The Island Editorial

Of that savage attack

06 February 2017

 

Last week’s brutal police crackdown on a group of undergraduates protesting against the Malabe private medical college has laid bare the true face of the yahapalana government. Saturday’s Independence Day parade was not complete. For, the police riot squad and stone-throwing government goons did not take part in it!

The Rajapaksa government did not care to camouflage its goon attacks on protests against it. Its thugs, armed with bicycle chains, swords and clubs, were seen operating alongside the riot police in full view of the public. Today, the yahapalana administration employs a different modus operandi; it obtains court orders and uses police like Oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible to crush protests; its thugs, immaculately dressed in white, throw projectiles, taking cover behind the riot police, as we saw recently in Hambantota.

A Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA) official has recently lamented, while addressing media that ‘the most intelligent students’ were at the receiving end of police excesses last week. One cannot but agree with the good doctors that police acted in a savage manner by firing teargas canisters slap-bang into the crowds of young demonstrators, but one is intrigued by the aforesaid reference to level of intelligence of the protesters.

Police are no respecters of the IQ level of their victims. If the professional outfits like the GMOA had protested against police attacks on student demonstrators previously and brought pressure to bear on successive governments to desist from using brutal force against them police would have had to act with some restraint last week. Students, regardless of their levels of intelligence and their academic disciplines must be able to protest without being assaulted by police.

It will be a mistake for the protesting medical students and doctors who back them to let the ultra radical groups with a disruptive political agenda to hijack their protest campaign. Those sinister elements are no protectors of free education or student rights; they are hell bent on plunging universities into chaos, which is used to fuel their bankrupt political projects. Their violence which manifests itself in bloody clashes, inhuman rigging and the attendant disruptions to higher education make even some of the students who qualify for admission to national universities to opt for private education either here or overseas.

Let it be repeated that it is not only the rights of medical or engineering students that should be safeguarded. Liberal arts cannot be written off as a liability. Unfortunately, attempts by successive governments to throttle this particular stream of education have gone unopposed by professional outfits. Instead of helping make arts graduates employable in the job market through the provision of required skills, rulers have sought to let it wither on the vine.

We stressed, in this space, on June 25, 2013, the importance of liberal arts education, in the wake of a despicable attempt by the then Higher Education Minister S. B. Dissanayake to curtail the university intake of arts students. We pointed out that a report, The Heart of the Matter, released by the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) a few days before, had highlighted the fact that humanities and social sciences provided ‘an intellectual framework and context for understanding and thriving in a changing world’. The report recommended advancing the humanities and social sciences in the US as in countries like China, Singapore and some European nations, known for promoting those disciplines as ‘a stimulus to innovation and a source of social cohesion’. It stressed the need for a well-rounded education where science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) were coupled with the humanities and social sciences and the fact that ‘all disciplines are essential for the inventiveness, competitiveness, security, and personal fulfillment of the American public’.

We argued in the aforesaid editorial comment that what was needed was not the promotion of STEM at the expense of liberal arts but an education system that facilitated the cross pollination of all disciplines for the benefit of students who needed to be equipped to face multifarious challenges in life. It is a pity that no professional organisation has resisted attempts by successive governments to do away with liberal arts. Nobody took on the government when it stopped the registration for external arts degrees!

Free education cannot be protected by selectively advocating the rights of students in the streams like medicine, engineering and law alone. In most cases, liberal arts students are those from rural backwaters, who are denied their right to pursue science education. Their rights also matter! Above all, as many as 125,000 out of about 150,000 students who qualify for university education in all streams cannot achieve their higher education goals as the state universities are not equipped to accommodate them. The onus is on professionals who have benefited from free education to take up cudgels for the rights of these hapless students.

Meanwhile, the government leaders must exercise control over their dirty tongues without provoking those who have lost a crucial legal battle against the Malabe private medical school, and try to evolve a solution. After all, they have a history of holding talks with even terrorists. What needs to be done urgently is to pour oil on troubled waters and not add insult to injury.