Independence 75: Many unhappy returns?

We began Year 1 of independence as the Switzerland of Asia. We complete Year 75 of independence as the Beggar of South Asia

The lebensraum type of statement attributed to Dutugemunu in Mahawamsa, that he is lying in a foetal position because he is confined by the sea on one side and the Tamils on the other, has been used again and again by our 20th and 21st century politicians to exacerbate Sinhala insecurities and fears. We are alone and few, this lament goes, in comparison to foreign hordes eternally conspiring to take over this blessed isle. Tamil Nadu Tamils, Western Christians, Muslims everywhere: the identity of the enemy varies, depending on the circumstances. But there is always an enemy

“I saw them erect the guillotine again tonight” – Alejo Carpentier 

(Explosion in a cathedral)

By Tisaranee Gunasekara

Call it a no brainer. Whatever Queen Viharamahadevi, the legendary mother of King Dutugemunu, wore, it wouldn’t have been a Kandyan sari (osariya). So why dress up her statue in that garb, jewellery included? Not just any statue, but the one by the Ruwanweli Seya, her son’s most famous construct, and the place Gotabaya Rajapaksa chose to take his presidential oaths in 2019. When the story broke over the social media, the director general of the Archaeology Department took steps to divest the statue of the anachronistic attire ( ඔසරියක් අන්ද විහාරමහා දේවී  | Carbon News). 

Who dressed the statue (securely placed inside a glass enclosure) in a white Kandyan? Did the chief incumbent of the Ruwanweli Seya and other monks not notice this sudden change? Could enacting such a radical sartorial transformation have been possible without an official wink and a nod? 

More pertinently, why do it? Why now, in January 2023? 

Dressing up the past in a garb that is profitable in the present has been a Lankan political staple in the last 75 years. Harking back to Dutugemunu is the favourite form in which this politics of redux finds expressed. In this ‘save the nation’ narrative, Queen Viharamahadevi plays a part that is second only to her warrior-son. She is his confidant, mentor, and, advisor, his fellow in the struggle to vanquish the Tamils (we have only Mahawamsa’s word for all this, a tale penned by a monk about 700 years after these events). 

The lebensraum type of statement attributed to Dutugemunu in Mahawamsa, that he is lying in a foetal position because he is confined by the sea on one side and the Tamils on the other, has been used again and again by our 20th and 21st century politicians to exacerbate Sinhala insecurities and fears. We are alone and few, this lament goes, in comparison to foreign hordes eternally conspiring to take over this blessed isle. Tamil Nadu Tamils, Western Christians, Muslims everywhere: the identity of the enemy varies, depending on the circumstances. But there is always an enemy. 

Politicians of almost every ilk (not excluding the JVP) fed the fires. The Sinhala public believed. Most of what we did in the last 75 years were informed and shaped by this visceral insecurity, this eternal fear. 

Imagine living one’s whole life in a continuous fit of paranoia. That has been our existence for close to three-quarters of a century.  

To paraphrase the title of a book by Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, nations make themselves. This is especially true of democracies, where governments are chosen by the people. Apart from one exception (the 1982 Referendum), Ceylon/Sri Lanka had periodic elections which were largely free. Where we are today, 75 years into Independence, is a result of choices we, the people, made, and made freely in the polling booth. If we were compelled, it was not by violence but by propaganda, mainly utopian promises and mind-altering phobias. 

As in human history, in Lankan history too, there is no paradise lost and none to regain. We wasted a good part of 75 years indulging in the fantasy of returning to a past that exists only in political speeches, religious sermons, and our own uninformed imagination. There was never a past that any of us would really want to return to, even if a time machine exists. Our only hope lies in a different future

In past we shouldn’t trust

In 2023 falls another 75th anniversary, that of the disenfranchisement of plantation Tamils. Six months after we gained independence, the UNP government pushed through the Citizenship Act turning the absolute majority of plantation Tamils into stateless persons. As Dr. N.M. Perera pointed out during the ensuing debate, this Act conferred on Ceylon the dubious distinction of being the only country which denied citizenship to people born in its territory (South Africa and Rhodesia would join the ranks subsequently).

Plantation Tamils then were a major part of the Lankan labour and left movement. Their political awakening began in the late 1920s. In 1931, Natesa Aiyar a journalist turned political activist, formed the first trade union in the plantations. When Australian Communist Bracegirdle began his radical work in the plantations, the workers were ready to receive his message. In 1940, a Seven Point Agreement was signed between planters and the unions. With the arrival of universal franchise, plantation Tamils became a potent electoral force with a clear view of their class interests. In the 1947 election, their vote went mainly to the left. 

Six months into independence, the UNP government brought the Citizenship Bill to parliament. The move seemed to have been motivated by class, caste and, most of all, partisan political interests. Had the plantation workers voted overwhelmingly for the UNP in 1947, the government would not have sought to disenfranchise them. A national and racial veneer was used to gloss over the horrendous injustice the Bill sought to perpetrate. The plantation Tamils were decried as The Other, privileged enemy aliens seeking to deprive proper Ceylonese of their birthright. 

As Rajan Hoole and Kirupaimalar Hoole point out in their recent book, Democracy Stillborn, “The Tamil Congress could have defeated the Bill,” and opted not to. The Bill passed because enough non-Sinhala parliamentarians either voted for it or abstained. Three Tamil members, six Muslim members and six appointed members (four Britishers, three of them planters, and two Burghers) voted for the Bill. 

The left movement had electoral and political reasons to oppose the Bill (once the plantation Tamils lost voting rights, the left would abandon them). But there was one Sinhalese member who opposed the Bill on a matter of principle: that of jus soli, citizenship as birthright. Herbert Sri Nissanka, a Buddhist lawyer and an independent member from Kurunegala, was not dependent on plantation Tamil votes. Given the ethnic framing of the issue, opposing the Bill might even have been costly for him. Yet oppose it he did, decrying the attempt to disenfranchise an entire community as an act of injustice contrary to Sinhala honour. It was the high moral path the majority community could have followed and didn’t.

Irrationality, irrespective of its wellsprings, eventually turns political. A person blind to reason and commonsense cannot be expected to vote in his/her own best interests. When such people predominate in an electorate, elections can achieve very little

The passage of the Bill proved the efficacy of the race card as a politico-electoral tool. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike had backed the Bill, defining his stance as ‘harmonising racialism and nationalism’ (ibid). He was to wield the racial-national weapon to excellent effect just nine years later with Sinhala Only. In the 1947 election, the UNP had tried to use the Buddhist card against the left opposition, with little success. In 1956, Bandaranaike used it against the UNP with outstanding success. From then on, race and religion would become an integral part of Lankan politics, paving the way for innumerable calamities including a 25-year war, one insurgency, and the Easter attack. 

“The past is never dead. It’s not even the past,” William Faulkner said in Requiem for a Nun. Those lines fit Sri Lanka like a glove. The echoes of our undying past can be heard in the growing vituperation against President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s proposal to fully implement the 13th Amendment. On 27 January Prof. Induragare Dhammaratana thero added a religious gauntlet to the ethnic gauntlet thrown by Wimal Weerawansa et al. “The country is the father,” he said, “and the Buddha is the mother... Monks are willing to rise even tomorrow” against the 13th Amendment’s full implementation (13 ගැන මහාචාර්යය පූජ්ය ඉඳුරාගාරේ ධම්මරතන හිමියෝ හඬ අවදි කරති! – LNW Sinhala). 

Whether enough Sinhalese would be receptive to this re-exhumed war cry of Rata, Jathiya, Agama remains to be seen. But its shameless usage shows a terrifying willingness to replay old errors. Provincial Councils will divide the country, its opponents, led by the SLFP and the JVP, hollered in 1987-89 period. The SLFP didn’t contest the first provincial council election and the JVP in its DJV avatar unleashed a spree of murder and mayhem against candidates, activists, officials, and voters. That was in 1988. By 1993, provincial councils had ceased being the equivalent of dividing the country. But the dead, murdered to save the country from being divided by provincial councils, remained dead. 

Perhaps before organising another ‘Saffron Rise’, the venerable thero could explain how the full implementation of the 13th Amendment will divide the country. If his ‘reasons’ include his claim that Sri Lanka with pure Buddhism, he can perhaps pinpoint where in Sri Lanka this unsullied teachings of the Buddha be found. Would it be in the caste-based structure of the Sangha? Or in the sadistic ragging of monk-students of the Buddhist and Pali University? Or in the thero’s own claim that the country is the father and the Buddha is the mother? Was that really what the Buddha taught?

“A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful picture, of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all...” (The Dawn of Everything – David Graeber and David Wengrow). As in human history, in Lankan history too, there is no paradise lost and none to regain. We wasted a good part of 75 years indulging in the fantasy of returning to a past that exists only in political speeches, religious sermons, and our own uninformed imagination. There was never a past that any of us would really want to return to, even if a time machine exists. Our only hope lies in a different future.

Where we are today, 75 years into Independence, is a result of choices we, the people, made, and made freely in the polling booth. If we were compelled, it was not by violence but by propaganda, mainly utopian promises and mind-altering phobias

Confronting irrationality

We began Year 1 of independence as the Switzerland of Asia. We complete Year 75 of independence as the Beggar of South Asia. 

For those 75 years, Unreason has been our divine. Our proclivity to see politics through an (ethnic/religious) Us versus Them lens, our habit of turning most electoral contests into battles-unto-death to save the Motherland from this or that enemy alien, has created a landscape in which only irrationality can thrive. 

Many Lankans, when they suffer a theft, seek help from the divine to uncover the mystery. A devale, when it suffers a theft, turns solely to the police to find the culprit. If that particular god cannot protect his/her own property, how can he/she intervene to help a wronged worshipper? 

Irrationality, irrespective of its wellsprings, eventually turns political. A person blind to reason and commonsense cannot be expected to vote in his/her own best interests. When such people predominate in an electorate, elections can achieve very little. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in his only encounter with the media, proved that he didn’t understand ABC of economics. Yet almost 7 million Lankans voted for him, seeing in him Our Hero who Works. That choice tells us all we need to know about our collective psyche and intellect.  

Our current bankruptcy and its social costs could have been avoided, had we de-prioritised military expenditure once the war ended. That was the rational thing to do from the point of view of the country and the people, starting with the Sinhala majority. Instead, the armed forces kept on growing as did the costs of maintaining them, eating up the potential peace dividend. Any proposal to cut defence expenditure was decried as unpatriotic. The eternal fear of being overrun by Tamils, Muslims or Christians provided a false logic to this maintenance of a massive military in peacetime. 

By 2019, the armed forces had reached an all-time high of 317,000, yet failed to protect the country from a handful of suicide bombers. In 2021, the share of military expenditure of the GDP reached a peak of 2.3%. Yet the military was unable to save the Rajapaksas from the tsunami of public ire. 

The recent outbreak of violence at the House of Fashion is the best warning of how close we still are to a general conflagration. Any incident, however trivial or marginal, can be the spark that ignites the fire. Once the flames break out, not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would be able to staunch them. They may not even try.

Imagine living one’s whole life in a continuous fit of paranoia. That has been our existence for close to three-quarters of a century

Sri Lanka does not feature in international media often, for contrary to beliefs dear to many Sinhalese, the world does not spend most of its time conspiring to take over this island. Recently, though, Sri Lanka made it to global headlines, as part of an AFP fact check. The story is instructive. France decided to give free condoms to young adults aged 18 to 25. On 9 December, Hiru TV published this news on its Sinhala website. The heading omitted to include the word France; it merely said, Government to give free condoms to those aged 18-25. Many Lankans, without bothering to read further, assumed the government was that of Ranil Wickremesinghe. Social media caught fire. This time, the story stopped at some Ranil-bashing. But the next story could feature a Tamil, a Muslim, or a Christian, and the fires of anger could spread from virtual reality to the real one.

Lancet fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum) is a tiny parasite which enters an ant and takes over its brain, thereby commanding its actions. The infected ant is made to climb a blade of a grass each evening until a ruminating animal eats that grass – because lancet fluke needs to get itself into the gut of a sheep or a cow. 

Our behaviour as a nation has been no different over the last 75 years. Like the ant, we too have allowed politicians with their scary rhetoric and promises of salvation to undermine our capacity to think for ourselves. Obedient to those siren calls, we have climbed our blades of grass again and again, hoping for heaven, until calamity grabs us in its unrelenting jaws. The only difference between the doomed ant and us is that the ant has no choice in its fate. We did. We still do.