‘Fixing’ can define dimensions of entertainment, health, sovereignty and existence

For years certain NGO personalities, academics, politicians, diplomats, journalists, political commentators and even heads of state argued that the LTTE could never be militarily defeated.  Today we know that these predictions were part conviction, part hope and part psychological operation to dent opposing view and military strategy. 

Kumar David, a well-known commentator, insisted, for instance, that the LTTE will never be crushed.  He said, at the time, that it was imperative for Marxists to hold and express this view. Many, like Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu (Centre for Policy Alternatives) and Jehan Perera (National Peace Council), launched well funded campaigns to convince people that the LTTE’s demands would have to be accommodated in some way ‘because Prabhakaran can never be defeated’.  Sudarshana Gunawardena (Rights Now) screamed ‘The government’s war balloon will burst in Killinochchi!’  Today we know who these people were batting for and why they had to read the game in a particular kind of way. 

It is hard to predict the when and how of conclusion in the case of a war that has dragged on for decades. As such, I doubt that the bookies were giving odds on outcome.  Perhaps there were bets being placed about specific things. For example, someone could have posted 4:1 odds on the Army capturing Killinochchi on or before January 2, 2009.  People betting on the matter might have considered the fact that well-known defence columnist Iqbal Athas had written on December 28, 2008 that it was virtually a toss up, that either party could emerge victorious.  The bookie would have made a killing because the said journalist has a reputation and is expected to know more about these things than the average person on the street.  It was no ‘toss-up’. It was a rout.  In the process, some balloons did burst -- those of people like David, Gunawardena, Jehan and Paikiasothy. 

People gamble all the time.  It is not a clean game. It is not ‘cricket’ (or maybe it is!).  This is why there is ‘fixing’.  For example, it is well known that the share market is negatively influenced by a terrorist attack. So, if someone had prior information of an impending terrorist attack, he/she could save a lot of bucks by selling off large chunks of his/her portfolio.  The late Dharmeratnam Sivaram (who wrote as ‘Taraki’) often knew of an LTTE attack a few hours ahead.  That knowledge could easily have been transformed into bucks if he tipped off someone who speculated in the share market.  I need not elaborate on the buck-making potential of information, especially ‘inside knowledge’ except to say that it is a short step from this place to that of getting the LTTE to set off a bomb.  Yes, we could call it ‘spot fixing’. 

It’s an old game.  Gambling artifacts have been recovered from ancient China (2300 BC), India, Egypt and Rome.  The Mahabharatha tells us that Prince Yudisthara gambled away the kingdom and much else in a game of dice.  Someone could very well have made a bunch by betting that he would stake Draupadi (the common wife of the 5 Pandava princes) if there was whispering that did not go unheard.  That would be called ‘spot fixing’ too. 

It is of course easy to speculate about these things after the fact.  Especially in cricket. There’s been so much talk about match-fixing and spot-fixing, after all.  India beat Pakistan in the second semi-final of World Cup 2011.  Did Pakistan throw the game? Was Umar Gul paid to deliver an uninspiring and indeed match-throwing spell?  Was Tendulkar paid to offer catches at 27, 45, 70 and 81?  Was he dropped because the entire Pakistan team was paid to lose (Tendulkar getting a good score would enhance the possibility of an Indian win, everyone knows)?  Did Younis, Misbah, Kamran and Umar get a bonus for dropping him?   Was Afridi in the plot, after all he persisted with Gul when he was being clobbered and didn’t show concern when one or two of his star batsmen were happily plodding away the overs?  Or was his innocence proven beyond all shadow of doubt because he left Shoaib Akhtar out of the team?  Unless someone rats, we wouldn’t know. Better to assume innocence. 

What is more important is learning from error and learning to predict events.  In other words, use science; state a hypothesis up front and put it to the test.  In cricket, for instance, given what we know and the patterns that have emerged, we could predict something like the following.

So and so will bowl Sehwag juicy, hittable leg side balls and two wides in his first three overs. So and so will produce only 10 runs in the first 30 balls he faces. So and so will bowl in a particular way in three overs at such and such a stage of the game.  Now, if this actually happens, we should flag the person and monitor his performance, the ups and downs.  If there is shady stuff happening, the lines of the pattern will get more pronounced and we then learn to predict the kind of contracts that may be given to susceptible players.

The same principle can be applied to identify people who are in the pay of corrupt corporates. We can, again based on observation over a period of time, that so and so in the Health Ministry will do or say such and such and/or support such and such a move.  We can predict that this cabinet minister will push that policy or that this senior administrator will get subtly smeared in the private 'free' media so that he is vulnerable to being removed or stops being too honest for the liking of the corrupt. This particular IGP, DIG or minister will be portrayed in this way by this particular TV station or media group, we can predict.

After watching the events in the 'Middle East' (by the way, what ‘East’ and what is Bahrain in the middle of?) we need to see who are the agents ready to be given arms to 'rise against' any nationally oriented government in a given country. Or which party is paid to be hostile to which neighbouring country so that tension can always be maintained - ready to use when needed.

Let’s take nothing for granted.  That seems to be a good rule of thumb for the honest, responsible and patriotic citizen in these days clouded by gambling, match-fixing, spot-fixing and nation-selling

[first published in the Daily News, April 1, 2011]

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Reflections on two-nation theses

It is good when people criticize.  It is better when those who criticize also happen to be responsible individuals in that they have not fallen back in paying dues, are humble enough to acknowledge error, are remorseful enough to attempt correction and are not ungracious in the matter of counting blessings.  The above would be a good reality-check we can self-administer or assess one another with, especially those given to ranting and raving at the drop of a hat as though the world somehow owes them something. 

I am blessed and among my blessings is the fact that there are numerous people who send me word and sentence, thought and question.  Among this special category of human beings is Prof. S.N. Arseculeratne, Uncle Chubby to me.  This morning he dropped Ananda Coomaraswamy in my inbox:  "When nations grow old, the arts get cold, and commerce settles on every tree".  Strangely, as I picked up word and though, my mind-net also came up with a man called Colvin R. De Silva and a mischievous line he once uttered, which later was ‘de-contexted’ and used to bolster the most ridiculous of claims: ‘One language, two nations; two languages, one nation.’

Colvin’s proposition related to the status of Sinhala and Tamil.  The relevant nations that political punditry and chauvinistic rhetoric drew from this careless statement and of course embedded ill-will was ‘Sri Lanka’ and ‘Eelam’, or alternatively, ‘Sinhale’ and ‘Thamil Eelam’ (‘Eelam’ being corruption of ‘Hela’ and as such the name being implicit acknowledgment of the primacy of ‘Sinhale’, a point which is deliberately ignored).  Word theatrics aside, Colvin’s observation/prediction did and does have some metaphorical as well as perception currency, given antipathies and insecurities.  Reading what Uncle Chubby sent me, however, I wondered whether we all missed the bus courtesy Driver Colvin’s deft turn into a political cul-de-sac. 

First, we have all forgotten that the ‘one language’ that produced or almost produced (as some would like to think) two nations was not Sinhala but English.  These two nations are not geographically marked as in the case of Eelamist rhetoric, where too demography and geography make mockery of the boundaries that fantasy produce.  They are nations in other ways.  Ways of inclusion and exclusion, for example.  Being part of ‘core’ and being ‘marginal’, rich and poor, dominating and dominated, exploiting and exploited.

Part of it is explained by endowment imbalances and also, as I believe, that which we bring to this world as karmic-potential or karmic-handicap.  Some of it, though, is structure-produced and some the outcome of deliberate and political push-aside.    In this, English is a divider and a ‘marginalizer’, it includes and excludes or, more accurately, it is employed to divide, marginalize, exclude and even humiliate.  That’s something to think about.

Coomaraswamy’s observation, "When nations grow old, the arts get cold, and commerce settles on every tree," also speaks (at least to my mind) of these other two-nation types.  There is a Sri Lanka that is young and one that is old.  It would be simplistic and erroneous to identify these two in terms of year-age.  We have one that is post-colonial in which there is a lot of embedded colonial baggage and one that is pre-colonial which although not entirely untouched by the colonial encounter is nevertheless and remarkably un-baggaged, so to speak. 

The former is old and certainly supports the Coomaraswamy thesis.  Built on the quicksand of modernity-promise, unable to handle the reality that ‘independence’ was merely a reconfiguring of the terms of extraction and the changing of outward appearance, deliberately, mischievously and maliciously unmoored from history by those who have little or no history to speak of or identity with, this particular ‘nation’ has operated as adjudicator and direction-setter, a role which involved the ‘necessary’ disavowal of the existence of the other nation.  It is falling apart and those who believe that the only citizenship that is real or which matters is what they enjoy in this ‘nation’, cannot seem to understand why this is happening.  It is an old nation. Its arts are cold.  Its every tree is commerce-laden.  It has lost heart.  It flounders without rhythm or rhyme, having pawned and happily abandoned heartbeat and pulse. 

There is also that other nation, bastardized, vilified and whose existence is not just questioned but is mentioned in past-tense terms, i.e. as dead and buried.  It does not occupy places some tend to think are the high seats of power and decision-making. It doesn’t carry flag or indeed has place in flag. It does not sing the national anthem with pride, force and conviction. Yet it flutters and makes music.  Its art is warm because its heart pulsates healthily.  It is not commerce-free but picks and choose for what and where that particular aspect of social intercourse is relevant. 

These nations too have languages. Two, not one. The first, i.e. the ‘old’ speaks money-tongue. The second, that is so new that it can re-birth not just the Buddha (as Ven. Saranankara did), but those who lived and died centuries before the arrival of Prince Vijaya and/or Arahat Mahinda. For example, Ravana and Balitharu.  Its civilization was not just born long before the much celebrated irrigation system was built, but is of a kind that can be re-birthed anytime.  It is so young that it will in innocence and compassion allow itself to be pushed against the wall and so young that at one point it will turn and almost casually recover its birthright. 

We inhabit all these nations, sometimes out of choice and sometimes without say.  These nations are resident in all of us.  As such we can decide upon a composite as individuals. Sometimes, though, I feel that regardless of personal preference, the ‘young’ comes through because in the larger order of things money bows to heart.  Sooner or later. 

Trees should have leaves if they are to be called ‘trees’, I believe.  I feel blessed, let me acknowledge. 

[first published in the Daily News, February 10, 2011]

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Oliver’s Story

That’s a love story, some would remember.  Sequel to Erich Segal’s tear-jerker, ‘Love Story’, that was made into a film.  I am not sure if ‘Oliver’s Story’ was made into a film. A third (unrelated to these two), ‘Man, Woman and Child’ was turned into a film, I remember.  This is then AN Oliver’s Story.  It has a love element of course but is not set in Boston, Massachusetts. 

On May 10, 1969, in Kumarigama (a settler village under the Gal Oya Irrigation Scheme) one M.D. Babynona gave birth to a lovely little boy.  He was her fifth child and fourth son.  The baby was named Nimal Karunatillake.  Werawellalage Gedara Nimal Karunatillake.  He didn’t have any hair at birth.  The boy’s father, W.G. Nandasena, nicknamed him ‘Oliver’, after former Governor General Oliver Gunatilleka, who was also bald.  The happy father played with the little one, stroking the hairless head with love, crooning, ‘mage chooti oliverrrr gunathilaka’ (My little Oliver Gunatilleka). 

I didn’t know that his real name was Nimal. He was just 17 when I first met him.  He was introduced to me by his brother, a batchmate from Peradeniya, as ‘Oliver’, with a strong stress on the ‘r’.  I was told that his real name was ‘Oliver’ only last week when I visited Kumarigama.  I was visiting the village after 9 years, i.e. after attending the funeral of their father, Nandasena.  I reminisced. Wrote.  I told my friend’s mother that I had written about all of them, including Oliver.  She laughed and informed me that Oliver was not his real name. She told me how he got that nickname.

I remember meeting Oliver on August 31, 2001 at his father’s funeral.  At the time he was in the Police.  He was young. Smart. Distraught.  Proud. All this I remember.  

Last week, when I wrote about my visit, Oliver was not at home.  He was out in the fields, harvesting, along with his brother Kumara.  Their nephew, Isuru, too me there.  I wasn’t sure if I would recognize him.  They were taking a break.  Sipping water.  I didn’t recognize Oliver. I saw instead his father, Nandasena. No, it wasn’t a ghost.  At 41, Oliver looked exactly like his father (at the age of 55 or so). Balding.  Greying. The same smile. Betal-stained teeth.  Weather-beaten face full of wrinkles.  The same with his older brother Kumara.  It was all very pleasant to talk about old times and catch up.  Then it was back to work.

Oliver started the machine, a ‘Combine’, i.e. it cut the paddy and separated the grain from stem immediately.  Kumara and I followed. Kumara collecting that which had escaped the machine; cutting clean with sickle and tossing it in the way of the returning ‘Combine’. 

We spoke about the weather, about the harvest, the prices and prospects.  They were cheerful as has always been their way.  ‘We are finished,’ Oliver said softly.  The issue was the price of paddy.  ‘It is down to 16-17 rupees per kilo,’ he said.  The previous year, under the guaranteed price and purchasing scheme, they had managed to sell at around 28 rupees per kilo.  This time around the Government is not purchasing, I was told, because there was no place to store the paddy.  Three good harvests in a row (in two Maha seasons and one Yala season) and the cultivation of lands previously left alone due to the conflict has caused this, I was told. 

Under the aforementioned scheme, the Government purchased between 1000-5000 kg of paddy from the farmers. On average a 2.5 acre plot of land would yield about 5500 kilograms.  The farmers don’t have the facilities to hold on to such quantities in anticipation of better prices and indeed cannot afford to since they often have loans to pay off.

Let’s get some perspective here.  We buy a kilo of rice at around 70 rupees.  A kilo of rice is obtained from 1.5 kilos of paddy, roughly.  Someone is making big bucks between paddy field and your plate.  There is no mechanism in place to protect the farmer.  It has been always a system that favoured the trader.  The consumer came next.  The farmer last of all. 

Ampara (where Kumarigama is located) is reporting the lowest paddy prices today. The price of long grain white varieties of rice (Nadu) hover around Rs. 15-16, the long-grain red rice around 20-23 rupees and the Samba varieties around 22-23 rupees per kilogram.  I was told that the prices are even lower in Thirukkovil.

I was told that earlier there was a scheme to encourage farmers and traders to enter into forward trade contracts, which helped give farmers a better deal and acted as a form of insurance.  This is yet to take off and part of the problem is post-harvest storage facilities or lack thereof.

The Paddy Marketing Board was resurrected some time ago, but it is still to get on its feet.  Its virtual dismantling probably played a part in the sad situation that farmers in Ampara and probably in other places have to suffer.  I remember the early 1990s when farmers committed suicide because they couldn’t secure a fair price for their produce. 

Oliver didn’t indulge in suicide-speak.  He said ‘at this time last year there were 2 or 3 lorries going past our house, asking if we had paddy to sell; this year I am yet to see a lorry.’ 

‘The Government has to do something.  They win because of people like us.  Sixteen rupees is nothing.’  That was Babynona, Oliver’s mother, speaking. 

This is serious. More serious than possible impact on an election that would take place years from now.  I am thinking of an advertisement by a mobile phone service provider, where a bunch of national cricketers say in proud tones, ‘I am Sri Lanka’.  Oliver didn’t make any claims, but if anyone is ‘Sri Lanka’, he is.  Someone, something, some process which I cannot put my finger on, but which I am sure can be figured out by experts in the relevant fields, has a knife at Oliver’s throat.  It is ‘Sri Lanka’ that’s being threatened.    

[first published in the Daily News, August 2010]

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Kuldip Nayar and the manifestation of Nehru’s Curse

In April 1955, 29 states from Asia and Africa came together to promote goodwill and co-operation. Sir John Kotelawala, then Prime Minister of Ceylon, took some pot shots at Communism and at China. The then Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru is supposed to have been livid. He had reason to be of course since the objective was to seek common ground and not to score debating points. His response, however, was classic in its Big-Brother, India’s-Burden condescension. Nehru had asked Sir John why he had not shown the speech to him before delivering it.

‘Why should I show you my speeches?’ he had shot back, pointing out, ‘you don’t show me yours!’

 
I don’t know if Nehru suffered an attack of apoplexy as some say he did but I wonder if cursed Sir John and the people of this island and in the process conferred pomposity, ignorance, arrogance and much else besides to people who succeeded him and the articulators/defenders of their policy preferences.

A few days ago, we had Nehru’s great grandson Rahul speaking as though Sri Lanka is that family’s or India’s plaything. We all know what Nehru’s daughter Indira and his grandson Rajiv did to Sri Lanka and how many lives were lost as a result, not to mention the physical destruction and political destability their actions engendered. Nehru’s presumptuousness looks quite mild, all things considered, compared to the bullishness of his descendents.

All the above is ‘intro’ by the way. Just wanted to place subject in context; subject being Kuldip Nayar’s self-righteous, erroneous, arrogant and presumptuous rant in the Island of December 26 (Sri Lanka going the wrong way) and context being what I think we can now safely call ‘Nehru’s Curse’. 

Nayar has been taken to task more than adequately by Gamini Gunawardena, again in the Island (January 3, 2011, ‘India, China and Sri Lanka’). There are a couple of points he makes, however, that I would like to expand on. Let’s first get some language issues out of the way.

Nayar engages in classic Eelam-speak by the liberal use of the problematic word ‘North’. It immediately bifurcates the country; North as ‘Tamil territory’ and South as ‘Sinhala’. He does not say ‘Northern Province’, one notes, and as such gifts half the island to Eelam myth-mongers. Secondly, he has no clue about demographic realities; most Tamils live outside the Northern and Eastern Provinces.

This ex-diplomat seems to be endowed with the rare ability to see what goes on in the minds of others. He claims that the ‘Sinhalese’ (sic) Government had a ‘one nation, one flag, one anthem’ plan which was ‘put on hold’ due to ‘fear of the LTTE’ and ‘pressure from Tamils outside Sri Lanka’. Now India has a ‘one nation, one flag, one anthem’ reality and it is a country that is far more diverse on all counts than Sri Lanka, not to mention raging insurgencies and incipient separatist struggles all over its territory. And how is it that this bleeding-heart do-gooder cannot see ‘Kashmir’? Is selective myopia a kind of qualification to join the Indian Foreign Service? 

What self-respecting government would plan to concede territory in the more-than-one-nation manner anyway? Nayar seems to think that the Sri Lankan Government should plan for a split and can’t seem to hide a disappointment that the forces that might have ‘stopped’ the government were pushed out of the equation. 

He believes that Mahinda Rajapaksa wanted to spite India and that’s why he’s looked to China and Pakistan.  He presumes that Sri Lanka should let India choose friends for her. He believes that being friendly with China or Pakistan amounts to spiting India. 

Let’s talk ‘spite’. India nurtured terrorism to spite J R Jayewardene for his friendship with the US. India should not cut its national nose for welcoming Barack Obama. Nayar doesn’t have the intellect to see the contradictions in his piece. 

As Gamini Gunawardena and others have pointed out, there’s a big difference between these countries and India. Relations with them are friendly. With India, there is no friendship.; there are pound-of-flesh-and-more contracts.

He says that when he was High Commissioner in London, he refused to meet with an LTTE leader and cites this as evidence that India did not want to be misunderstood by Sri Lanka. Well, Mr Nayar, don’t worry. Sri Lanka has never misunderstood India. Jawaharlal Nehru in that crass, classless and overbearing question put to Sir John, made things so clear that he deleted ‘misunderstanding’ from the bilateral relations script. 

The line about ‘misunderstanding’ is followed by the threat, ‘if Colombo continues to encourage China and Pakistan, India would have to do something to safeguard its interests’. Nothing ambiguous about that either.

There can’t be friendship with caveats such as ‘You can’t be friends with him, him and her’. India’s friendship, according to Nayar, is of this kind. And it is this contractual nature of India’s foreign policy with respect to Sri Lanka that is pushing Sri Lanka to seek friendships elsewhere. As Gamini Gunawardena pointed out, Pakistan and China didn’t attach price tag to ‘help’. India helped, yes and we are grateful, but for a price. 
It is sad that the Indian Foreign service had to count on people like Nayar, for he has a pretty horrible memory. 
He paints India as a generous and hit-taking saint, quite forgetting India’s deliberate and malicious nurturing of terorists by way of encouragement, funding, arming and training.

Nayar wants us to thank India for all that? I believe that no one has been as bold among our post-independence political leaders as Sir John was in Bandung. 
To his credit Mahinda Rajapaksa, without being as blunt, appears to have achieved what his predecessors could not: kept the Ugly Indian at arm’s length and treated the Pretty Indian (yes, not all Indians are intellectually and politically insufferable as Rthe Nehrus and the Nayars) with watchful hospitality. As he should. 
As for Nayar and his ilk it is probably high time for those who decide such things to conclude that just about an Indian with a long CV can string a few sentences together in Engilish, this does not mean he/she has anything useful to say. Indeed, as long as there are Nayars doing there thing, those who maliciously want to give India a bad name can take a break.

He’s going out of his way to confirm what the Nehru’s have basically forced us to think: India is an opinionated, double-tongued, bully. 

[First published in January 2011] 

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Old Trotskyites don’t die…

My teacher and friend, E.C. Gunasekara, disciplinarian, sportsman and wonderful conversationalist and human being, who even while fighting a cancer was trying to convert me into Christianity, had in his living room (Pamankade) a wall-hanging of a batsman just failing to make the crease before the keeper whipped the bails off.  There was caption: ‘Old cricketers never die, they just get run out.’  I’ve seen many such ‘old (insert profession/category) never die…’ lines since.  Most of them are cute, and, theoretically at least, applicable to anything and everything, all kinds of people. 

What kind of (not) dying line would be appropriate for Trotskyites, I wondered a short while ago.  Thinking of Trotskyites, took me to a lecture by Dr. Desmond Mallikaarachchi in Peradeniya. This was either in 1997 or 1998.  His topic was Maaksvaadaya maranne kawda? (Who is killing Marxism?).  There were about 50 people in the audience, most of them members of the JVP’s student wing, the Samaajawaadi Shishya Sangamaya (Socialist Students’ Union), one from the Samaajawaadi Samaanatha Pakshaya (Socialist Equality Party), i.e. the new avatar of the ‘VIKOSA’ or Viplavavaadi Komiyunist Sangamaya (Revolutionary Communist League) and maybe about 10-15 who could be said to sympathize with the Jathika Chinthanaya school. 

Desmond focused, naturally for that time, on Nalin De Silva, Gunadasa Amarasekera and the Jathika Chinthanaya School the two had helped form and develop into a significant presence in the universities.  It should be mentioned that the ideological thrust and political will so necessary for crushing the LTTE came mostly from the work of these individuals over a period of more than two decades, a fact that none of their detractors who now enjoy the fruits of that victory are willing to admit.  Desmond, as always, gave an interesting lecture.  Naturally, I did not agree with everything he said. 

There was a question and answer session following the lecture. I had a question.  Three, actually. I offer below the English translation.

‘Who kills Marxism?  Is Marx not murdered by the traditional left or the Old Left when entering into coalitions with right wing or centrist political parties? Is Marx not murdered when so-called revolutionaries hold a galkattas to the heads of workers and force them to “strike”? Was Marx not murdered by Trotskyites who put a full stop to the dialectic when Trotsky was murdered?’  Desmond answered in Sinhala: ‘Ow, ow,ow (yes, yes and yes)’.    

I got black looks from the TVPers. The sole VIKOSA member who was seated next to me, Dharshana Liyanage displaying that latest streak of fascism in all Trotskyites, used his elbow on my ribcage, scowling in a fashion that made the JVPers’ seem quite friendly.  There was no one from the Old Left.  There was, technically, come to think of it, one. Dhammika Amarakoon, who had never been able to hand in his letter of resignation (from the party) because the party office in Kandy was never open. 

If Old Trotskyites don’t die, what happens to them, I asked myself again.  Are they knocked down by a train called reality as they grope blindly along a deterministic tunnel?  Are they blown over by the nescience (lack of knowledge or awareness; ignorance) that has been the natural product of the marriage between tunnel-vision and arrogance, blessed of course by the high priests of crass materialism? 

Can we say, ‘Old Trotskyites never die, they just get their knickers so twisted in the iron-grip of the dialectic that they are rendered intellectually immobile’? I remember another Trotskyite, again from the VIKOSA, Jayasekera from the Engineering Faculty.  Now I had some regard for the two to three Trotskyites on campus because unlike the JVP boys they had actually read some Marx (key word, ‘some’).  One night I was traveling in a Mahakanda-Kandy bus.  This Jayasekera gets into the bus somewhere near Getambe. The bus is quite empty and he happens to sit near me.  I smile. He smiles back. I ask, ‘Ithin kohomada, me dawas wala monavada karanne?’ (So, how are things, what are you doing these days?). He looks at me as though I have asked the stupidest question on earth: ‘Monavada karanne? Politiks!’ He downs me.  I smiled and mumbled acknowledgment of his wisdom, what else can one do when confronted with such ‘unidimensionality’?

Old Trotskyites don’t die; they just grow so bitter that they might as well be called Bitterites.  Old Trotskyites don’t die; they are so black-and-white that they go colour-blind.  Old Trotskyites don’t die; they are so self-righteous that they don’t realize when they end up in or are co-opted by the Right Wing.  Old Trotskyites don’t die; handicapped by a deterministic ideology and therefore burdened with logical inconsequentialities, they lost capacity to think straight and spend their years twisting and turning as though they have been afflicted with a bad case of KPG (Kiri Panu Gaaya – Thread Worm Squirms if you will) to justify assertion. 

Old Trotskyites, nevertheless, if they spend enough time in the land of their birth and among the people, find immortality thanks to the sheer force of tangible evidence and sometimes even graduate out of Trotskyism into other isms, most enlightening of which is Buddhism.  Some, on the other hand, flee looking for greener pastures, to other continents, discover that the world is not built on ‘material’ and ‘economy’, get uprooted and go unsteady and return home only to find that they just cannot re-root in any way.  Such people spend their years spitting so much that their mouths go dry and their voices become hoarse.  They suffer such depravations, emotional and otherwise, that their final refuge becomes an unholy fascination with organized religion and the worst crooks ever to be in the pay of colonial powers hell-bent on serving the interests of capital.  That they don’t see is perhaps a blessing.  I would not wish anything but myopia for these Old Trotskyite dodderers, some of whom masquerade as Renaissance Men.   

That’s a good end, then.  Old Trotskyites don’t die; they just call themselves Renaissance Men (ref to Emil Vander Poorten of the Sunday Leader) and engage in doddery.

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The karawala-mallun of addressing citizenship anomalies

There is a number that scrambles the number 13. That number is 54, and, worse, it is a number that references an increasing trend, leading to further scrambling. Yes, I am talking about the 13th Amendment to the constitution, with ‘54’ referring to the percentage of Tamils living outside the so-called traditional homelands of the Tamils.

Thus, quite apart from the untenable nature of posturing in terms of history that can be substantiated, the territorial fixations regarding resolving for citizenship anomalies seem utterly silly for demographic reasons. I am yet to see a compelling answer from the ardent champions of the 13th Amendment (as per addressing Tamil grievances/aspirations) to what I call ‘The Number 54 Dilemma’.

Lacking a cogent response, they cannot be faulted for taking the ‘koheda yanne malle pol’ road out of the debate. Dayan Jayatilleka, in a recent video interview with Sanjana Hattotuwa (available at www.groundviews.org), dismisses as ‘karawala and mallun’ (to him, a Sinhala equivalent of ‘apples and oranges’) my contention that minority grievances are not addressable by the 13th or by any devolutionary mechanism but have a better chance of being resolved through a formulation that takes the 17th Amendment as a starting point.

[Karawala, by the way, is dried fish and mallun refers to sliced greens sometimes mixed with coconut, with salt and lime in quantities as preferred by maker. ]

He offers that a citizens’ rights approach, as such I have argued for, works only in a secular state.
This is interesting because it is mischievous, obscurantist and nothing more than setting up an ‘ideal’ as a straw man in opposition to a formulation that is not only ideal (in this case a minority community contained 100% in a given territory with an indisputable and exclusive historical claim).

Secularism, broadly, refers to the view that religious considerations should be excluded from civil affairs; and in general parlance speaks to the ‘ideal’ of separating church and state. It remains an unfleshed term in political practice and as pertain to real (and not imagined) political formations describable as ‘states’. For example, it can be argued that there is no such thing as ‘a purely secular state’. The USA for example has ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ printed on all paper currency. Barack Obama as well as every President before him and almost all senators, congressmen and candidates for such office typically end speeches with ‘God bless you and God bless the United States of America’. Should atheists then be rounded up and given a special territory where they can exercise some degree of self-determination as per devolved powers?

Switzerland, the UK and a number of other countries with secular pretensions have the cross (as in ‘Christian’) on their national flags. National Anthems in most European nations have clearly non-secular wordings. Constitutions too. Article 2 (Religion, State Religion) of the Kingdom of Norway puts it this way: (1) All inhabitants of the Realm shall have the right to free exercise of their religion, but adds the caveat (2) The Evangelical-Lutheran religion shall remain the official religion of the State. The inhabitants professing it are bound to bring up their children in the same.

According to Dayan’s argument, religious minority communities (and atheists) in such countries cannot be equal citizens in the full sense of the word unless they are corralled into a province or district (as per their numbers) and given self-determination by way of devolution. This is nonsense.

What’s ‘not secular’ about Sri Lanka, I wonder. The reference to Buddhism in the constitution? That is nothing more than a frill, a decoration, and there is nothing in the constitution or in subsequent determination by court that gives Buddhists any extra privileges.

Sri Lanka, in other words, is not a bad political formulation in the secularist spectrum. There are worse cases. Dayan’s ‘secular’ interjection, therefore, is mischievous and an exaggerated reference employed to push his preferred formulation; that of a Sri Lanka with power devolved to provinces.

Let us assume that Sri Lanka was the worst non-secularist political entity in the world. Sadly, for Dayan, even this doesn’t unscramble ‘54’ to a degree that makes the 13th logical as a ‘solution’ to minority grievances. If indeed Sri Lanka was a grotesque example of the constitutional intertwining of church and state (as was typical in societies in which the Vatican exercised considerable power) then of course an unraveling as per political realities may be warranted, but this is simply not the case.

Champions of the 13th must come up with a more robust argument with respect to ‘54’ and more importantly, if they are to be taken seriously, must not toss around political terms and idioms carelessly. Until such time, the 13th remains an aberration, the only logic for whose existence is that it was forced into the constitution. It remains not because it is good or resolves what it sought to resolve but because of political realities that have nothing to do with democracy, the will of the people etc. If it remains, it is only because its removal depends on politicians, and because its removal would be against their self-interest. It was and is a basket of goodies for politicians. It did precious little for the people and if the 13th is seen as somehow eliminating citizenship anomalies pertaining to minorities, then the minorities, in my view, are settling for crumbs.

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Losing the moral high ground

(to undergraduate protestors with love)

Young people are rebellious.  That’s how it always was and how it always will be, all over the world.  They have the energy, the determination, all the answers to all the questions, the idealism, romanticism and are typically fortified with sufficient quantities of arrogance, disrespect and innocence.  It is a heady cocktail and can be quite potent in destabilizing conditions. 

The young, especially students, are hardly ever free agents.  Idealism coupled with naiveté are made for manipulation.  The emotional are almost always prone to come under the sway of the calculating.  The organized consistently prevail over the un-organized or dis-organized, and the group even if small will sway bigger numbers made of disparate individuals.  This is why university students time and again end up becoming pawns of serious, determined, organized minorities.  Universities, consequently, are often the happy hunting grounds of the agent provocateur. 

Today’s undergraduate is a pampered individual.  On the other hand, courtesy an education system that is at odds with real world opportunity, a culture that is rights-heavy and responsibility-light;  a country where politics, from constitution to parliament to street, screams for a monumental re-haul; an economic system that accentuates disparities; a development paradigm that consistently marginalizes while undercutting civilizational ethos and erasing memory of history and heritage; their agitation cannot be tagged with the dismissive ‘ungrateful’. 

If policy makers have a point, it is clear they are not communicating the point effectively.  If students have a point, it is lost in hooliganism.  Policy makers appear to be in hook-or-crook mode, made worse by an unholy hurry.  Granted that long-standing anomalies need to be corrected, it is still advisable to exercise caution when making radical changes.  When systems are dismantled, even those that need to be changed, they fall on the heads of those they contain.  People need time to get out of the way.  More importantly, bad systems should not be replaced by bad alternatives.  The good and bad need to be assessed and debated using all avenues available.  When this is not done, both conscious objector and agent provocateur obtain and abuse, respectively, the moral high ground. 

What have the students done with the moral high ground though?  The history of student politics in Sri Lanka shows that time and again they fall prey to the machinations of political parties.  The JVP has had a stranglehold for at least 30 years.  They don’t have the numbers, but number-lack has not stopped them.  Endowed with organizational skill, well versed in the art of manipulation and intimidation, and carrying a perniciously vindictive and destructive gene, these operators have on numerous occasions brought the university system to a standstill. 

The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) has always stuck to a ‘not-us’ response, a line picked up by its all but in name successor, the Jana Aragala Vyaparaya (JAV).  Self-criticism has never been their forte.  All acts of thuggery and vandalism on the part of students have gone without censure and worse, uncommented.   Retaliation is not out of order.  The authorities with their own brand of arrogance have certainly justified the umbrage of undergraduates. Still, there are many ways to react and undergraduates have sadly chosen poorly in the matter of articulating objection.  They’ve lost the moral high ground. 

They’ve lost years.  They’ve gained a bad name in the eyes of would-be employers.  They have made it difficult for the larger population to take up their cause.  They’ve helped justify the call for the setting up of private universities and even privatization of the entire system.  In effect they are cutting the ground from under the feet of those they deign to speak for: the nangis and mallis who dream of obtaining higher education.   In short they are playing into the hands of their detractors. 

The sloth on the part of the JVP/JAV when it comes to condemning these acts of thuggery and vandalism and blank refusal to correct their ways feed the widely held view that they are not serious about meaningful social change, that they are good at destroying and poor at building, and therefore are essentially spoilers.  Even though the United National Party was the principal villain in the massacres of the eighties, the JVP was certainly not a minor player; the Red Comrades helped push the country to the brink.  If the current regime is flawed, the principal objectors are no saints either. 

There are times when anarchy is a convenience and indeed a necessity for regimes.  There are times when regimes have no choice.  The responsible rebel will not cut a path to an anarchical situation where the ordinary people will necessarily bear the brunt when the coercion option is exercised.  You don’t make revolutions that way.  You make mass graves.  The masses may not cheer, but they probably won’t weep either.  If at all, they’ll heave a collective sigh of relief and get on with their lives. 

Young people are rebellious by nature.  The rebel rarely wins but that is no reason not to object.  One thing is clear: when you lose the moral high ground you are in fact cutting a path to defeat.  That’s where student agitation seems to be heading right now.  Pity.   

[The Nation editorial, January 15, 2012] 

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