The Way Forward

First published in The Island on Wednesday 11^th February 2009

The government, for its part, must break free from the evil spell of the bankrupt racist political elements masquerading as patriots wrapping themselves in the flag. The JHU, the JVP etc., which are anachronisms in modern politics ought to be neutralised politically if ethnic polarisation is to be checked. The same goes for mono ethnic and mono religious outfits like the SLMC and the TULF. These political malformations that have resulted from the failure of the two main parties to do away with the ethno-religious glass ceiling which has prevented non-Sinhala and/or non-Buddhist leaders from reaching the topmost notches of government, inter alia, have put paid to the efforts made since Independence to bring about the much needed national integration and to create a Sri Lanka where people can live in peace and dignity, irrespective of their ethnicity and/or religion.

(from The Island editorial of February 9, 2009)

As always, the Island editor has hit the nail on the head. “Political malformations” indeed! For they have blighted the Sri Lankan body politic since even before Independence by going against our ingrained pacifist, tolerant, non-violent, accommodating common cultural heritage.

The overwhelming majority of our people – comprising the Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays, and the rest of well over twenty different ethnic groups that share this little island as their native land, represented in the procession that paraded before the President on the Day of Independence (February 4, 2009) when he opened the Dayata Kirula (Sovereignty to the Nation) Exhibition at the BMICH - are not racist. However, to be sure, there are potentially dangerous fault lines in the polity, mainly the legacy of nearly half a millennium of foreign colonial rule; but these could have been easily fixed by now, had the more patriotic and enlightened politicians of post-independence Sri Lanka who understood and followed the implicit commitment of the general body of citizens to the principles of hospitality, caring and sharing, and generosity that they have inherited from centuries of a common culture of harmonious coexistence and religious and ethnic tolerance.

(Mr D.S. Senanayake, the Father of the Nation, and the first Prime Minister of independent Sri Lanka, was one of these rare statesmen; the incumbent President Mr Mahinda Rajapakse appears to be ushering in a new era of national resurgence following, in some important sense, in the footsteps of the late Mr Senanayake, though, as should be expected, against infinitely more formidable obstacles.)

We have occasionally heard the desperate cry that divisive politics is the bane of this country, and that a benign dictatorship could be the remedy. Though there is no doubt that the worst form of democracy is potentially superior to the best manifestation of any dictatorship, it is also true that unscrupulous politicians do flourish by sowing division among the populace. In the matter of inter-communal relations within a society such as ours, power hungry politicos should be expected to be in their element. Hence the crop of tribalist political gatherings that plague this country today.

Of these, the JHU and the JVP, are of comparatively more recent origin than those monoethnic Tamil and Muslim political parties, and differ significantly from the latter in terms of their raison d’etre. The advent of the JHU and the recent metamorphosis of the JVP as its ally could be interpreted as reactive, rather than proactive, developments in that they were actually in response to the perceived failure of the two main national parties (the UNP and the SLFP) to successfully and democratically neutralize the racism of the more pronounced, and, within their respective communities, more popular and hence more potent, political formations of the country’s ethnic minorities.

It is to the credit of the majority Sinhalese that they will never allow any extremist racist political party to flourish. The two main parties are not racist in any significant way. The smaller parties that seem to advocate a rather narrow racist slant in favour of the majority community always find it necessary to lean on one of the main parties for their survival in politics. We can safely predict the possible fate of the JHU and the JVP if they decide to contest by themselves at the next general elections: their parliamentary representation will be drastically reduced! When the minority communities are given a chance to show that they care more for the wider national interest, rather than narrow communalism, the fate of those ethnicity-based parties will be the same.

In today’s context, the UNP and the SLFP have an epochal role to play. They must form a united front to absorb all or most of the patriotic elements from all the communities (i.e. the majority of the common people) and create a truly democratic country where racist outfits and political parasites will be wiped out of the political arena. That, I believe, is the way forward for us at this juncture.

Rohana R.Wasala