For the love of a daughter

‘Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents’ – Sir Edmund Leach - Social Anthropologist, Reith Lectures 1967 

‘Relatives of politicians get foreign postings’ is the dull and decidedly damnatory caption of a new report that appeared in the Daily Mirror of 30 January. 

Among those reported to have received appointments were Dulmini Attanayake, daughter of Samagi Jana Balawegaya Parliamentarian and National Organiser Tissa Attanayake and Randula Gunawardena, daughter of Minister Bandula Gunawardena. 

The ‘Daily Mirror’ had failed to elicit a comment from Minister Bandula Gunawardena. It had succeeded in getting a remarkably candid response from parliamentarian Tissa Attanayake. 

According to the Daily Mirror report, parliamentarian Tissa Attanayake had explained that his daughter had been given the appointment by the former Government. It seems that he was more concerned in dispelling the idea of enjoying regime patronage than the moral deficiency implicit in an act of nepotism. 

His daughter Dulmini Attanayake had received her appointment from the former Minister of External Affairs. 

“A Cabinet paper was issued in July 2019, but the process was suspended in November 2019 as a result of the Presidential Election,” Attanayake has explained. “The current administration was only taking forward that Cabinet paper and it was not a fresh appointment.”

Attanayake also insisted that his daughter, who is to be appointed as Third Secretary to the High Commission of Sri Lanka in Canberra, Australia, is qualified for the post. “She has the educational qualifications for the position and attacking her based on political affiliations is unacceptable.” Clearly, Tissa Attanayake is convinced that his daughter deserves to be and should be the Third Secretary in our mission in Canberra. This maddening sense of entitlement of a politician forms the point of departure of this essay.  Tissa Attanayake is the national organiser of the SJB – a political outfit that is dedicated to advance the dynastic politics of its leader Sajith Premadasa. That is as it should be. Dynastic politics underpins any meaningful discussion of nepotism, cronyism and corruption. 

This our ‘independence’ week. Since independence, we have lived with a system that bestowed a kind of proprietary sanctity on political dynasties. That should explain the shift of focus of this essay from Tweedledum on horseback to Tweedledee who is saddling up to mount his pony. 

The new order repealed the 19th Amendment. It nixed the light rail project. Apparently it has not revisited the selection of Tissa Attanayake’s daughter to the Foreign Service made on the basis of a special Cabinet paper. 

Now that can be due to one of two things. 

Either, Tissa Attanayake’s daughter is an indispensable asset in furthering our interests and relations in Kangaroo land or it is cronyism in the incestuous world of our political class. 

This writer has nothing against the young lady. We are fortunate that her father did not entertain the idea that his daughter was eminently qualified to represent Sri Lanka in women’s pole vault at the next Olympics.

It is also the good fortune of all those lasses aspiring to be Miss Sri Lanka in 2021 that her father decided not to field her for that extravaganza of a pageant.

In these bleak days of pandemic induced restrictions of movement, condemned to read about or watch the quiet erosion of our once cherished freedoms, reading George Orwell is the one sure refuge available to retain one’s sanity. 

George Orwell understood people such as Tissa Attanayake. After all, Orwell is the saint who unravelled tyranny and dictatorship. He understood kinship. “To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.”

Loving some people more than others is the road to nepotism, favouritism and corruption. Tissa Attanayake’s love for his daughter has made him immune to the rules of recruitment to our Foreign Service. 

This is what nepotism is all about. It is that deliberate favouritism extended to the immediate family in the selection of persons for public office to the utter detriment of others who are more deserving. 

Their achievement, effort, devotion and talent are ignored solely for selfish desire to promote the interest of one’s own kin. In short, nepotism is the application of grease to the wheels of advancement for children and relations. 

Nepotism is wrong. Cronyism is foul. Favouritism is contemptible. These are vile practices that offend our sense of fair play. But then, if Tissa Attanayake does not understand what fair play is, all this lofty talk is water on the duck’s back. 

This puts Sajith Premadasa to the test. Let us see if Ranasinghe Premadasa’s son and heir understands what fair play is. It does not imply that the ‘papa’ did not know nepotism! The purpose of this missive is to ask others in the SJB who fancy themselves as successors to reiterate their commitment to create a meritocracy that they promise, morning, noon and night. 

Nepotism is like adultery. It is widely condemned and widely practiced. Serving your kin first, is a human impulse. However, it is detrimental to democracy and defeats the rule of law. In an ideal representative democracy, nepotism is bad politics. 

Nepotism is natural in the animal world. It is the primordial predisposition that determines the group dynamics among most animals including us humans. Biologists have found nepotism prevalent among spiders. Just as with humans, spiders seem to rely on relatedness as a protective shield to avert danger. 

Researchers of the University of Hamburg, Germany, and Aarhus University, Denmark, organised spiders into different groups to collect food. Some groups were entirely made up of siblings. Others included only non-siblings. Spiders working with their kin were more motivated to share digestive enzymes with the other spiders, allowing them to consume their prey more quickly. The spiders that were related also worked more communally when foraging for food, which benefited the entire group. The study established that working with relatives-maintained harmony and was an excellent tool in foraging. It demonstrated that family unity had its positive sides. Nepotism is good for foraging. 

The American Philosopher Owen Flanagan regards humans as animals capable of a higher purpose. We humans are animals capable of consciousness and abstract thought. Unlike other beasts, we can live rationally, morally, and meaningfully. It is that self-knowledge that compels us to eschew nepotism. Nepotism is the distinct characteristic of a backward society. 

Another Sociologist, Edward Banfield, studied kinship and political behaviour in Southern Italy to find out why some societies resist modernity. In Southern Italy where the Mafia originated, the community was self-centric, and utterly devoid of any moral sanctions outside those of the immediate family.

The nuclear family is what mattered. They were incurably self-serving, unwilling to undertake any activity in the greater interest of the larger society. He titled his study ‘The moral basis of a backward society.’ 

Today, we know that even in America, the great citadel of democracy, there are backward societies trapped in tribal prejudice. Banfield coined the phrase ‘amoral familism’ to describe the ethos of a backward society. It was the dominant ethos of the ‘backward society.’ 

Only one overarching idea prevailed. Maximise the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family, and assume that all others will do likewise. The state was the ultimate patron. 

In a society immersed in ‘amoral familism’, no one worked for the common interest of the community except participation in periodic elections where patronage politics ruled the day. A self-perpetuating political class spawned by civic apathy of the populace was the inevitable product of ‘amoral familism’. 

Need we ask why the repeal of the 19th Amendment was easy, simple and smooth? When we adopted ‘Presidentialism’ in 1978, we institutionalised a patriarchal society. That explains the fascination and devotion with which the established religious institutions regard the Executive Presidency. It explains why they dislike the noisy debates in pure parliamentarism.  In such a patrimonial society, the ‘state’ is the ultimate patron. That in a nutshell is the predicament of Tisa Attanayake the father. 

In a modern democracy such predicaments belong nowhere but in a nutshell.