then we can aspire to be in turn the Miracle of the World, the Miracle of the Solar System and the Miracle of the Universe, and thereafter perhaps we could become Sri Lanka’.

Andare’s drift is clear enough.  In the rush to become miraculous, we may just be forgetting that if we are not Sri Lanka, miraculous or otherwise, we gain little by becoming a miracle of a larger geographical area.   We might shine, yes, but if we lose sense of who we are, then we might have lost it all. 

Andare’s thoughts took me back to the year 2001-02, when Ranil Wickremesinghe came up with his plan for the country, ‘Regaining Sri Lanka’.  That ‘regaining’ had nothing to do with Sri Lanka.  To ‘regain’ something, one has to first and foremost be conscious of what has been lost.   To know what has been lost, one has to know what was there before and also be convinced that was there before was good for the most part. 

The easier thing is to is to look around, check out your neigbours, see what their preferences are and use them as standard to assess what you have and don’t have.  The difficult thing is to figure out who you are on your own terms.  That calls for a different kind of comparison.  It demands a delving into history, a look-back at the paths taken from long ago to now.  In other words, it is not about being or becoming like Singapore or about being better than India, but about being the best at who we are, i.e. Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans.

This requires us to re-discover ‘Sri Lanka’, not in slogan and political rhetoric but in its cultural and civilizational essence.  Not easy, but necessary, unless we are only interested in glitz and confetti, polite applause in public and sneering behind our backs, a big fat GDP and endemic poverty in vast swathes of the country.

What all this calls for is to examine what we are doing right now and where we are planning to go, and then ask ourselves how ‘Sri Lankan’ it all is.  Take ‘development’ for instance.  It’s all about growth-focused initiatives. Where has ‘grown-focus’ taken the world?  Where has it taken those countries that offer themselves as blueprints for how the rest of the world should be and become?  Who fell out, who was kicked out and how many people have had to die for the sustained development of SOME economies?  What was the blood-cost?  What kinds of values became current and what were discarded?  Did we become better as a species? Did the earth get healthier?  Well, if we looked around, the answer is pretty clear: we screwed up!     

That’s at the global level.  At the local level, we’ve faced and overcome many challenges, from insurrections to tsunamis to terrorism.  We’ve built roads and dams, provided healthcare and education that generated statistics which left the region and much of the world far behind.  We won the World Cup.

We also have a terribly flawed constitution.  We have cut down our forests. We’ve created jobs and made a lot of goodies available to the rich but have well and truly compromised our ability to protect our economy from spoilers.  Our food security.  In the name of ‘progress’ we have dismantled traditional systems of social security.  We have a seed policy that is deferential to multinational seed companies and wrecks all attempts to conserve traditional seed varieties.  We have roads that come in the name of development and go away with profits extracted, from land and man and woman. 

We have heritage but it’s up for sale.  We have history, but it is hardly ever perused and its distortion celebrated in the name of ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’.  We wave flag and sing anthem but there is neither in our hearts and lives.  We have associations but we are not a community.  We are Sri Lanka but we never ask ourselves whether under the façade of chest-beating nationalism there is anything significant that make us different from others. 

If and when we become a ‘miracle’, we may no longer be Sri Lanka or Sri Lankans but clones of other miracles, which of course is not bad if the vast majority of our people got to live miraculous lives, except that things don’t crumble in that direction usually.   

We must ask ourselves if Andare is correct, i.e. must we go through Asia, the East, the Solar System and the Universe to return to Sri Lanka?  We didn’t always work according to someone else’s blueprint.  We didn’t always inhabit someone else’s version of our reality.  And we got on fine.  We didn’t have any sophisticated education system, except the pirivenas, but those who listened to bana regularly, built structures that have amazed the world. Maybe we are getting definitions wrong, setting wrong targets and operating in frames of reference that sound great but are nevertheless hollow. 

Maybe it’s good to just BE Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans.  That’s what Andare seems to be saying.

[This is from 'The Editor's Blog' of The Nation]

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Time to go beyond the 13th

The Bishop of Jaffna, Rev Thomas Saundaranayagam is reported to have said that the Government must dialogue with the Tamil National Alliance in order to find a solution to what he called ‘the ethnic problem’.  He adds that lasting peace must be based onthe aspirations of the Tamil people and that they (the Tamil people) must have the liberty to ‘live in peace in their own soil’.

Dialogue is good as long as there is genuine intention to obtain progress in resolving issues.  On the other hand, dialogue must be inclusive and open-ended.  One in ten Muslims was displaced courtesy the conflict and therefore any discussion that excludes that community will necessarily be incomplete and unsatisfactory. This is why the TNA’s delay in sending names for to Parliamentary Select Committee is disappointing. 
The Bishop’s reductionism on aspirations is however troubling.  Aspirations and grievances are usually conflated for political expediency, but when it comes to serious negotiations that seek lasting solutions, it is important to keep things real. This requires greater weight to be placed on legitimate grievances and not on wild aspirations which could potential rub people the wrong way and construct unnecessary walls between communities. The contention about ‘own soil’ falls into the realm of aspirations since that claims is at best contested and at worst unsubstantiated in terms of history, demography and geography. Co-existence, inter-communal harmony and the forging of a national identity stamped with the notion of togetherness are consequently compromised. 

Today the talk is about land and police powers and there are whispers to the effect that the Indian Foreign Minister’s impending visit is to get these elements of the 13th Amendment back on the table.  A lot is known about India’s role in the conflict but in the comings and goings, the give and take of that decades-long exercise the one thing that remained (as a scar or cancer, some might say) is the 13th Amendment. It is a constitutional fact. It is an in-your-face fact too, since Provincial Councils, elections, the elected and monumental wastage of public funds are part of oureveryday. 
The 13th not only precipitated a brutal insurrection, but was rejected by the much championed ‘sole-representatives’ of the Tamils, the LTTE.  It is therefore confusing that the President and Government, even whilst rejecting devolution of land and police powers have nevertheless talked of ‘going beyond the 13th’.   On the other hand, since the 13th is flawed then any mechanism that is pragmatic and draws from reality would amount to ‘going beyond the 13th’.

The report submitted by the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission is very clear on this issue.  While ‘devolution’ is recommended, the LLRC insists that the end product should be acceptable to all communities and not infringe freedoms.  In addition to recommending concrete measures to obtain maximum citizens’ participation in decision making processes, when taken as a whole, the Report calls for reason and fact and is not applauding emotion and myth. 

‘Going beyond the 13th’ suggests a rethinking of constitutional provisions so as to empower the citizen, which is a need that is echoed in the Report.  Land and police powers devolved to lines that have no basis in history and are in fact arbitrarily drawn boundaries are not in concert with the idea of ‘going beyond’. 

Indeed, they are conceptually and politically far more comfortable with ‘going back’ (to conflict). They may make better sense if there was deference to the scientific inre-demarcations, for example a re-drawing of provincial boundaries so that every single unit except for the central hills has a seaboard.  The LLRC does not mention a specific unit of devolution and neither is it fixated with current administrative or other boundaries.   In any event, even such demarcation will not yield any tangible benefit to the ordinary people unless better checks and balances are written into the Constitution, which is again something that the LLRC emphasizes. 

The TNA is no longer a mouthpiece for the LTTE and while one can ignore the fact that R. Sampanthan and others are not passing around gratitude for this unfettering, these individuals must understand that what was not extracted by gun and bullet will not be handed over on a platter at a negotiating table unless the official ‘giver’ is intent on political suicide. 

The Government, for its part, has to understand that three decades of myth mongering has helped turn fiction into fact and that perception is reality for the perceiver.  Getting rid of a thick coat of myth-dust requires an honest engagement where the ‘other’ in the equation is asked to substantiate claims regarding land and history, take cognizance of the demographic realities that rebel against territory-based solutions, and a demand that aspirations be grounded and grievances legitimate. 

As one columnist has pointed in these pages, ‘The problems of ordinary people are real and must be resolved by State agencies’.  That’s only the beginning of ‘going beyond the 13th Amendment’.  The rest, so to speak, is history.  And ground reality. Literally.  In other words EVERYONE must live in peace on their own soil.  ‘Everyone’ is every citizen and ‘own soil’ is Sri Lanka. 

[First published as 'The Nation' Editorial of January 8, 2012]

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Remembering Lasantha three years later

Lasantha Wickramatunga was clearly among the most colourful media personalities of his generation.  He was in fact so colourful in his typically uni-colour-political way that he was more than a media person.  The test of fast-colour, however, is a post-death thing and as much as many would want him to paint ‘The After’ he left behind, it really didn’t happen.  That itself is an indicator of impact.

He was not only the Editor-in-Chief of the Sunday Leader, he WAS the Sunday Leader and clearly much loved by his staff.  I’ve even heard of people who worked under him considering him as a father figure.  It was however not for fathering or leadership that he was best known.  Lasantha was political but less in an ideological sense than as a party man, and this is true of his time with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and with the United National Party.  He wore colour and symbol with pride and without apology; that his newspaper consequently acquired party branding is another matter altogether. 

He was clearly fearless whenever he attacked individual or collective, party or institution.  He knew how to get a story, how to gather facts and how to lay it all out so that there was a greater likelihood of realizing the objective that spurred him.  He was among the best investigative journalists the country has seen in the last two decades.  It is tragic that he consistently allowed political allegiances (to party and to individuals within parties) inform editorial direction.  There were numerous times when this selectivity detracted from his overall journalistic skill, especially when he toned down or even stopped critique altogether when a particular individual switched political loyalties. 

In his defence, however, it must be kept in mind that Lasantha was not one of those journalists who feign neutrality but are in reality diehard foot soldiers for this or that political party. Unfortunately, this particular fixation forced him to fashion and refashion editorial policy in according to ideological, political and policy shifts of the UNP.   He went ‘soft’ during the time Ranil Wickremesinghe was Prime Minister, with hardly a word of criticism leveled against the Ceasefire Agreement with the LTTE.  He was rabidly anti-government after the SLFD-led UPFA came to power and especially after Mahinda Rajapaksa became President.

I met him once in 1984, i.e. a few weeks after the Sunday Leader was launched, to submit an article but my better memories are of his performance in Geneva during the Government-LTTE talks in February 2006.  Attending a media conference called by Rohitha Bogollagama, who led the Government delegation, Lasantha was only interested in seeking to establish that the very fact of ‘talking’ was an endorsement of UNP policy, i.e. negotiations with the LTTE (see 'Facets of one-upmanship in Switzerland' for an interesting exchange between Lasantha and H.L.D. Mahindapala). 

Events proved that unlike in the Ranil-LTTE talks, the Government did not end up co-signing Balasingham’s agenda but used the moment to maneuver to positions of advantage, on the ground and in the political debate.  The Government had no illusions about the LTTE and events showed that nothing was lost when the inevitable that Lasantha was never ready to entertain happened, the resumption of hostilities courtesy LTTE belligerence and intractability.  In fact when it all came back to guns, bullets, bombs and suicide attacks, it was that very CFA that proved to have helped the LTTE most.  Lasantha was a day-to-day political activist and was not too worried about ‘later-fallout’.  He operated on the dictum ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ and this is perhaps why he gave Anton Balasingham a thumbs-up signal just before talks began in Celigny, Switzerland (See 'Revenge as an article of faith').  I was there, I saw it and I wrote about it and Lasantha never countered.

That kind of misplaced loyalty which put party before nation and people was never Lasantha’s preserve, however.  There are many who were blue and red in colour who did worse and whose failings on this account were not compensated for by the kind of journalism that Lasantha was capable of.  Speaking strictly for myself, it is sad that Lasantha, who had all the attributes to be larger than party chose to be framed by such loyalties.  It is in fact this party-fixation that rendered ineffective even the legitimate criticisms he leveled at his political opponents.  Divested of colour and embellishment, he did come up with a lot of stories that the public needed to know.  Unfortunately, he was too politically tainted to be taken notice of by sections of the readership that were not politically inclined either way.  As such his missives did little more than titillate the like-minded and offer temporary relief to the politically depressed.

Nothing of this made Lasantha deserve the death he suffered.  Indeed, if any of this was fault enough to be punished by murder then there would be a long list of journalists and others on someone’s list of targets.  When he was murdered three years ago, naturally the accusing finger was directed at the Government and especially those he had attacked venomously.  It was only later that it came to be known that Lasantha, for all his fierce attacks on the Government, remained a close friend of the President.  Lasantha was political and it was natural for his murder to lend itself into quick transformation into political capital.  Even today the incident is used as case-in-point by those who claim there’s a war on media freedom.  No one has been found guilty, though, and even making allowance for the fact that murder-clues do not materialize with finger-snap (it took 2 years to find a suspect in the attempt to assassinate the Defence Secretary, after all), the unresolved nature of the investigation will continue to haunt the Government.

Lasantha was not the only journalist who can be said to have irked people in high places.  While I would count out spies for foreign countries and cheerleaders for terrorists among those of our tribe who suffered threats and bodily harm, people like Keith Noyhr and Upali Tennekoon were never accused of being thus integrity-deficient.  They were moreover not even like Lasanths in that they didn’t turn newspapers into party rags.  They were both attacked and the attackers in both cases are yet to be apprehended and brought before the law.  The longer it takes to find out what really happened the greater the likelihood of blame being directed at the Government, even if such finger-pointing is unwarranted. 

Lasantha and I exchanged pleasantries in Geneva.  We didn’t see eye to eye obviously.  He was high-profile back then and I was new to newspapers.  I doubt he knew of me, but I certainly read his paper.  I kept notes.    I wouldn’t run a paper the way he did but then again I doubt I ever could.  He was one of a kind.   Even though all things considered he bit himself much more than he bit others, he entertained, he gave some zip to the media industry and splashed a lot of colour too.  It is a pity that we have to talk about what he could have achieved, less because he’s no more than because of who he was.  Perhaps this is why he is now largely forgotten (while Ajith Samaranayake is not, for example).  Still, I think we are poorer as a tribe for his absence.

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