Ceylon Today Editorial

Sri Lanka – The Broad Picture

15 January 2017

The Joint Opposition could be forgiven for not knowing whether, along with Humpty-Dumpty, they are on the wall, clinging to it for dear life – or trying to clamber up its surface back to the top. The slither on both sides of the wall is caused by the US and India et al kicking up waves on the one side, with China, Russia etc following suit on the east side of the wall. Survival for the government and the Joint Opposition comes as a 'Hobson's Choice' because both are equally committed to the forces which sustain them, local and foreign.

The exception to this is that pro-democracy civil society organizations, which had the privilege of being led by the late Ven. Sobhitha Thera, have of late shown a rare depth of understanding and accommodation and show signs of perhaps putting its weight once again behind the government despite its reservations which were born out of what they perceived were signs of President Sirisena and Premier Wickremesinghe dawdling around with the pledges of Yahapalanaya instead of getting on with the work of bringing to book the swindlers of the nation's wealth and destroyers of the nation's ...and media's – democratic rights including the basic and holy right to life and freedom of peaceful, bona fide association for a just cause. The phrase 'just cause' is used here in the context of sincerity of purpose in an attempt to right a wrong that has deliberately and with mala fide intent been imposed on the people. Protest cannot be deemed to be just when it is against a measure implemented by the government for what is transparently meant to be for the good of the people and the country as a whole in an effort to turn the country around and away from the precipice of geopolitical oblivion, and global disgrace to a stature of honour in the comity of nations.

Not when it's intended to put the nation as a whole back on track towards economic emancipation. Not, we must emphasize here, for the vainglorious extension and sustenance of those lusting for dictatorial power that had a kept Judiciary, and law enforcement forces. Not for a despotically controlled oligarchy that had a kept media in addition to a brow-beaten one that was crushed into servility by the murder of its practitioners such as Lasantha Wickrematunge. Not when dissent is stoked against a regime that has restored all of these values and is gradually, in the face of destabilization attempts, creating an ambiance in which marginalized people can have a shot at a better quality of life as a people free of rampant crime under State impunity which in itself was no different – as a weapon of social tyranny – as that of Velupillai Prabhakaran and the equally subtle tyranny of a TNA that's exploiting for extremist ends any understanding it had with the UNP and pro-Sirisena SLFP to help vote them into power. The TNA sadly lacks the understanding one sees manifested in the patient and mature approaches of the civil society groups which helped vote the government into power. The TNA' stances will only serve as grist for the Opposition mill.

If there is one singular factor that can derail attempts at introducing a new Constitution under which all races can live as equal citizens without privileged regional homeland rights which detract from the spirit of social equity, that factor is the TNA, or at least, the TNA's political sham in claiming to desire reconciliation while in the same breath demanding a geophysical ambiance in which the North and East can in time be subtly translated into an effectively exclusive Tamil-Muslim region. And that approximates the Eelam dream that apparently was not interred wherever Prabhakaran's remains were. It's amazing that a man of Wigneswaran's stature must lend his once honoured objectivity and sense of justice at the Supreme Court to a terrorist objective couched in secular political words and phrases: Most disappointing, to say the least, when a giant falls off his pedestal.

Perhaps for the first time in the annals of diplomacy in this country, the Chinese envoy in Colombo, for obviously parochial reasons, paid an otherwise innocuous looking visit to Mahinda Rajapaksa after JO MPs led a mob in an effort to apparently disrupt the ceremony at which the Chinese Investment project at Mirijjawila was launched.

Rajapaksa was nowhere in the South when the mob invasion took place in an obvious bid to provoke government into a reaction that could be politically exploited among those susceptible to the subculture of mob violence that can be brought about by politicians adept at the art of de-individuation, making mobs obedient to a call to social violence. These are the emerging factors on today's canvass of Lanka's socio-political scenario.