Remember when the Yahapalanists came up with the name ‘Maithri Yugaya’?

MAITHRI ERA BEGINS. That was the bold and single headline of a special issue of ‘The Nation’ on Friday the 9th of January, 2015. I had forgotten all about this special edition until that particular page, torn, was about to be used for some household purpose by my wife. Out of curiosity I read it. 

On the front page there was a big picture the smiling newly-elected President, his hands clasped in the manner of the traditional greeting. Under the picture was the headline.  On the opposite side there was an Editorial with a short note to Maithripala Sirisen’a predecessor, the defeated Mahinda Rajapaksa.  The Editorial took the form of a letter and was titled simply, ‘Dear Mr President’. Here are some excerpts: 

As a seasoned politician and as a one-time staunch supporter of your predecessor, you are eminently qualified to understand the challenges ahead as you think about delivering the promises made to the people of this country.  

The road to the Presidency was rocky. There were pitfalls and booby traps. You walked not alone, but you would know as well as anyone that we live in times where friend turns foe and vice versa without warning. You took on a strong leader, a proven competitor and a man who is probably the most loved national leader this country has known since D.S. Senanayake. You went against a candidate in a political culture and an institutional arrangement which gave him a massive edge. You prevailed.

These very people (who supported you), as you know well, backed your opponent on two historic occasions. He lost their confidence and their support. Nothing, Mr President, is guaranteed to last forever. If you look around you, you will see many who were once best friends with your predecessor You know of salon-doors. You know that politicians just as they are made of promises, are also made of self-interest. Trust, Mr President, is a good thing. In moderation.

There will be praises sung today. And tomorrow. There will be criticism too. Well-intentioned and anger-made. You can put aside the love and hatred and obtain the critique. You need it. Make it your best friend.

You came with a promise. You came with a tag, you promised that compassion will be the signature of your tenure. You set yourself high standards and this is good. Sometimes we need to trap ourselves in frames which force us to be better than we usually are. You will err, you will falter and even fall. We will forgive. As long as we are confident you are walking in the right direction and taking us with you.

May you always be blessed by the Noble Triple Gem, in which you’ve taken refuge. 

If the results of the February 2018 local government elections are anything to go by, Maithripala Sirisena’s popularity has declined dramatically.  Such a decline in such a short time is unprecedented. Even an A/L student could write a fairly decent essay on the reasons for this decline. We need not go into details. Suffice to say that Sirisena got a lot of things wrong.  

Bad friends. Bad advice. Huge gap between rhetoric and practice to the extent that one has to wonder if he ever believed (or knew!) the stuff he mouthed during that election campaign. Absence of initiative, rank incompetence, injudicious statements, an admitted cluelessness about important issues including who authored his own manifesto (!), a penchant for contradicting himself and a fascination with vengeance. That’s Maithripala Sirisena. He portrayed himself as a humble, mature, accommodating man of the people who harbors no grudge. All those frills fell and quickly too. 

And it is not just Sirisena. Indeed it is unfair to blame everything on the President. Even back then, i.e. in late 2014, it was clearly apparent that his chief backers, especially Ranil Wickremesinghe, envisaged a more or less ceremonial role for Sirisena. After one of the key pledges was to abolish the executive presidency, which, if done within the first 100 days after Sirisena assumed office would have in effect put Wickremesinghe (at that time with only a few dozen parliamentary seats under his command) in the executive seat.  

That didn’t happen. Neither did Sirisena come into his own. The yahapalana-arrangement went ahead with understandable difficulty given histories of antagonism between the two parties that Sirisena and Wickremesinghe led.  There was innuendo and veiled threat. Minions were deployed to badmouth one another.  However, the two entities remained political Siamese Twins, joined at the hip.  Together and separately they’ve turned that would-be empowering term, yahapalanaya (good governance) into a joke. Together and separately they’ve presided over rank incompetence, abuse of privileges, nepotism, thuggery and corruption.  

There are brownie points for bringing the Right to Information Act and for doing away with the anti-democratic 18th Amendment. No cookies for the much-celebrated ‘freedom to criticize’ because that is par for the course whenever there is a regime change. There are, however, black marks for everything else.  

It was to be expected; after all Sirisena campaigned in the shadow of two people who had poor political track records and it was with the ‘old(er)’ rogues that he had to run, even if he himself turned a new leaf (which he obviously has not). 

Looking back it is abundantly clear that there’s no maithri (compassion) or a Maithri (Sirisena) that is wholesome in this ‘yahapalana’ era. And we are not talking about his chest-beating, feet-stomping fire and brimstone speeches about capital punishment, which by the way absolutely contradicts the recitation from the Dhammapada by his upaka avatar on January 9, 2015 [නහී වේරේන වේරානී - සම්මන්තිධ කුදාචනං අවේරේනව සම්මන්තී – එස ධම්මෝ සනන්තනෝ or ‘Hatred never ceases through hatred in this world; through love alone it ceases — this is an eternal law’]. 

Coincidentally, not long after I re-read that scrap of paper, I got a call from Saman Samarakkody, former Editor-in-Chief of ‘Randiva’.  Interestingly, when Sirisena (the candidate) invited newspaper editors for a ‘suhada hamuwa’ or ‘informal meeting’ about a month before the election, only he and I turned up. One editor did come, but when he realized there was just two other editors, he left. 

There were some reporters assigned to cover this ‘event’ and of course radio and television crews. Saman and I asked the questions. At one point, the candidate reminded us that it was a ‘suhada hamuwa’ and not a media conference, thus bringing the event to a close. 

I walked up to Sirisena and said ‘Today you looked presidential but your first press conference was a disaster; and anyway you are the main opposition candidate, you need not be under the shadow of Chandrika (Kumaratunga) or Ranil (Wickremesinghe).’

He smiled, I smiled. He patted me on my back.

As I was walking away, Saman laughingly said ‘lokkata kiyanava’ (I will tell the boss). The boss, of course, was Mahinda Rajapaksa. 

‘He probably knows, already!’ I laughed. 

Then Saman got serious and said ‘mark my words, if he wins, all those who didn’t come today will be running after him and you and I won’t be able to get anywhere close.’

Interestingly, less than a year later, Saman and I lose our jobs, the owners of our respective publications perhaps in order to please the new ‘boss’ deciding that regardless of yahapalana pledges regime-critique was not on.

The Maithri Era is over. It did not end yesterday or a few weeks ago. It ended within a few months of Sirisena assuming office. Wait, it is not only the ‘Maithri Era’ that ended. ‘Yahapalanaya’ was is also dead. That death took place around the same time. 

Saman Samarakkody knew.  Even before January 8, 2015.

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Coughing up sovereignty, Yahapalana-style

Sovereignty is about authority. In usage it is about a people or a nation or a state being able to control affairs independent of outside influence.  In this globalized world there are no sovereign states, if you really think about it. 

What we have is the appearance of sovereignty even in the best of cases; if you think for example that the USA has it, then delve into the history of the US Federal Reserve and of course its present day operation.  

The truth is that if one digs deep enough ‘people’ as a collective have little say. It’s ‘some people’ who have authority or who exercise it on behalf of other people not necessarily identifiable as being part of those whose sovereignty is being discussed.  So what we have are degrees of sovereignty or states of sovereignty compromised in various ways. 

It’s a word that gets quite a bit of carry from time to time. We had the usurpation of sovereignty and the usurpers returning it without really letting go, putting in place a system, grooming loyal agents of sovereignty-retention and creating a culture of servility. They gave us democracy, a neat anesthetic that moreover had all the trappings of sovereignty without much substance. And they fixed us well and good with the Bretton Woods institutions. 

We had alignment, non-alignment and re-alignment.  We had J.R. Jayewardene opening doors ‘to the robber barons’ and later genuflecting before Indian hegemony, agreeing to (in Rajiv Gandhi’s words) ‘the beginning of the Bhutanization of Sri Lanka.’  The sovereignty-usurpers were invited and kept by successive governments. 

The words are fine. For example, three years ago, commenting on the US-authored UNHRC resolution which Sri Lanka co-sponsored, Rajitha Senaratne said ‘The US initiated resolution clearly recognizes sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka.’ In effect it was a shameless agreement to force Sri Lankans to inhabit the so-called international community’s version of Sri Lanka’s reality.

Just the other day, we had Kabir Hashim using the word. He claimed that Mahinda Rajapaksa had not only accepted a bribe from China Harbor Engineering Company, but had violated the country’s sovereignty ‘by getting into a framework agreement with the Chinese company’ which by the way is owned by the Chinese state. The problem he says is that the framework ‘had clauses which denied Sri Lankan Navy the access to Hambantota Port.’ He adds that after Rajapaksa was defeated ‘Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was able to change the agreement and see to it that Sri Lankan Navy had access to the Hambantota Port.’

When a country funds politicians of another country it is a problem, especially if there are benefits to the funding nation. China is not the first. We have it from John Kerry, former US Secretary of State, that the United States gave money to campaigns that sought to overthrow the government. That’s not a first for the United States of course, but let’s not get into all that.  It’s wrong. Period. 

Here’s the key question: is access of the Navy to Hambantota the only issue pertaining to sovereignty-loss? Would Hashim or anyone else in the Yahapalana Government care to detail the contents of the draft ‘Colombo International Financial City Law’?  

We are talking about 239 hectares leased for almost 200 years (99+99). Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe who is also the Minister of National Policies and Economic Affairs is to be in charge of regulating the ‘financial hub’ that the government envisages the Colombo Port City to become. We are told that there’s an ‘Operations Office’ regulating the legal framework and the operations methodology to be pursued in bringing about the International Financial City.

Nothing of the legal framework has been made public so far. Now what if the entire agreement will come under British law with disputes to be resolved in British courts, outside the purview of Sri Lanka’s judicial system? What if there are clauses that require relevant lawyers, judges and professionals to be British qualified?

Let’s ask some more questions. 

Is it true that the US based multinational law firm Baker & McKenzie was hired to draft the laws, quite in contradiction of accepted procedure and indeed in violation of the constitution? Let us note here that Baker & McKenzie works lockstep with the US State Department and has been working with China to forge partnership agreements in Europe.

Is it true that the Chinese company paid them US $ 2.3 million for their services? Did this company operate out of Temple Trees and Cinnamon Grand Hotel in violation of the Rules of Supreme Court and in contravention of Article 169 (foreign lawyers cannot be employed)? Is it true that a local company funded by Chinese and US interests is advising the Cabinet Committee on Economic Development on these matters and that among the directors is a former Attorney General, former Chairman of BoI and a former Secretary to the Treasury who is also a senior advisor to the Prime Minister? What would that tell us about the levels at which treachery is being perpetrated? What would that tell us about the nature of the threat at hand?

Perhaps those in the know would share with the general public all relevant details so that we can come to informed conclusions regarding the true state of our sovereignty.  We do need to know because if, for example, this Law sanctions the annexing of any territory in Sri Lanka in a context where the same terms and laws referred to above are applicable, then Rajapaksa ‘coughing up a port’ is a mere tickle in comparison.  

Hypothetically, China could under this law annex the Trincomalee Harbor and trade operating right to India in return for, say, concessions in the South China seas, for example India’s drilling operations off the coast of Vietnam. Of course the President would have to ratify such a move, but then again since Independence we’ve had many leaders who were weak, corrupt, unimaginative and happily servile. We can reasonably expect that in the next 200 years there will be many leaders who through purchase or arm-twisting will sign relevant document to facilitate such annexing.  

For those who are puzzled by the China-US connection in all this, let’s offer some ‘bullet points’. Barrack Obama touching on foreign policy in his inauguration speech clearly stated that the USA and China will not be on a collision course any longer.  A top level team headed by Hillary Clinton hammered out the details of what was called ‘The pivot to China’ with Chinese counterparts. Part of the agreement was that China would control of the region and along with the USA would ‘globalize the world’ which is another way of saying ‘ensure that the super rich will continue to call the shots and become richer’.  It was about burying all vestiges of sovereignty and not just that of Sri Lanka.

As we said, our leaders have coughed up bits and pieces of sovereignty for decades, either for reasons of personal gain or because of ignorance, timidity and a marked reluctance to trust the people.  We’ve had outright invasion by the Europeans, retention through proxy post-1948, India playing schoolyard bully, the slick maneuvering through the Bretten Woods institutions and we’ve had democracy, that cost-effective anesthetic that lulls into complacency through the inducing of myopia.  The Colombo International Financial City Law may not facilitate guns-in-booty-out operations, but it could be a coughing up of sovereignty that’s unique in character and possibly of unprecedented proportion. 

Let’s see the document.  Kabir Hashim, sir, will you oblige? Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, sir, can we see the draft?

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer. malindasenevi@gmail.com. Twitter: malindasene. www.malindawords.blogspot.com

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There are patriots and patriots, realists and mavericks, progressives and charlatans

It is often held, erroneously, that all those who champion culture, heritage and especially language, which is the vehicle that carries these things across the troubled and uneven territories of time, are "traditionalists" or worse, chauvinists and racists. Such labels are of course applicable to demagogues and petty politicians who, lacking minds of their own and hampered by a manifest absence of creativity and vision, latch on to the politically remunerative caravan called "identity". If they happen to be gifted with the power of articulation, they are quite capable of persuading the masses to follow them. Typically, the journeys they chart go nowhere and what movement occurs leaves a trail of bloodshed and mayhem.

"Patriots", like Marxists, Catholics, and other fundamentalists, come in different hues. Unfortunately, the colours that distinguish them do so in such a subtle manner that it is not easy to develop a fool-proof equation that anyone can grasp and use as protection against the mavericks, the quick-fix artistes and downright opportunists. Wisdom, in these things, comes late. Indeed, quite often, it comes too late in the day.

Still, life is about learning lessons and resolving not to make the same mistake twice. One must learn to assess those who aspire to be heroes and champions of the people as well as those who clearly enjoy heroic status in terms of the utopias proposed, the strategies laid out and most importantly the means adopted.

I am always suspicious of those who want to celebrate heritage and culture without saying why such salutation is important. Religious and cultural revivalism as ends in themselves set off warning bells in my mind, perhaps because I am at that age when cynicism is supposed to make a serious effort to obliterate all else, especially dreams.

Celebrating Sinhalaness, for example, if justified by a simple "because it is who we are, and because this is the Sinhala Nation" is just not enough to get the adrenalin running in my veins. By the same token, "Tamilness", proposed on account of historical "fact" (even if a case could be made), rings hollow and not just because the term is now, sadly, associated with tyranny and anti-intellectual claims and practices.

There is a difference between a revivalist and a reformer. Revivalism can be a tool (and one could argue that it is an imperative) used by a reformer, but reform is not necessarily included in the agenda of the revivalist. This is why I consider both Anagarika Dharmapala and Cumaratunga Munidasa to be revolutionaries, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike a creature of a lesser breed, certainly of an order lower than both D.S. Senanayake and Sirimavo Bandaranaike.

I’ve just finished perusing an elegant copy of Munidasa’s "Kumara Gee Ethulu Lama Pedi" published by Visidunu Publishers (Pvt) Ltd., and so I shall leave out Dharmapala, Senanayake and the Bandaranaikes for a later occasion.

Cumaratunga Munidasa is widely recognized for his life-long work on the Sinhala language and his meticulous efforts to derive the "Hela" by weeding out what he believed to be Sanskrit impurities. His immaculate edition of ancient texts in this regard and his commitment to do a comprehensive untangling of the Sinhala verb alone makes him a grammarian of the highest order. His experiments with verse and his many stories place him among the greats of modern Sinhala literature. He was obviously fascinated by his language, so he loved it, cherished it, nurtured it, cured it, if you will, and sought to preserve it.

Reading "Kumara Gee", I cannot help but conclude that Cumaratunga Munidasa, much as he loved the language of the Sinhalese, he loved it less than he loved his nation and his people.

He was obviously perturbed by the state into which the Sinhala nation had deteriorated. He was convinced that redemption lay in the hands of the people. Most important, he believed that the people cannot be empowered if their language, the vessel wherein the cultural ethos is best preserved, is not resurrected.

Thus it was that he propounded the idea that the preservation of the "basa" was the necessary precondition for the strengthening of the "resa", the people, and that it was only then that one can dream about freeing the nation. This is a lesson for all time, I believe and perhaps never more pertinent in a pragmatic sense than for the struggles of today.

Cumaratunga, even as he resurrected and celebrated his language, was therefore eminently political in a pragmatic and visionary way that has since been unmatched, except perhaps by Martin Wickramasinghe who, although probably guided by the same truths, approached the task differently.

And his politics, tender and nourishing as is always the case when a person of vision takes on the task of social transformation, is probably most evident when he employed his considerable command of the language to mould the children of this land. 

He wanted nothing less than to help develop a child rich in wisdom and compassion. His verses serve to inculcate even in the smallest child positive attitudes, a cognizance of and love for the world that surrounds him or her. The songs teach us how to take on the challenge of deciphering complex truths and empower us to face the vicissitudes of life with fortitude. He was, in short, preparing an entire generation to take over the matter of rediscovering itself, its heritage and thus empowered to rebuild the nation.

More than half a century after his death, we have clearly lost our way and this needs no elaboration. Suffice to say that we will all benefit from a return to Cumaratunga’s work. There is much study to be done. Let us not squander our time. Let us shed the sloganeering and empty talk of a splendid past and rediscover the true body of the patriotic. In our language. That would indeed be an auspicious first step.

First published in the Sunday Island (September 14, 2003)

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