Walk the talk

After a bizarre prorogation of Parliament that lasted just over one month, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa delivered a policy statement inaugurating the new session of the legislature that was, if anything, even more bizarre. The speech was littered with falsehoods, misrepresentation of facts and statements void of substance, but the most damning of these was probably his outright rejection of the politics of race and division.

“We reject racism. The present government wants to safeguard the dignity and rights of every citizen in this country in a uniform manner. Therefore, I urge those politicians who continue to incite people against each other for narrow political gains to stop doing so,” the President said, without any outward sign of understanding the irony.

The statement accusing other politicians of perpetuating racial politics makes the President sound like a famous character from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, who once declared: “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t.”

Having run one of the most bigoted, prejudicial electoral campaigns in living memory, President Rajapaksa presides over a ruling administration that has crafted policy to assert Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony over most aspects of social and political life. A task force on preserving archaeological treasures that uses its mandate to erase religious and cultural symbols in regions of the island that ethno-religious minority communities have inhabited over the centuries. 

A One Country-One Law presidential task force headed by Sri Lanka’s race-baiting, rabble-rousing Buddhist monk, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara seeks to assert Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony over Sri Lanka’s legal framework. Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, Muslim families who insist on burying loved ones fallen to the virus according to traditional rites, must first pay to have corpses transported to a remote village in Ampara. Ignoring protests from the scientific community and even the World Health Organization which has cleared COVID-19 victims for burial, the Government hurled Muslim victims of the coronavirus into crematorium fires, claiming that burying those who succumb to the virus would contaminate ground water – for one entire year. 

President Rajapaksa even begged the Government of the Maldives at one point, to accept Sri Lanka’s dead Muslims for burial in the archipelago. During his two-year tenure in office, Muslim lawyers, poets, writers and politicians have been arrested under anti-terror laws and endlessly held in detention against all civilised norms.

The Tamil community has suffered no less. President Rajapaksa noted in his policy statement that the ‘people in the North and East who had been battered by the war for a long time wanted economic security above all else’. He called on Members of Parliament representing the people of the north and east to support his Government’s efforts to improve the living conditions of the people in their areas. But the fact remains that two years after his election as President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa is yet to meet with the Tamil National Alliance, the country’s largest Tamil party – even once. 

No minority community has been spared. The Catholic community demanding justice for the Easter Sunday attacks that killed over 260 persons has also been left high and dry. As reprisal against the church for continuing to demand justice, Catholic priests are being hauled before the CID and harassed over their statements.

In 2000, when the Chandrika Kumaratunga Government imposed a press censorship on war reporting to mask casualty figures and bad news on the military front during the siege and fall of Elephant Pass, Editor of The Sunday Leader, Lasantha Wickrematunge decided to challenge the censorship and the Government’s Competent Authority who regularly slashed reports of military news in one of his Sunday editions. Wickrematunge did it in his own inimitable style. The lead story of the Sunday Leader one weekend in May was titled, ‘War in Fantasy Land’ and tongue-in-cheek, Lasantha reported uncensored military news as if it had never happened. 

For his efforts, the Kumaratunga administration sealed the Sunday Leader presses, forcing the publishers to file Fundamental Rights cases to resume printing. Nine years later, Wickrematunge paid with his life for choosing to speak truth to power. President Rajapaksa’s “throne speech” was a well-crafted policy statement designed for a different leader speaking of a different country. In that country, there are no food and fuel shortages. Its citizens are prosperous and healthy. In that country of the President’s fantasy, the lights are still on. It is a land that has achieved vistas of prosperity and splendour; where he is revered and adored – and exists only in his dreams.