March past a milepost and a new hope in court’s steps

It sings of a stauncher freedom and untrammelled liberty, which we earnestly desire but often find to be out of reach year after year, generation after generation – Pic by Ruwan Walpola

As Sri Lanka parades past its 76th milepost on a journey of independence from colonial dominion today, there are a few factors to my mind that may help discern how the wind in that flag flies in the face of our march past. 

It sings of a stauncher freedom and untrammelled liberty, which we earnestly desire but often find to be out of reach year after year, generation after generation.

The way we spend our days, of course, is the way we live our lives. This is as true of nations as it is of individuals. 

There is therefore some merit in examining the way we dealt in the year past with diurnal events as individuals, as it may indicate the turn that our destiny as a nation is taking. 

Three ships a-sailing

For one: while we’ve shaken off the shackles of foreign domination on the face of it, tensions in the Indian Ocean over alleged Chinese ‘spy ships’ show that Sri Lanka these days is swimming like a minnow between two sharks testing the temperature of the water before fishing season. 

Would that we had a clearer foreign policy than ‘we’re friends with everyone yet trust none but those that bully us’ bilateralism in a multi-polar, interdependent yet competitive milieu, we’d be one step closer to proper closure to our colonial epoch. 

In our ongoing decolonisation project, we’re hardly underway to a new more sharply defined nonalignment than in the heady days of the 1950s and 1960, when Ceylon led in diplomacy and international relations, and set a certain standard in terms of nonaligned benchmarks and national behaviour. 

Our island nation could then consider its harbours a safe haven for sundry ships, sans the fear of provoking our nearest neighbour’s ire. 

We’re treading water in choppy seas as it is, after the government contributed a Sri Lanka Navy ship to the ongoing proxy war in the Middle East, where the US and its neoliberal allies are in a violent standoff with ethno-religious fundamentalism – as supposedly represented by the Arab coalition against Israel; ostensibly over the Gaza issue, although the roots of the conflict run deeper. 

A more nuanced view of the US’s brand of internationalism is the need of the hour, counteracting as it does India’s stand against the alleged genocide by Israel against the occupants of The Gaza Strip. 

From the US expeditionary fast transport vessel USNS Brunswick (11 Oct 2023) to Indian Navy landing ship tanks (Airavat, 18 Oct 2023) and Chinese ‘dual-purpose’ ‘research vessels’ (refer three of these given below), through Royal Navy offshore patrol vessels (HMS Spey, 28 Jan 2024) and the Pakistani frigate Saif (30 Jan 2024), meanwhile – we’re keeping up with the (Davy) Joneses to the detriment of our national interest.  And short of selling our national assets on the high seas to appease western aggrandizement against ideological enemies – albeit in the name of maintaining the peace in the Middle East and safeguarding the oceans from piracy. 

We run the risk of losing our much vaunted neutral status through this demonstrably imprudent naval manoeuvre. Also, committing a defence policy blunder, as the Maldives has done with Xiang Yang Hong 3 by welcoming this ‘research vessel’ into Malé despite India’s vociferous disapproval. Which Sri Lanka heeded this time round, when it requested docking, and we refused in an apparent policy reversal. 

This is unlike in the two previous instances where ‘survey ship’ Yuan Wang 5 and ‘scientific research vessel’ Shi Yan 6 docked in China-controlled Hambantota harbour (Aug 2022) and a Chinese-run terminal at the Port of Colombo (Oct 2023), respectively, in the teeth of Delhi’s protests.

While the first may seem like happenstance, the second has been presented – particularly by a suspicious Indian defence establishment and supporting media – as highly coincidental. Coming as it did in the wake of President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s visit to the 3rd Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) forum in China only days before Shi Yan 6 docked in Colombo. 

And arguably, Sri Lanka needs a more stringently designed and sustainably observed standard operating procedure (SOP), which our Foreign Minister Ali Sabry once asserted we do have. Which better balances national and regional security with transparency to – and accountability by – all our stakeholders?   

Post-bankruptcy recovery blues

For another, we’ve not quite managed to stave off foreign interventionism in our domestic matters due to the abysmal mismanagement of economic policy that led to defaulting on sovereign debt repayment and the subsequent declaration of bankruptcy. 

Despite vociferous asseverations that ‘we will not go to the IMF’, we did go to the UN agency eventually, hat in hand and having swallowed our fatuous pseudo-nationalism and cheap populism, to crave a boon and cadge a 17th programme that is increasingly not looking anything like the ‘bailout’ it is popularly bandied about to be. Dear me, if this is a favour, say Wimal & Co. now in the wings but then playing to the gallery, we don’t need enemies. Told you so WW!

More to the point – with an unrepentantly conservative and decidedly neoliberal executive in the seat, a hot seat at that and heavily contested along the continuum of legality to legitimacy, it doesn’t seem prudent or feasible or likely that the socialists will get a look-in anytime soon as far as a stab at governance goes. 

And it doesn’t go very far, except the way of all flesh. Which is to say through the kitchen’s back doors, if and when the ‘Marxism with a human face’ peddlers of what passes for New Labour in the land can’t cobble up a decent economic manifesto between themselves, or tell us who will lead their portfolios once in power, and that it redounds to a team that they have in place but won’t/don’t want to/can’t name... yet! 

Brother, liberty – like ambition – must be made of sterner stuff. Or as Antonio Gramsci had it: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. I hate the indifferent.”

Skyfall

Last but by no means least, this writer and the cohort that holds to ‘fiat justitia, ruat caelum’ (‘let justice be done, though the heavens fall’ – possibly Piso). This thinking runs counter to the institutional and establishmentarian apathy best expressed in a mantra that assumes all of us can, must or shall go on as before, just like that, let us go (‘ohoma young’) – and let the crimes of yesteryear that brought Mother Lanka to her knees and so many of her diverse children to bitter tears and bloody blows go unsolved, unpunished and soon forgotten: easiest mended. Pissu da! 

And it is a severe indictment of all political parties – save the idealistic young contenders who look forward to a cleaner political culture come our independence’s centenary, and summarily dismiss the political establishment en bloc – that no one else is speaking of, or even blithely promising, that justice be done in emblematic cases. Those of the war time; Central Bank/bond scam syndrome; Easter Sunday attacks; bringing to book those responsible for our collective bankruptcy, and not resting it at naming and shaming...

Of course, some recent Supreme Court judgments were welcome steps in the right direction of soliciting a greater indictment and eventual conviction – if justice is to be done and/or the ceiling cave in. 

One of these was in November 2023, when a five judge bench (4-1) found culpable of causing or triggering or contributing to the country’s worst financial crisis a brace of former executive presidents and their colleagues in government. 

Also guilty of mishandling or inaction on the economy and violating public trust were the brothers Rajapaksa, an ex-Central Bank Governor and a former Treasury Secretary, whom the country’s top court found culpable of three major policy failures that created Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since Independence.  

And coming as it did in the vanguard of several other judgments that spoke to the independence of the judiciary shining like a lighthouse – not for the first time in recent history – there was cause for genuine celebration over and above the ego-driven, jingoism-inflamed tamashas that pass for commemoration these days...

If and when we are able to abdicate from the atavistic compulsion to roll out dilapidated hardware every year for decrepit demagogues and bungling bureaucrats to take the salute, and satisfy our political establishment’s puerile need to kow-tow to the incumbent administration under the guise of honouring our heroes, then we can truly celebrate life and liberty for all islanders in the blessed isle. 

In the meantime, every sensitised citizen can see the writing on the wall...

And nod in gratitude to the bench of old that in January 2023 found former President Maithripala Sirisena liable to pay damages of Rs. 100 million and ordered four other officials and the state to fork out a total of 311 million rupees, as compensation in the Easter Sunday security fiasco of 2019 that killed 269 Sri Lankans and guests, by dint of defence lapses and administrative negligence among other shortcomings.  

Also grateful to the country’s apex court for finding in December 2023 an Acting IGP guilty of torture in 2011, as well as the legal eagles such as Prof. Savitri Goonesekere who dared to question the presidential appointment of the same worthy to highest law-enforcement office with the approval of the Constitutional Council.

Least of all in terms of gravitas for those struggling to make ends meet is the gravamen of a reversal in January 2024 of a presidential pardon granted in June 2021, for being arbitrary, and failing to follow constitutional procedure and not valid in law. 

The Supreme Court ruled that as former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had failed to adhere to the proper legal procedure, the special presidential pardon vis-à-vis the 2016 High Court sentence of death (commuted to life imprisonment) on former MP Duminda Silva for the 2011 murder of four including a fellow parliamentarian stood annulled.  

These in vitro bode well for a future body politic in which there is hope in the independence of at least one of the three branches of government.

| Editor-at-large of LMD |