Right.
It’s time for the Geneva Circus. It is time to turn cough and cold into
full-blown Covid-19. It is time to make mountains out of molehill. It
is time for politicians and activists whose preferred outcomes haven’t
materialised to play plaint colonial slave and beg for some political
inches in the hope that fortunes will turn. It is time for master and
mistress to conjure concern and issue denunciation and declaration.
We’ve seen and heard it all before. So let’s get the seasonal
conclusions out of the way.
If there be anyone who believes there’s a mahamolakaru
(mastermind) behind the Easter Sunday attacks who is at large operating
in collusion with the entire justice system of the country or is
holding all law-enforcement authorities to ransom, such a person has to
be an unqualified idiot. If anyone believes that a commission report is
equivalent to the outcome of a judicial process, such a person is an
unqualified idiot. If anyone believes that such documents which contain
testimonies (true or false, we don’t know) which, if made public, can
assassinate characters, should be copy-pasted on all platforms, social
media and otherwise, such a person is an unqualified idiot. Ignorance of
procedures is not a virtue. Nor is it an excuse. Idiots there will be.
There will also be the pernicious; those who do not give a damn about
anything but the furtherance of pet political projects and personal
agenda. We can call them idiots. We can also call them scheming vermin,
regardless of the language they speak or the garb they wear, and whether
or not they are scribes who put their tribe into disrepute.
So
we have seen, are seeing and will see such individuals, acting on their
own or in concert, doing the rounds. They’ll go to Italy, whip up
anxieties uttering well-crafted half-truths or barefaced lies, visiting
Vatican City to kiss the ring on the Pope’s hand (if need be) and plead
their cause (of course they won’t tell His Holiness the true cause
(which has nothing to do with grievance-redress, truth and justice),
cartwheeling in and out of the dingy minds of the Human Rights Industry
and so on and so forth. Par for the course. To be expected. Best
ignored.
There is however the flip side of things. Power. It is
seldom balanced. It is always skewed in favour of some and skewed
against others. The international community, therefore, is a misnomer.
It implies equality. It is however never flat. There are nations with
bucks and they typically have firepower. They have the megaphones and
it’s their voices that get carry. Truth, justice, equality and such are
beautiful words but they get footnoted or worse in the play of power.
And all that countries such as Sri Lanka need to understand is the
importance of knowing location in a structure of power. Sri Lanka
doesn’t hold the trumps. This needs to be acknowledged.
Those
who have the trumps will play their cards loosely. They can afford to do
so. Those who don’t have the high cards, must be wary. Sri Lanka needs
to be wary. In any case, if the bullies want to bully, bullied you will
be. However, it would be folly to give additional excuses for bullying.
It would be folly to walk into a firing range.
The circus comes
around in late February and plays to a carefully picked,
cheer-guaranteed audience for a few weeks into March. Thereafter, once
what can be extracted has been extracted, the circus monkeys retire, for
the most part. They know that they need to wait their turn. They know
that they need to make their masters aware of their existence
beforehand. So they know when to make the noises, when to do their
cartwheels, when to chest-beat, when to prey and when to pray. All the
more reason not to create additional arenas for these monkeys to play.
Even
today, it’s a well-crafted but old lie that has the most carry in these
circuses. Course-corrections as there will always be room for are
ignored. A relatively error-free year is however never enough. A cough,
as mentioned, will be labeled ‘positive’ for all the wrong reasons.
Molehills will be duly re-named as mountains.
All that said,
there’s no reason to do what makes for easier extrapolation, however
irreverent be the hand of the extrapolator. Of course, there’s nothing
called perfect surveillance. Idiots there will be on all sides of the
political firmament. There will also be the naughty boys who will do
something to make it look like some else did it. Has happened and will
happen. Ideally such things should not happen. Ideally, even if they did
happen, investigation should be swift. We don’t however live in an
ideal world. We can only do our best. Moreover, just because there’s a
circus and there are well-trained monkeys ready to play to an adoring
audience whose applause will be enhanced by pre-recorded cheers of
rapture, one cannot and should not delay processes set in place to
ensure law and order. We cannot have ‘auspicious times’ for questioning
or arrests. What’s important to keep in mind, however, is to decide on
the best course of action from a range of choices.
The powers
that be need to reexamine choices, knowing all too well that if Choice A
is more or less as good as Choice B and if Choice A is what the monkeys
need, then Choice B is to be preferred.
February 17, 2022
[Malinda Seneviratne is the Director/CEO of the Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research and Training Institute. These are his personal views.]
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