Go East(er)! – A look back to 21/4 and hearkening at what lies ahead

As April showed this year, Easter – together with Eid and Aluth Avurudu – can be entertained in ecumenical hearts, 

without breaching the undivided peace that prevailed in the hearts of most people of an island race keen to live in harmony 

Sri Lanka is no stranger to hostiles with big black backpacks brimming with explosives, literally and metaphorically.

A protracted conflict between insular tribes, stoked by ethno-nationalism and egged on by war profiteers, taught us to expect sudden or strategic violence in public places and contested spaces. 

The tsunami of 2004 took a sleeping island by surprise in their homes. But being used to ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, the wound was more readily assimilated than death blows delivered by neighbours in 1983. 

That, and humanity’s inhumanity to humankind, combined to make the Easter Sunday bombings of April 2019 arguably the single explosive event with the farthest-reaching ramifications of our times.

Nothing new

What fresh insight can we add to the 20:20 vision of hindsight, five years after the cataclysm? 

There is nothing new under a cruel sun. And under such cruel and politically complicit suns since 21/4, there has been sufficient administrative angst, bureaucratic bungling and incompetent buck-passing to convince a wounded polity that it is ‘vanity of vanities’ and ‘all is vanity’ as regards any expectation of peace with justice. 

However cynical one is wont to grow at politicos and their Teflon skins though, the hide of the electorate may well be about to take a beating again. Electorates rarely remember well, and the last two weeks of election-time see notorious narcissists seeking a fresh supply of validation. 

So it behoves voters to have their wits about them, and gird their loins against repeated intrusions into the national interest in the name of security or sovereignty.

Not that these are the most pressing issues of the day. 

But that apart from the geopolitical criterion we’ve made of this twin helix, as have most other modern nation states, there are matters more germane than safeguarding our territorial integrity to a nation striving to convert its currency from a post-bankrupt value into the coin of recovery. 

And yet, demagogues and other home-grown charlatans would connive with their peers – that sad bunch we elected but can’t seem to hold to account save by a nationwide people’s protest that ended in an ouster but re-established a regime – to pull the Easter wool over our baa-lamb eyes… again.

How long will we have to put up with former presidents either firing broadsides at all and sundry over their undoing due to arrogance and incompetence, or hinting broadly at the dark plots they’re privy to without doing their public duty – and stepping up to the plate and into the unforgiving scrutiny of the law, rather than the court of public opinion? 

To the slaughter

At the formal or superficial level, the powers that be have even belatedly done all or most of what could be expected of a lacklustre state machine. 

Arrests were made. A brace of senior bureaucrats were hanged as scapegoats initially, followed by a ruling of the apex court that set right some of the balance as regards culpability, by finding the then chief executive and his engine guilty of gross negligence. And despite presidential and parliamentary commissions of inquiry, the jury is still out as to whether the correct mastermind was identified and indicted.

Apologies were tendered by the former prime minister who now sits in a higher chair for all the good that it has done.

Accusations from church and civil society continue to harry the traumatised body politic. And counter accusations have helped the usual suspects to fob off forensic audits of their agency in masterminding the attacks by invoking conspiracy theories tantamount to self-whitewashing.

And now, to add insult to injury, we’re told there’s going to be the umpteenth parliamentary debate on the Easter Sunday bombings, at the taxpayers’ expense to boot, and at a cost of Rs. 45 million, no less...

All in all, then as now, it is the amorphous masses of citizenry that suffer most from the self-serving narratives and native wit of those born survivors, our elected representatives. We must, now more than ever, elect them with care, a critical perspective sharpened by the failure of the Aragalaya to effect regime change, and concern for a systemic overhaul that is long overdue.

At least, even if nothing changes in the political establishment and ethos, can our politicos even fake a semblance of empathy for the people they claim to represent? 

Au contraire, while literally millions of workers, domestic aides and citizens not privileged to own a private vehicle struggle – often at grave risk to their lives – to return to the commercial and social capital, some shameless MPs solicit favours from their political masters to reserve for themselves more perks, privileges and plush cars at taxpayers’ expense.

Ask yourself: If they don’t believe in sabbe saththa bhavanthu sukhi-taththa (‘May all beings be happy’), can they at least subscribe to an ethic of pseudo-empathy for the people they claim to serve so that their hypocrisy might not be so blatant? 

Plus ça change

At the functional level, the state of affairs that prevailed as far as security and public safety were concerned pre-21/4 continues as before in the face of a citizenry getting and spending as always. 

An exception may be the injury to ‘law and order with transparency and accountability’ inflicted by Operation Yukthiya. 

Twin additional burdens are the insults of the Online Safety Act and Antiterrorism Law, which would muzzle the demographics of dissent so anathema to power-hungry, agenda-driven politicos.  

The fundamental inertia – a sea-change into something poorer for democracy and stranger for a polity where popular sovereignty once held sway (such that the high and mighty fled in disarray) – bears closer inspection.

For one, as intimated, the political constellation remains recognisable as being the same in ethos as it was pre-July 2022 and – the truth be told – since 2005 (bar the brief interlude of deceptive good-governance in 2015-19). 

The one new star that has swum into our ken is a familiar visitor in a newly revived guise: eliminating queuing for essentials and energy supplies, and kicking the can of debt repayment down the road for generations as yet unborn to pick up the tab. Shall we cry, smile or revolt? 

That emperor has new clothes to cover the nakedness of the agents and actors and their cohorts who didn’t really suffer from the fall, and certainly haven’t faced the bodily deprivations shared by their bankrupted fellow-citizens. As usual or even always, the one percent here too carry on. 

For another, the consolidation of a fragmented nation state’s finances may soon be followed by the resurgence of a once united national political party, if the opposition continues to buy into the false dichotomy of a country divided by contesting political ideologies – when in fact it is divisive socio-economic agendas that keep Sri Lanka from the path of a unified pursuit of salvation. If that much vaunted national television debate eventuates, you may see what I mean... 

Then again, as April – once the cruellest month – showed this year, the Easter spirit can be entertained in agnostic hearts, together with Eid and Aluth Avurudu, without breaching the blissful peace that prevailed in the hearts of most people... bar their public transport woes and cost-of-living cuts...

Last not least, if the Aragalaya failed, then the next brace of elections may well prove the desire of struggling multitudes to make ends meet sans the botheration of political adventures intruding into our harmonious domain.

The dogs may bark but the caravan moves on – for the dawn of nothingness, as it may be in the long run, given the dire prognostications of Sri Lanka falling into the downward gyre of repeat defaulting on mounting sovereign debt. 

Resolutions 

So what of the black Easter of five years ago, which threatens to pass without meaningful resolutions into a sixth year of unresolved tension? 

Among the Christians – demonstrably the most victimised demographic of that black bloody Sunday, by dint of churches being targeted, and an estimated 100+ of the 269 paschal lambs being slaughtered at a single place of worship in Negombo – there is a saying: “We are an Easter people.”

This means that a flock with their eyes on a glorious new hope of revival are at peril of unscrupulous elements seeking to skin them alive for their own profit if the hopefuls are not careful: a church driven by rage and grief, a civil society motivated by arch-manipulators reinventing themselves.  

All civilisations must grow out of their primal deities and atavistic practices if they are to progress towards a dawn of something more meaningful than animism or ancestor worship.

As Easter, Eid and Avurudu tides abate, and people return to work as worship, perhaps the polity might make a new year’s resolution to eschew political messiahs in favour of elected representatives who may still be held accountable by law, civic modalities and constitutional mechanisms.    

|Editor-at-large of LMD | Easter person eschewing saviours in favour of solidarity as a people|