By Malinda Seneviratne
I am against capital punishment. It is an abhorrent practice against which I have argued tirelessly. In 1995, Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra introduced a bill in parliament seeking to enforce the death penalty. The consensus among our parliamentarians was that the rising crime rate was due to the death penalty not being enforced and that things would dramatically change if convicted people were duly hanged. The majority of the public, if we were to go by their apathy, seem to agree. I don’t. This is however not an essay against the death penalty. It is a commentary on violent death, murder and how vulnerable we are as a society to these things.

We all know that elections are plagued with violence. From the moment parliament is dissolved, it is the "accepted" practise for candidates to throw their weight around, for it has become an axiom that power goes to the powerful. In the most negative sense of the word, that is. Sometimes desperate politicians enraged with dropping popularity and scared to death about the loss of power and the perks that come with it, can’t help but harass their oponents. From the simple matter of tearing up the posters of rivals to physical assault and murder, we have seen it all. And yet, we are complacent.

We had Mervyn Silva storming the Divaina editorial. The next thing we heard was that the man had punched a rival in Anuradhapura. Then we had Reggie Ranatunge and his men attacking UNP supporters in Minuwangoda. Yesterday, Ravi Chandra, another UNP supporter, was shot to death by a good squad allegedly following the orders of a prominent PA politician who is notorious for thuggery. The JVP has alleged that Chandana Kathriaarachchi’s henchmen had attacked their supporters in Nugegoda. The games, as they say, seem to have begun.

And yet, the people vote these people and these parties into power. Regularly. Is it because this kind of violence is not as systematically executed as was the political violence when the JVP and the UNP went at each other’s throats in the late eighties? Is the word "violence" associated only with times of insurrection? Or with terrorist attacks? Are there degrees of violence, soft, medium and hard?

I remember the year 1976 when the police shot and killed a Peradeniya undergraduate. The UNP made considerable use of his corpse in its election campaign the following year. That was to be expected, I suppose. The fact remains that there was widespread outrage about this single killing. Some people explain off the bheeshanaya as the natural product of two megalomaniacs having a free hand, Premadasa and Wijeweera. Not true. For there was a steady escalation of political violence from 1977 onwards. We had the ethnic riots, masterfully orchestrated by Cyril Matthew. We had the attack on trade union leaders beginning with the July 1980 strike. There were attacks on the democratic opposition in 1982. Two university students, Padmasiri Abeysekera and Rohana Ratnayake, were killed in June 1984. Nineteen eighty seven was when the first seeds were sown on the killing fields of Sri Lanka, with the signing of the infamous Indo-Lanka Accord. From then on it was a one-way street to hell in a hearse driven alternately by the UNP and the JVP.

Bertold Brecht has a beautiful poem about people being agitated about a single death, how there were still protests when the killing rate increased and how a deathly silence descended over society when the dead bodies started piling up by the hundreds. Maybe this is what has happened to us. We tend to mark violence on a scale, seek to pin a relative value on brutality and horror. And what about the families of the dead? Nothing. Just the loss of a loved one. Always, always tragic.

In the Mahabharatha there is a story about a Raksha living in a pond who captures four of the five Pandava princes. The eldest, Yudistara, is confronted by the Raksha, who says he will release the other Pandavas if he answers correctly a series of questions. This was one of the questions asked: "What is the strangest thing?" Prince Yudistara answers: "Death occurs every moment, it is present everywhere, and yet we think, ‘death will not come to me today’. This is the strangest thing."

Today, none of us are willing to accept the fact that regardless of our political persuasion, and regardless of the extent to which we are "political", we are all on death row. We are a people waiting in line to be obliterated by a bullet, a kick in the head, or a bomb blast.

Yes, people tend to forget that it is not just the recognised political parties and the independent groups that are "in the fray". We all forget Prabhakaran. The JVP and the PA, sadly lacking in an campaign theme, have latched on to the boring "ali-koti" story. They have forgotten the "kotiya-enava, kotiya enava" story. Still, whether or not the UNP has a pact with the LTTE, it is very clear that Prabhakaran has a stake in the election. When all is said and done, it is the Sinhalese who will be at the receiving end of his designs.

The Narahenpitiya attack was closely followed by a series of attacks in the Trincomalee District. The LTTE targetted both civilians and military posts. No one can tell when and where the next attack is going to take place. We are on death row. It matters not whether the executioner is a PA or UNP thug, or the LTTE. Once the bullet finds its mark, all talk stops. All speculation about who will win, what will happen, the benefits, the fallout etc., will end. There will only be an emptiness in whose hollow spaces echo the sighs of those left behind.

The question is, what are the people to do about it? As regards violence perpetrated by PA and the UNP, I suggest that we let the candidates kill themselves if they so wish. Let’s stay at home. The newspapers, the TV stations and the radio will tell us what each party promises us. It is time that "party supporters" realised that neither of these parties are interested in the people or the country.

I don’t think the JVP will go about bashing heads in the indiscriminate way that the PA and the UNP are used to doing. They will, as they have done, only attack those who are perceived to be weaker. In the universities, they readily shed the democratic cloak they wrap around their political persona in parliament. All groups and individuals who oppose and/or criticise them are beaten without mercy. During elections, they take care not to mess with PA and UNP posters. Only Sihala Urumaya posters are ripped by our rathu veerayas. Still, this is relatively mild.

And how about that mad executioner called Prabhakaran? What about him during this mad month of election campaigning? He knows very well that he cannot win Eelam through guns. Or with the Tamils. He is not clearly trying to extract Eelam through the Sinhalese. It is in this context that I find it appalling that the PA and the UNP have not ceased seranading racist Tamil groups and fundamentalist Muslims. The Sinhalese "participate" in elections only to the extent of voting for these ideologically and programmatically bankrupt parties which are then described as "parties of the Sinhala majority". They are, in the final analysis, readily sacrificed as pawns in the chess games that Eelamists play. I would say, "time to move on".

People on death row for crimes they did not commit do not have any option but to orchestrate a prison-break. The "prison" in this case is the UNP-PA voter-trap. It is also the "peace-trap" which strengthens the LTTE. We need to realise that "death" is not at our doorstep. It has entered our household. Time to make some decisions, I think.