A saga of missed opportunities
NOTEBOOK OF A NOBODY
by Shanie

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, which when taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyages of their life is bound in shallows and in misery."

Political figures remembered in history are only those who have thought and acted with a vision for the future. History is replete with examples of leaders throughout the world who, thinking only of the present, took their country and their people to ruin. Those with vision and foresight will seize the opportunities that present themselves if such are in the long-term interests of their country. Sadly, many leaders lack this foresight. They prefer to rule as if tomorrow does not exist, employ fascist methods to crush all opposition and like to think they have a divine right to rule and nobody should be allowed to stand in their way. By these methods, they lose touch with reality believing the hollow words of self-seeking sycophants who gather around them. In a dictatorship, such leaders will survive for a time by threats, intimidation and authoritarianism but at some point, they will be brought to justice; as Pinochet, the Chilean dictator was to learn. In a democracy, they will be brought down to reality sooner rather than later.

This is what has happened to President Musharaff in Pakistan. Although his position as President has not been directly affected by the General Election, his allies in Parliament have suffered a humiliating reverse. It was virtually a vote against the President. How the political scene will develop in the coming weeks and months is still not clear as the military intelligence services in Pakistan are very powerful. But it has lessons for our country too. The ballot is a powerful weapon in the hands of a people. Fascists have attempted to rig the ballot in the past, sometimes with limited success. But the people’s power will ultimately prevail.

Leaders in Sri Lanka must have the discernment to read the signs that are all too visible that the people are getting increasingly agitated due to the spiralling cost of living. There are also signs that parties with an ear to the ground plan to exploit the concerns of the people. In such a scenario, the Government could be brought to reality sooner than expected.

If the Government faces such a situation, it would have been of its own making. . The recent incident at the Rupavahini studios should have been a wake-up call – that people were getting frustrated by the naked abuse of power, corruption and mismanagement of the economy. But it has been yet another instance of a missed opportunity. By sweeping all the violence and abuse under the carpet, the Government fails to read the pulse of the people. The bogey of the LTTE cannot be made an excuse for too long.

President Rajapaksa needs to extricate himself from the quagmire in which his Government finds itself. There will be many sycophants who would say that all is well and on course. But the reality could be very very different. The more he depends on self-seeking flatterers, the more he loses touch with reality. This is what seems to be happening to President Rajapaksa. Having felicitations at Temple Trees, even for trade unionists, is not going to help his or the Government’s popularity. Good governance – by which is meant sound fiscal and economic management, adherence to the provisions of the constitution, curbing corruption and abuse of power and creating peace and justice for all people – is what is required at this time. Many opportunities have presented themselves for the Government to change course and move towards better governance but sadly all these opportunities are being squandered.

The Government is increasingly acting in an irrational manner. Two recent cases are the stubborn refusal to appoint the Constitutional Council in terms of the Constitution. The President’s claim that a parliamentary committee is in the process of reviewing 17th Amendment has no relevance to adhering to the 17th Amendment as it stands now. If so, the implementation of the twenty-year old 13th Amendment should also await the final report of the APRC.

This columnist’s plea for national integration has evoked a response from Paltha Senanayake (Island 23 February). The response only reinforces the need for national integration to be given priority. Senanayake repeats the Sinhala nationalist sentiments that were expressed in the fifties and which have re-surfaced in recent years. In the fifties, it led to the disastrous Sinhala only language policy which took twenty-five years and several anti-Tamil pogroms to be reversed. Senanyake claims that it was the Tamil leaders who thwarted a Special Provisions Bill for the use of Tamil and thereafter crafted the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact. Obviously he either does not have any understanding of history or wishes to deliberately distort history. This column stated a few weeks ago that S W R D Bandaranaike had a liberal outlook and would have wished to work out a reasonable settlement to the language issue but could not do so due to pressure brought on him by the Sinhala chauvinists and the obscurantist forces. When Bandaranaike presented the first draft of the Sinhala Only Bill, it had provisions for what was termed the reasonable use of Tamil. But the Sinhala chauvinists would have none of it and a University don staged a ‘fast unto death’ in the Parliament premises. The provision for the use of Tamil had to be dropped and only Sinhala was recognised as an official language in the 1956 Act.

The Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact was signed the following year. It provided for the use of Tamil language and for some devolution of powers to Regional Councils. This was also abrogated due to pressure from the Sinhala chauvinists. The Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Bill became law in 1958 but it took another eight years for the regulations under it to be enacted by Parliament. It was only in 1978 that Sinhala and Tamil were accepted as the national languages of Sri Lanka.

National integration can only become a reality if our people learn each other’s language and learn to listen to each other and to communicate with each other. Nowhere is this clearer than in Senanayake referring to the official Tamil name of the Federal Party. He says that the name does not use the word ‘makkal’, which according to him means federal in Tamil. Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with Tamils or the Tamil language will understand what makkal means. Surely, before he put pen to paper, Senanayake could have clarified this with someone. The direct translation of the official Tamil name of the Federal Party is ‘The Party for a Tamil State in Ceylon’. This columnist and many others in Sri Lanka see no problem with that name. It was after all what the Federal Party was agitating for – a Tamil State in a federal Ceylon. If there was no reference to Ceylon, it could perhaps have been open to misrepresentation. Senanayake conveniently ignores Tiruchelvam’s statement that he considered separatism as abhorrent.

Senanayake thereafter is guilty of the selectivity that this columnist lamented. Our country has been polarised to such an extent that, except for a very few, the people and the media highlight only the tragedies that befall the civilians amongst "us" and ignore the tragedies of the "other". This column pointed out that while the print and electronic media showed heart-rending pictures of children killed and of wailing mothers in the south, Tamil web-sites carried similar pictures of children killed and the anguish of mothers in the south. The plea was for people like Senanayake to weep for innocents killed both in the south and in the north, in the west and the east. There can never be national integration if our weeping is only selective.

Senanayake also takes issue with this column for criticising the terror of the TMVP. He says that a lot of people who criticise Karuna now, did not do so when he was part of the LTTE. That may be so, as much as there people who embrace Karuna now for doing the same things (child conscription, abductions, killings, etc) that the LTTE is also doing. Sadly, Senanayake seems to be one of them.

One final point. Senanayake quotes A J Wilson as stating that the Federal Party strategy in signing the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact was ‘little now, more later’ and sees something sinister in this strategy. Senanayake must know that in any meaningful negotiations between two parties, there has to be compromise. The parties compromise to arrive at a workable formula without giving up their long-term goals. In fact the preamble to the Bandaranaike–Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957 stated: "The Prime Minister (Bandaranaike) stated that….he was not in a position to discuss the setting up of a Federal Constitution…. The question then arose whether it was possible to explore the possibility of an adjustment without the federal Party abandoning or surrendering any of its fundamental principles or objectives…..The agreements so reached are embodied in a separate document." This is the language of statesmanship and political maturity. Senanayake must understand that no solution to the National Question is possible unless parties are willing to compromise and accommodate each other. Selectively blaming the "other" and an unwillingness to self-examine the faults in "us" will not lead a people anywhere.