A better-late-than-never foreword

Twenty nine years ago almost to the day, Prof Ashley Halpe, then Head, Department of English, University of Peradeniya, addressed about 400 first year students of the Arts Faculty. This was at Ratnayake Hall, Dumbara Campus.  I can’t remember everything he said. In fact I remember only the following.

‘If 100 children enter Grade 1 in this country, only one of them will go on to enter university.  This is not because the other 99 are foolish.  It is because the (social and economic) structures don’t permit it.  So, you have a responsibility to those other 99 students.  You have to do whatever you can to make sure that in the future, these numbers are changed for the better.’

There’s no law of course to force anyone to expend effort to correct such structural flaws.  It is a responsibility that one either accepts or ignores.  There are always undergraduates who not only take it as a personal responsibility but try to foist it on others as well.   Some of it flows less from a sense of social responsibility than from making plays for political projects.  It is always interesting to look around and check what the loudest idealists are up to now.  I’ve done this exercise many times over the past three decades and come up with an elaboration of Prof Halpe’s ‘project’.

‘If 100 first year undergraduates decided they’ll devote their lives to altering the structure in favor of the “99” only one would remain committed to the project by graduation time.  It is no indictment on the other 99 of course – there are structural and other reasons for “fall out”.  If 100 graduates determined at graduation-point to dedicate the rest of lives to the project, only one would remain committed at life-end.  Again, that’s no indictment on the other 99 and for similar reasons.   That one individual would be bearing the responsibility of 99x99x99.’

I don’t know if Prof Halpe gave that speech every year.  I know one person who wasn’t there that day because he entered university one year later.  T.M.S.K. Malwewa was not just another wide-eyed undergraduate.  He was one of those one-of-a-hundred young men.  He was in the thick of student politics in the latter half of the eighties.  Unlike others who had some say in the student movement, Malwewa never lost his cool.  He wasn’t into debate and discussion.  He held his views and didn’t hold personal grudges against those who disagreed.  He was, to me, someone on ‘the other side’.  ‘The other side,’ I felt then and still feel, was mostly made of those who would slip into the ‘Group of 99’ on graduation day.  There was no reason to believe that Malwewa would be an exception.

I ran into Malwewa more than 25 years after leaving Peradeniya.  He was following a mass communications course conducted by the Sri Lanka Foundation.  I had been roped in to teach English and was pleasantly surprised to find one face that was familiar. His.  He had got a teaching appointment upon graduation.  He was also the school’s scout master.   He kept in touch and a couple of months ago wanted me to write the foreword to a book he had written, ‘Let us create a production-oriented education’.  I didn’t meet the deadline and that saddens me.  He didn’t badger me to write it.  ‘If you have the time,’ he said in a voice as soft as it was the first time I met him way back in 1986 and through those antagonistic us-them years that followed. 

It’s not that Malwewa aspired ever to be judged positively.  I doubt if he ever wanted to inhabit other people’s versions of his reality or that he strived to live up to someone else’s expectations, but to me he is ‘exception,’ one of those ‘1/100’ people.  Well, one who carries without complaint 99x99x99 fellow citizens in heart and mind.   

 He dedicated the book to ‘Adults who love this country and its future generations’.  That’s a confession of ‘life interest,’ I feel.   The book is about skills development.  It is at once a critique of the entire education system and a proposal for a new way of thinking about knowledge acquisition.  It sees a different kind of education as a necessary foundation for a different kind of society. 

Malwewa was not a slogan-shouting, picket-holding, speech-making kind of student leader.  He was quiet but there was no doubt that he was a decision-maker.  There were many like that.  Most of them were killed.  Reading this book and talking with him confirmed once again that this country is so much poorer because it lost the best men and women of an entire generation.  We should be thankful that a few, like Malwewa, survived and lived lives in ways that help alter equations. Quietly. Effectively.  

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Returning to 'The One in Ten' of 2006

Eight years ago, during my first stint at 'The Nation,' when among other things I wrote the weekly Editorial, I wrote about the British band, UB40 or rather drew from their lyrics to comment on things that were more immediate.  It was a two part editorial, referring to two situations but drawing from the same song: One in Ten.  Someone brought up UB40 in a conversation.  Reminded me of that piece from a different time and a vastly different country.  This is it. 

What if you were one of the one in ten?

Those of you who are old enough or conversant enough with pop music and the politics that meandered in and out of the lyrics might remember the UB40 song ‘One in Ten’.

The name of the band, formed in Birmingham, England in 1978 was derived from a form that the unemployed had to fill during the Thatcher years: Unemployment Benefits, Form 40. The ‘one in ten’ referred to the fact that 10% of the British workforce was unemployed at the time. It is worth quoting, at least in part:  ‘I am the one in ten, a number on a list; I am the one in ten, even though I don’t exist, nobody knows me but I’m always there; a statistic, a reminder of a world that doesn’t care; my arms enfold the dole queue, malnutrition dulls my hair, my eyes are black and lifeless with an underprivileged stare.’

We are living in the year 2006, i.e. 26 years after the song. We are living in Sri Lanka, where the unemployed rate is less than 10%. That ‘one in ten’ is not applicable to us. There is, however, a one-in-ten that is most unfortunately relevant to all of us. It is a statistic, a reminder, an uncomfortable presence decorated with miseries common to all those in that plight. Hang the poetry, let’s get specific here: one in ten of all Muslims in this country is a refugee, is internally displaced. 

It didn’t happen with ‘Muttur’ whichever way you may want to read that two-syllable thing with all the politics, maneuvers, shelling, bloodshed, death, destruction, displacement, chest-thumping, agonizing, what have you. In fact it doesn’t matter when it began. What matters is that the ‘liberators’ so celebrated by a wide-eyed world ethnically cleansed the Jaffna Peninsula of Muslims long before Kosovo demanded that a term be coined for the crime. What matters is that the self-same ‘liberator’ gunned down some 600 Muslims in the Eastern Province while they were at prayer. What matters is that if there were many ways of engaging the security forces in Muttur, the LTTE chose to do it in a way that forced Muslims to flee. What matters is that hundreds were butchered even as they fled. What matters is that this unhappy community has been hounded out of their homes and driven into the hard-to-palate status called IDP by those who have the gumption to complain about ethnic intolerance. 

These people did not flee into a vacuum. They, like more Tamils fleeing a war that Prabhakaran has foisted on them, ran southward. This is an old story. The Muslim traders, when hounded by the Portuguese, found in the Digamadulla District a refuge, thanks to the largesse of King Senarath. All this is true. All this is hardly compensation for our home-grown one-in-ten.  

This war, the one-in-ten demand that we recognize, is not about Tamil vs Sinhala, about a territorial dispute. It is about barbarity and civilization. It is about terrorism and democracy. It is about a thug who cuts a water line to destroy 35,000 acres of paddy and force impoverishment on 15,000 families and when the objective is achieved, releases or claims to have released water for which ‘heroic’ act he wants to be crowned in some capital as a benefactor of humankind. It is about the intolerance of a terrorist and whether or not civilized society wants to have zero-tolerance for terrorism. 

The one-in-ten demands that they be reduced to none-in-ten. Let us remember one thing: if we say and do nothing about this one-in-ten, we would be doing nothing else other than getting on the fast-track to joining them.

Children who will never learn to read

The UB 40 song had this line too: I’m the child that never learns to read, ‘cause no one spared the time’.  There is a child who cannot be allowed to be a number, a child who has a name that we have to remember. Asvini. Say it again and again. Asvini. Asvini. Asvini.

Age: two and a half years. Story: the son of a domestic worker, she had been thrilled because her grandfather, Rasiah, an employee in a restaurant, had bought her a pair of shoes. She wanted to try them out. She wore them as she walked to the bus halt, after kissing her grandpa goodbye. That was all. A bomb set up by the LTTE targeting an ex-MP of the EPDP took her away. For all time. Asvini was a Tamil. So was the intended victim of the bomb. So was the perpetrator of this crime. Something has gone dreadfully wrong somewhere if this is what ‘liberation’ entails. 

Asvini is a child that will never learn to read, because her time was brutally taken away from her, because she was taken before her time.

  
Asvini was not a Tamil. She was a little girl, a child in fact. In death she testifies to the futility of a struggle whose self-appointed heroes have robbed all meaning from it. That struggle has to be objected to if all it does is produce children who are not allowed to read, ever.

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So what do you want to do with the rain?

A Sri Lankan once wrote to a friend living in a small town called Ithaca in the State of New York. It was winter.  It was a particularly harsh winter.  Lots of snow.  Ice on the sidewalks.  People slipping and sliding.  Hard work for everyone because driveways would have to be shoveled to get their cars out.  Shoveling snow is hard work.  Back-breaking work.   Winter is about long nights and short days.  Depressing. 

Believing that his friend would be envying him for living in a tropical island with lots of sunshine, the Sri Lankan wrote to his friend, Tony Del Plato, ‘I am sending you sunshine, my friend…lots of it to keep you warm in these cold winter days!’ 

Tony is a simple man.  He appreciated the thought.  He added, ‘When it is summer I enjoy the sun and in winter I enjoy the snow’.  It’s about learning to appreciate what’s there in the natural world, whether it is sunshine or rain.  It’s not about staying out in the midday sun of course.  You can appreciate sunshine from the shade, from inside a house or from under a tree. 

It’s the same with the rain.  The skies put up quite a show when there’s a thunderstorm after all.  Loud thunder scares me still, if it’s really close.  It thrills too.  I suppose that’s why some people like horror films.  It’s still spectacular.  The drum rolls, the light-effects of thunderstorms can be quite awesome.  As long as you are safe indoors, of course. 

But rain is not always about thunder and lightning.  There’s all kinds of rain. We have passing showers, drizzles that build up into heavy rain with big, heavy drops of water, drizzles that ruffle the earth’s surface just enough to give us a whiff of dust and then go away, soft rain that we hardly feel on our cheeks and rain that persists throughout the day.  It’s pretty in whatever form it comes, but only if we allow ourselves to drop what we have been taught about the weather.  Like Tony does.  It’s not ‘bad weather’ when it rains.  It’s just a rainy day.  You won’t call it ‘great weather’ would you if you have to work or walk in the midday sun in April? 

It is all about what you do with the rain. You can watch it.  You can paint it. You can write about it.  You can dance in it (if there’s no thunder and lightning).  You can get drenched in it, happily imagining that you are in the world’s largest bathroom. 

You can also make paper boats, color and decorate them, and set them off in a drain or one of the inevitable streamlets that appear from nowhere when it rains.  It’s something Tony would not be able to do in winter where he lives, but then again we can’t make snowmen or snow angels either, can we?

If you are inside a room, go out.  It’s a beautiful day.  If you are outside and not really enjoying it, move away, wash your face, drink some water and look again.  It’s a beautiful day.  Like all days.  We can make them all drab, dry and doleful.  We can make them all beautiful.   If we want to. 

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It’s all about timing

This is the sixth in a series of articles on rebels and rebellion written for the FREE section of 'The Nation'.  'FREE' is dedicated to youth and youthfulness. 

A thirteen year old girl in the USA had run into a fellow student she hadn’t seen in a while.  The ‘friend’ had, by way of greeting, exclaimed, ‘Oh my god, you are still wearing braces!’  The girl had responded immediately, ‘Oh my god, you are still ugly!’ 

The girl’s father was upset.  He was upset because he remembered all the times he had been taunted while a schoolboy and hadn’t been able to come up with a silencing rejoinder.  He remembered also how he would revisit the moment again and again coming up with brilliant come-backs. All to no avail of course. 

It’s all about being able to seize the moment, about doing or saying something when it is most effective.  This is how it is in politics, not just in the parry and thrust of debate but all action: timing makes a difference. 

Let’s consider some simple examples.  What’s the point in putting up a poster around midnight when most ‘poster teams’ get on the job around 4.00 am?  No one will see your beautiful designed, hard-hitting, eye-catching poster.  Message obliterated.  Is there any point in converging at the Fort Railway Station at 6pm on a Sunday to demonstrate against this or that? 

You have to strike when the iron is hot.  That’s something good to remember.  It works the other way too.  The enemy, if prudent, will not try to iron out some crease with an ice-cold iron.  When you know ‘time’ you know when to act and when to expect action from the other party. 

ගුරු සිත නොරිදවා

වේලාව නොවරදවා

බැති පෙම් උපදවා

අකුරු උගනිත් කුමරු සොඳවා  

This is about punctuality and school.  The good student will be conscious of time, will not hurt the teachers’ feelings, and will carry him/herself in a manner that fosters affection.  All good, but for our purpose the key line is the one about punctuality.  Timing.  It’s an early lesson that we forget pretty quickly. 

Let’s take a political example.  Politics is nothing if not about insult and humiliation, sadly.  In recent history, it is hard to find two individuals who have been as vilified as President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Opposition Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe.  The former suffered insult after insult for years, some of it from the leader of his very party.  He took the hits.  He smiled. He did not show his hand, he did not jump the gun.  His moment arrived and he seized it with both hands.  He prevailed.  Ranil Wickremesinghe, similarly, is a man who refuses to be irked by personal attacks.  His time may have come and gone or else it may come someday in the future, but one thing is clear – his detractors have shown poor judgment when it comes to timing moves to oust him.  It’s not only about time of course, but bad time makes poor judgment look worse. 

If politics is theater, the players will not receive applause if they start too early and play to an empty house.  If they are late, they are booed.  Entrances and exits have to be timed perfectly for the drama to hold. 

In political action, the correct time is not based on the movement of the earth around the sun alone.  It is about determining the moment when the enemy’s strength is at its lowest and yours is peaking.  Surprise always gives an edge, but it has to be precisely calculated. 

Think of an archer.  There are many factors to be considered when shooting an arrow at a target.  The wind, the release, the angle etc. have to be considered.  You put it all in your head.  Finally it comes down to the time of release.  A moment too soon or a moment too late and the wind-factor can affect direction-change.  Where the stakes are high, i.e. of the ‘bulls-eye or nothing’, you can’t afford to get the timing wrong.

The bat must come down at the right time to negotiate a Lasith Malinga yorker.   Get it wrong and you’ll get out LBW and have your toe crushed to boot.  Or have your stumps disarranged.  Plan an attack in chess, get the move order wrong, and you get creamed.  Same principle.    

It’s hard to be dead right when it comes to timing.  However, if you are not conscious about timing the chances are you’ll be way off mark.  A rebel, by definition, has lesser resources to play with than does the enemy.  These can be squandered if not employed correctly.  At the right time. 

Previous articles in this series

Dear Rebel, have you got the e-factor out of the way?

Have you carefully considered the f-word?

It is so easy to name the enemy, right?

The p-word cuts both ways

Cards get reflected in eyes, did you know?

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The death-wish of a constitution

Constitutions are made, talked about, cursed and amended.  They never speak although they frame much of what happens in a country.  In a parallel universe constitutions would talk.  They would, as the Americans of the US say 'kick ass'.  They would complain of aches and pains.  In a parallel universe the Second Republican Constitution of Sri Lanka (democratic, socialist, let's not forget!) or the 'JR Jayewardena Constitution' would have a lot to say.  We could but transcribe. 

No one is made perfect.  Even things of ‘top quality’ decay and perish.  It’s just a matter of time.  Of course there’s a lot of resistance.  When there’s ‘break’, there’s often an attempt to ‘mend’.  Patch-up. Even when there’s no perceivable flaw, things are done to enhance.  Upgrade.  In my case, both patch-up and upgrade have one name: amendment. 

I was birthed in 1978.  There were a few at the time who wanted me strangled at birth, but the movers and shakers of the time had enough push and pull to get me out.  I was no perfect baby.  I came with many flaws that were etched into my DNA by my makers.  Even those who blindly cheered my birth, in time, concluded that I was not as pretty as they first thought and that I didn’t live up to my promise. 

So, from time to time, I was fixed.  Tweaked, some say.  They all said it was for my own good.  It was as though everyone who tinkered with me wanted me to live forever.   But I know better.  It was not my longevity that the ‘tweakers’ were concerned about, it was theirs.   It reminded me of that old song by Lobo, ‘Love me for what I am’.

I can’t give any more of my soul away

And still look myself in the mirror everyday

I can’t change any more

Of what makes me be myself

And still have enough left

Not to be somebody else.

Only, I had nothing to do with it.  It was all done to me.  Not only was I twisted and turned, I was read and interpreted.  I was named and identified.  It’s the worst thing I can think of.  I was never myself but always what others saw me as.  For their own purposes of course.

So I am not fooled by this mending talk.  Amending, rather.  It’s not about me.   I have a grandaunt on the other side of the world.  (A)mended 27 times in 225 years or roughly once every 9 years.  Well, she had a serious birth defect and had to have some 10 operations in her first year.   So if you don’t count those it’s about on ‘repair’ every 13 years.  And here I am, just 36 years old and already ‘fixed’ 18 times.  That’s once every two years on average.  I am beginning to think that this is because no one realized I was deformed at birth. 

Anyway, now there’s talk of further fixing.  I’ve suffered 18 operations.  It takes a toll on the old body you know.  I don’t think I can go under the knife again and survive.  That’s only so much a body can take.    I am done.  I don’t want it.  I want out.  I want out like that dramatic line in Kingsley Peiris’ catchy song, Podi Kale Maranda Welle. 

රුචිරානනී අහන්න.....එක පාර මා මරන්න

“Listen, beloved!  Kill me once and for all!”

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You name it, the Kolombians own it!

Pic Courtesy www.tour.lk

Everyone takes note.  Some keep notes.  Some in diaries and journals.  Some in their minds and hears.  Some of these are shared via email or on Facebook or blog; some are not.  Among these people are Kolombians, people from Colombo who know much -- so much that they are wont to think that others don't know and can't think.  This is the fourth in a series published in 'The Nation' under the title 'Notes of an Unrepentant Kolombian'.

Kolombians, some people mistakenly believe, are born, live and die in Colombo.  Nothing can be further from the truth.  Which community (outside of people in the Survey Department) has been to every corner of the island, West to East, South to North, and all over the central hills?  Why, it’s us, the Kolombians! 

Ask around.  Most Kolombians, especially of an earlier generation, would have visited every single national park, spent sun-drenched days in every exotic beach resort, visited Nuwara Eliya during ‘The Season’ multiple times and done the major archaeological sites as well.  The hot wells, waterfalls, World’s End, the hummaanaya, the botanical gardens, Galle Fort restaurants for lunch on lazy Saturdays, the boutique hotels that have mushroomed after May 2009, you name it, we own it!  Well, not exactly, but you know what I mean. 

This is why we firmly believe that this country belongs to us and no one else.  This is why we firmly believe that it should be one of us running the country.  And this is why I am upset about the Government rebuilding the Northern Railway Track.  Yes, it will enable the industrial northern farmer’s produce to reach our parts quickly.  It might even bring down vegetable prices.  The fact remains that we don’t really care.  We spend less than 0.1% of our average incomes on vegetables.  What’s insufferable is that the Government thought the railway line was more important than the Northern Highway.  Stupid! 

We are happy about the Southern Expressway.  We are glad that the Colombo-Kandy Expressway is coming up.  You won’t find us thanking Mahinda or Basil or anyone else in the Government though.  This is as it should be.  It’s our birthright.  We don’t have to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ for such things.  It’s the same with the road to Jaffna.  Birthright.

The problem with railways is that it makes sightseeing even more affordable.  Since the end of the war I’ve seen vanloads of people from all parts of the country lined up outside the Yala gates.  I’ve seen dozens of safari jeeps in Minneriya and Kaudulla.  There are busloads of people visiting the Jaffna Peninsula on a daily basis.  These are not people I can recognize.  They look like us but they don’t have even a strain of Kolombian blood in them, I am willing to wager.  They know how to give high-fives, they say ‘hi’ and ‘bye’, they can give a thumbs-up sign or make a ‘V’ sign, they all have smart phones, but that’s not what makes a Kolombian.  It’s the English.  No, English spoken well.  

There will be thousands of yakkos hopping on the Yal Devi. They’ll be tweeting about it.  They’ll post pictures on Facebook.  They’ll be hopping off at relevant places so they can visit places only we’ve visited.  And it will be all over social media. 

Deep down I know that however hard they try to mimic us, they can never become Kolombians.  My problem is that they won’t know that.  They’ll think they too are Kolombians.  My worst nightmare is that one of these yakkos will one day come up to me wearing a Kolombian expression and talk down to me. 

The President and the Government is not helping.  They are not affirming my birthright.  They have to understand that Kolombian identity is about exclusivity.  Kolombians are Kolombians and will be to the exclusion of all others.   We own this island.  Others may live here, but they can’t be us, they can’t be like us, they can’t do ‘Kolombian Things’. 

We could do a Kolombian version of Prabhakaran’s UDI, i.e. unilaterally declare the independence of Kolombia, except that part of our identity is about the ownership of the entire island or at least appearing to do so.  Restrict us to Colombo and all the fun is gone.  

More 'Kolombian Notes':

We shall not be re-named
Get off my walkway! 
Thank you Mahinda for the Avacado Prawns!

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On death and preferred funerals

A 'grave' as good as any, if I am lucky.
[Pic courtesy www.yamu.lk]

‘I plagiarized shamelessly,’ a friend confessed.  He had copied something from an article I had written, ‘On heart-unbuckling’.  I told him that my words were not born in me, that they were engendered by others and therefore it does not matter where they go after they leave my fingertips, i.e. the moment they die and receive afterlife.  I told him that I don’t care much for copyrights, although I understand that other do and therefore acknowledge when necessary. 

There’s a heavy storm raging outside.  Only essential areas have power from the generator.  I am not sure if the email connection will be restored quickly enough for me to send this to my editor.  My words are under threat of being incarcerated by a technological glitch.  Things die.  It is inevitable.

A few days ago, on a bus from Athens to Chalkidiki, a resort village in Greece, I suffered a strong allergic reaction.  It was around 11 pm.  There were 33 people in the bus, including 4 doctors.  I asked for some medicine and was given Piriton and some other tablet.  Didn’t help. The dose was increased.  I fell asleep.  Not for long.  Hives had broken out all over my body. I felt I was going to faint.

About 12 years ago I suffered a similar attack and a bout of vomiting and purging helped cure me.  It might work, I thought to myself.  I went to the bathroom in the bus and collapsed with such a crash that Dr. Lamwansa and others heard me, dragged me out, called an ambulance and sorted me out.  ‘You lost your pulse for awhile,’ Dr. Lamawansa told me later.  Kind, efficient and professional, Dr. Lamawansa’s presence was reassuring and critical.  I believe he saved my life.    

I remember the moments just before losing consciousness.  ‘This is death,’ I told myself.  I felt peaceful.  I didn’t want to wake anyone up.

Today, fully recovered, I am thinking of other deaths.  Words, for example.  Deaths and lives too, for they come and go together.  The words I used, are they the mortal remains of others who wrote before me?  Do the words I write in their survival of my death fertilize literary soils that give birth to other writer-trees?  

I am thinking right now that funerals are all wrong.  Whoever or whatever manufactured the notion of death could have done better.  About 6 years ago I asked a question: ‘When voracious readers die why is it that their mortal remains do not turn into so many pages that will fly in all directions celebrating literacy?’

Maybe they do, maybe not, but shouldn’t the bodies of musicians disintegrate in a way that they are reconfigured into song and music score?  Shouldn’t the bodies of dead cricketers be transformed into a flurry of sixers or so many doosras that crash into the wickets?  Would the bones of liars and thieves be transformed into tall tales and loot with the names of those they beguiled and stole from tagged as appropriate so they can recover dignity and wealth? 

What kind of afterlife should the bodies of dead chess players have?  Will magnificent combinations rise from their ashes and stay suspended above a tournament hall for a few minutes so the living players can gasp in awe?  Will it be their monumental blunders that get preferred treatment post-death? Will they be remembered for flaw or brilliance? 

The remains of those who till the earth should, I believe, become manifest as all the grain  they produced so their progeny and the beneficiaries of their labour can get a sense of what they owe the dead. And the living. 

Far better, don’t you think, than grand funerals and mourning, incineration or burial? 

We all drink from other people’s wells and are fed by roots we did not sink into the good earth.  We are all parasites even as we are givers, willing or not, conscious or otherwise.  

The dead are dead and need not worry about the fate of mortal remains, one can argue.  We all want immortality in one form or another, though.  This is why we tend to prefer our children to do what we failed to do.  If life is to be celebrated then the kinds of death-rites I alluded to above would be fitting, don’t you think? 

Speaking strictly for myself, I am convinced that the final resting place of a writer is a dusty shelf at the back of a used book store.  I am human and ego-ridden, though. I prefer a different fate.  Speaking strictly for myself, I want my words to escape their page-prisons and scatter in the winds so I am distributed across time and space in such infinitely tiny pieces that no one can put me back together for others to dissect and define. 

I prefer to be remembered for my silences.  In silence.  For a while.  By those I love and those who love me. 

*Written 4 years ago and first published in the 'Daily News'

Malinda Seneviratne is the Editor-in-Chief of 'The Nation' and can be contacted at msenevira@gmail.com

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The 'Sajith-Factor' in the Presidential Race

If it is about who will be the principal presidential candidate of the Opposition then it boils down to who wins Ranil Wickremesinghe’s endorsement, in the event that he chooses not to contest of course.  This is because the United National Party is the main Opposition party and the one that can secure support from important sections of the rest of the Opposition.  This is also because of the UNP’s constitution and, more important, Ranil Wickremesinghe’s proven shrewdness in holding on to party reins. 

There will be, as there already is, pressure from various sources.  He will be asked to step aside for a more credible candidate to take on President Mahinda Rajapaksa.  Some might even entertain thoughts of a coup to oust him before candidacy is formally declared.  It won’t work.  He has to decide whether or not he would contest and in the event he steps aside he has the biggest say in naming a ‘common candidate’. 

Very few, including the big names in the UNP, seriously think Ranil Wickremesinghe can win.  People do check out track-records.  People remember.  They remember more clearly what’s more recent, sure, but there are things associated with Wickremesinghe that are not forgotten.  The archives will no doubt be visited and relevant material unearthed and touched up.   At best it would be a very tough ask unless he is helped by a ‘spoiler candidate’ capable of making dents in Mahinda Rajapaksa’s vote bank. 

An easier ‘ask’ would be a ‘common opposition candidate,’ but then again it would be hard to come out with a name with appeal greater than that which Sarath Fonseka had.  Even if one were to account for abuse of state resources and other election malpractices, the margin is still considerable.  Regime-fatigue, regime-ills and such might not bridge it for a lesser name.  Anyway, it’s less about party than about personality.  Mahinda Rajapaksa, simply, is still seen as ‘leader’ over and above the fact that he is considered a one-of-us kind of guy by large swathes of the voting population.   A non-UNP ‘common candidate’ will suffer from the lack of enthusiasm from the rank and file of parties supporting him/her that was widely seen in 2010. 

It has to be someone from the UNP.  There are only two names to be considered. Karu Jayasuriya and Sajith Premadasa.  Dayan Jayatilleka (The Karu candidacy project: is it a viable option?) says he is the ideal candidate but says ‘that’s just his potential’.  Leaving a window of opportunity slightly open for Karu (‘It isn’t his reality; certainly not yet—and there are only a few short weeks to go for crunch time’), Dayan opens a bigger window. For Sajith.

He says Karu has mismanaged the equation with Sajith.  Some would argue that if anyone is guilty of mismanagement it is Sajith.  Sajith wanted Ranil to resign in favor of Karu and snubbed Karu at every turn including most recently in Uva.  He wanted to oust Ranil but now backs him; backed Karu and now wants him hoofed out.   That’s amazing ‘equation-management’ especially if Karu is all that Dayan claims him to be (‘Potentially the ideal candidate’). 

Then he makes some grand claims about Sajith: ‘Sajith is not only the only UNPer who can galvanize the grassroots, he is the only frontline UNPer with resonance among the vast majority of voters who are rural/provincial’.   He paints Karu as someone who has appeal only among ‘the goigama Sinhala Buddhist elite and its urban and suburban strata’.  Sajith, on the other hand, he claims, ‘can carry the larger swathe of Sinhala Buddhists under the poverty line’ and adds ‘like his father did’.  He also says, quite correctly, that Karu’s signature political project of abolishing the executive presidency has no mass appeal, but then again it’s not difficult to downplay this.  He does this and there’s no more an ‘Achilles heel’ in his candidacy.  Sajith, it must be remembered, has no project apart from ‘I, Me and Myself’.   

The under-painting of Karu directly contradicts Dayan’s earlier ideal-candidate (potentially) claim.  More seriously, Dayan just doesn’t substantiate the claims he makes about Sajith.  Sajith’s Sinhala-Buddhist credentials are weak.  ‘Hambantota’ (over 14 years) does not translate into ‘Sri Lanka’.  He has been a divisive factor more than a unifying one in the UNP, even getting anti-Ranil pals to badmouth the party and the leader at his own rallies.  He’s gone on record to say that if he is made candidate he must have the leader’s post as well.  Yes, he’s all about ‘I, Me and Myself’. 

How big is Sajith anyway?  He has admittedly a great cheering squad.  He is also the beneficiary of much inflation by a television station whose owner has time and again proven that he has absolutely no clue about political winds, backing the wrong horse imagining it had the legs to win. For the voter-segment that Dayan believes would pick Sajith over the President that station is a joke.  

Whatever that Sajith might hold back in the event of a Karu candidacy, is going to diminish into a non-factor as campaigns gather steam.  What he ‘takes out’ could be compensated for by the JVP and JHU, both more comfortably with Karu than with Sajith. 

Finally, the presidential election will be about what political forces the candidates can mobilize.  Sajith is a demoralizer.  Karu accommodates.  That could be key in an election already skewed in favor of the incumbent for reasons that are larger than incumbency in the context of the existing constitution.  A good effort that falls short of a win would help democracy; a weak showing as is likely with a Ranil or Sajith candidacy would not only platter-giving to Mahinda Rajapaksa  but would bleed into a poor showing in a General Election thereafter. 

All this, IF RANIL STEPS ASIDE, it should not be forgotten. 

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Orphaned tragedies

How many deaths does it for something to be called a ‘tragedy’?  What is more tragic, a long drawn out war that takes more than a 100,000 lives, an insurrection that takes 60,000, a tsunami that kills 50,000, Dengue or CKDu that affects tens of thousands, a flood or landslide that takes away a hundred or a child who has just learned that her parents were buried alive? 

Tragedy is described in numbers but it cannot be quantified. Quantity is a non-issue for the dead and a small matter for the near and dear who grieve.  Numbers do matter, however, when it comes to galvanizing relevant authorities into providing relief.  They matter, more importantly, when tragedy forces a re-visitation of policy, both at micro and macro levels. 

Where did ‘Meeriyabedda’ come from?  Was it a creation of victims who didn’t take warnings seriously? Was it the plantation company that manufactured a mass burial through criminal neglect including refusal to follow instructions from relevant authorities to relocate people whose lives were in danger?  Should the authorities take responsibility for not enforcing a decision conveyed to the plantation company?  Is it the Government that is at fault?  Given that earth-moving processes often involve the play of multiple factors over considerable lengths of time, we could easily conclude ‘all of the above and perhaps something else as well’.  It doesn’t lessen the tragedy of course, but it can help us be more alert and respond better the next time.

If people are to blame, then this tragedy should alert all people not to take warnings lightly.  If the Government is to blame, this is but one of many things one can attribute to the sloth, arrogance and inability of officials and politicians.  The same goes for plantation companies.  While corruption was rampant when the plantations were all run by state agencies, hanky-panky has only taken a different form when the private sector regained lost ground.  There are many companies who are in it for short term again and therefore don’t have to worry about the welfare of workers or making changes necessary for long terms sustainability. From state-control to private sector control without regulation that does justice to the term cannot be good. 

Then there’s the issue of overall land use policy dating back to the days of the British.  Deforestation has not only enhanced the possibility of natural disasters but has had a negative impact on the entire country, especially the rivers serviced by what used to be handsome catchment areas in the central hills.  The crass neglect of plantation workers, corrected somewhat by the rise of trade unions, is perhaps second only to the immense dislocations that the Kandyan Sinhala Peasantry was subjected to, a tragedy that hardly finds mention these days. 

There has been very little discussion on the impact of climate change in precipitating ‘Meeriyabedda’.  Is it too big a topic, one wonders.  Is it, as the biggest and most notorious exploiters of natural resources say, a non-issue?  Either way, the pernicious fingerprint of the human species on processes that yield outcomes such as ‘Meeriyabedda’ cannot be ignored forever.

This brings us to policy.  Have we got our ‘development blueprint’ right?  Do we have a pulse on the time factor or are we in the business of extracting maximum value as quickly as we can regardless of costs to the environment and therefore future generations, not to mention the inevitable right-here and right-now tragedies such as ‘Meeriyabedda’?

As a nation and as a collective that is part of the larger human family and the still larger community of earth-inhabitants, there are questions we need to ask ourselves.  The easier ones will obviously be about response.  That’s taken care of.  The difficult ones will be about development policies and activities.  The most difficult one will be about development paradigms. 

We had systems that work.  We had subsequent ‘systems’ that have made recovery of the lost frames extremely hard.  We have thinking-systems that rebel against a reconsideration of that which worked before.  We are tuned to follow, much like the rats and later the kids followed the Pied Piper.  To disaster, we must add. 

The point is that politicians, after they are done with the photo-shoots at tragedy-site, will play blame games.  They’ll throw so much mud at each other, but not enough to bury one another which, some might say, is poetic justice.  They will not question the dominant paradigm of development. 

That too is tragic and indeed a tragedy that is not given to ‘numbering’.   It is a bastard creature, without parents, an orphan no one will pick up perhaps until there’s no one left to pick up either. 

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