Not even the most hardened cynic will deny that Obama’s Inauguration address was inspirational to a degree that exceeded anything attained by any political leader anywhere in the world, in recent times. I must confess that as I listened to him I could not help feeling a deep stirring within. It seemed as if he was addressing not merely his own country, and not even the world at large, but in particular, my own country as well. Surely, the cry must have trembled in a million Sri Lankan hearts, "When, and from where, will our own Obama emerge?"

Explosive power

The explosive power behind Obama’s heart stopping 18 minute oration came from a vision of a new nation he had laid hold of, which in the words of one of his great forbears, Abraham Lincoln, had been "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". I believe with all my heart that, if we are to regenerate our own land, that is the vision we also need to grasp.

One of Britain’s Sunday papers had done a word-by-word content analysis of the Obama address to determine from the frequency with which he had used certain key concepts, the general drift of his thinking, and found that the concept he had invoked most often was "nation"(12 times ), and the next most frequent concept was "new"(11 times). Basically, Obama had recaptured Lincoln’s great dream of a "new nation", and along with millions of other Sri Lankans I believe that, that is the very dream that we Sri Lankans need to dream.

Just as Abraham Lincoln set out to salvage a new nation from out of the wreckage of a bloody Civil War, and just as Obama has plugged into the same spiritual inheritance as Lincoln, and is today stepping out to raise a new nation from the shambles of his country’s arrogance and greed, so must Sri Lanka’s leaders today, plumb the depths of the nation’s own spiritual inheritance in the Thathagatha, and bend all of their energies, for raising a new nation from out of wreckage of their collective follies.

Triumphalism

However, a new nation cannot rise out of triumphalism for triumphalism is not only vulgar and coarse, but hurtful and humiliating to those who, for over six decades have been made to feel as if they did not belong here. Civil wars are the worst of all possible wars, especially protracted ones, because when one side has defeated the other, the victor has yet to bed down with the embittered "enemy", and unless he can find a way quickly to remove the causes that provoked the conflict and heal the wounds, the victory can quickly turn out to be hollow. In a brutal civil war, military victories by either side, do not engender reconciliation and integration. They only further deepen hate and consolidate schism, and healing and reconciliation will come only when the victor takes positive initiatives for achieving them.

Therefore, the paramount need of the hour is for restraint and magnanimity, for compassion and forgiveness. The haemorrhaging has to end, wounds have to be healed, and tears have to wiped from every eye, but those tasks require great minds and large hearts at the helm. They require leaders who have caught a great vision, a vision that goes beyond tribalism and lighting crackers. They require leaders who have a coherent concept of nationhood, leaders who are capable of rising above the pettiness and the enmities that have characterised our politics for six decades. Not least, we need a whole new vocabulary to illuminate our discourse. The crying need of the moment is not celebration, but a spelling-out of all those measures we propose taking for ushering the peace. How do we raise a new nation from the shambles of our past mistakes?

An organic whole

First, we must face up to the self evident truth that sixty one years after Independence, we have yet to emerge as a Sri Lankan nation, never mind dreaming of a "new" nation. On one side, we have certainly rediscovered what it means to be Sinhala, and on the other, as a countervailing response, we have intensified our feeling of what it means to be Dhamila, (sadly, in both instances, to the point of morbidity), but in between, we have yet to discover what it means to be "Sri Lankan". The long walk to achieving a Sri Lankan nationhood has been blind, lacerating, and unfruitful so far.

Secondly, we will not emerge as a nation until we concede that the nation of Sri Lanka is more than just the Sinhala people. Neither will we so emerge, until we realise that the nation of Sri Lanka is more than just the Sinhala people, plus the Dhamila people either. Nor will we so emerge, until we realise that the nation of Sri Lanka is more than Sinhala plus Dhamila, plus Moor and Burger. Indeed, we will not emerge as a nation, until we realise that Sri Lanka is more than all of these, plus Buddhist, plus Hindu, plus Moslem and Christian, plus the many foreign nationals who have made this land their home, and not even then! For Sri Lanka to emerge as a nation, it must not only include all of these people, but it must be greater than all of them put together. Sri Lanka must be more than the sum of all its parts, and more than a collection of marbles in a jar.

The nation of Sri Lanka must be an organic, living, pulsating unity, encompassing all of its constituent people, but it must also be something that is greater and grander than the sum of all its people. It must be a focus of loyalty and emotion, not just for the Sinhala people but for all of its component members. In a sense nationhood is only a concept, an abstraction perhaps, but paradoxically, a profoundly solid one. It must be a reality so firmly embedded in the consciousness of its people that devotion to it will transcend every sectarian loyalty, so much so that the words "Sri Lanka" will evoke from Tamil, Moor and Burger alike, as it now does from the Sinhala, bold and resonant commitments to its overarching cause. That I believe is what true patriotism is, devotion to the whole, rather than to any single section thereof, which can degenerate into sectarianism or racism, but it is up to the Sinhala leadership to facilitate that outcome.

Our Sinhala-Buddhist hinterland

This is not to say that plural Sri Lanka does not have a distinctive cultural hinterland. Let those who talk of pluralism never forget that every plural formation has a core, a "central zone" ( to borrow a concept from an eminent sociologist) that holds the plurality together and imparts to it its unique identity and cohesion, which in the case of Sri Lanka, is its Sinhala-Buddhist tradition. This is true regardless whether one is Tamil or Moor, Burgher or Malay, Hindu or Moslem, Christian or atheist, and its truth is not dependent on anyone’s acceptance of it. It is simply a historical reality, with which all those who constitute our plurality must come to terms. Anyone who denies that, must be either ignorant, blind, or perverse.

I say this not in the spirit of chauvinism, which, as a totally devoted follower of the Jesus Christ I cannot ever be, but out of a commitment to objectivity and truth, which my spiritual allegiance makes irreversible.

However, when we talk of the Sinhala-Buddhist tradition as constituting the central zone of the Sri Lankan identity, we must also not forget that the genetically, the Sinhala are as much Dhamila as they are Sinhala. If we are to believe our great chronicle the Mahavamsa, which many Sinhala do, our archetypal ancestors, Prince Vjaya and his seven hundred comrades, from whom the Sinhala claim descent, took Pandyan wives, which means that through our maternal line, 50% of the Sinhala DNA is Dhamila and our genetic pool is therefore equally Dhamila as Sinhala. The point I am trying to make is that genetically, the Dhamilas are not an alien people but are of the same flesh and blood as the Sinhala. Therefore, integrating them into our nation as equal partners is at least expedient, if not mandatory, and it is our failure to do so that caused them to want to set up on their own and go their own way, setting off a bloody civil war as a consequence. Recognition of that fundamental truth, and raising a national consciousness and an environment appropriate to it, will be the first task that awaits a Sri Lankan Obama.

Not a banyan tree

On the other hand, let us also never forget that our Sinhala-Buddhist central zone should not be a banyan tree, suffocating every other organic growth around it, and under which nothing else prospers. Neither should we ever talk of those others who comprise our plural nation as "creepers" and "parasites" as one Sri Lankan President once did. Nor should we permit the words, attributed to a military man recently, ever to gain currency, that Sri Lanka belongs only to the Sinhala. Such utterances are Neanderthalism at its worst, and must be banished for ever from our national discourse, and relegated to the sewer where they rightly belong. That is certainly not the Sri Lanka that we need to see born, and should our leaders continue down that road, as many of them have over the past sixty years, and many of them still do, it will only perpetuate the conflict and the blood letting that have marred this country’s progress so far.

The nation of Sri Lanka must be an organic whole, within which its constituent parts subsist, unthreatened and secure, in a symbiotic and synergistic relationship with the Sinhala-Buddhist central zone. It must be an organic whole, wherein no part, not even the central zone, is self sufficient, but where each needs the other, and draws energy from one another, and where they all live for the whole, and the whole exists for all.

As a necessary condition of raising a Sri Lankan nation, our indigenous Obama will first have to tame the rampant Sinhala-Buddhist triumphalism, and make it possible for the other components of our plural society to live in dignity alongside the Sinhala-Buddhist central zone. Regrettably, during the sixty one years since Independence, not one leader, bar Ranasighe Premadasa, himself an iconic Sinhala-Buddhist, has had a vision of an integrated Sri Lanka nation, (I know that this statement may provoke derisive protests, but having known Premadasa the man, shorn of his many masks, and even after allowing for his many failings, I can truly claim that that is the truth). Premadasa never pandered to divisive ethnic politics. Equally sadly, not only have our leaders, bar Premadasa, lacked a vision for a united Sri Lankan nation, but many of them have shamelessly sowed to division, and have exploited every vestige of interracial enmity, for attaining and holding on to power.That is why building a consciousness of unity will be a daunting one, requiring vision, intelligence, character, integrity and above all a profound moral commitment, unmatched hitherto.

"What grievances"?

One of the principal obstacles to building such a consciousness will be the refrain, " What grievances do the Tamils have? " Well, this article is not the place to answer that question, except to say, that if for more than six decades, a community known for their intelligence and ancient culture, have been traversing the globe complaining of injustices inflicted on them, and have been willing to lay down their lives in tens of thousands to have them righted, and as a consequence, suffer the most unspeakable privations, exposing their land and their homesteads to devastation, and lest we forget, simultaneously inflicting the most horrible barbarities on their opponents, it is rational to surmise that their claims may not be chimera, and that there just might be some substance to their grievances. If a thing waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, it is just possible that it might be in fact, a duck!

To be realistic however, even with an Obama at the helm, overcoming decades of division and mistrust, healing wounds that are still haemorrhaging, drawing the Tamils out of sullenness and sulk, remedying their long festering grievances, and building a consciousness of unity and oneness, will take several more years, perhaps even decades. Meanwhile however, an enlightened leadership can contribute enormously towards catalysing the process.

Enlightened leaders

Who are enlightened leaders? They are those who have caught a vision of a civilised society, framed in a set of absolute values, which are rooted not in the mass, or in the mundane and the expedient, but in the transcendent. They are guided not by popular clamour but by a moral compass, which keeps pointing unerringly towards fundamental rights, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of worship, tolerance, righteousness, equality, justice, integrity, fairness, harmony, peace and not least, freedom from corruption, and all their energies are directed towards objectifying those noble values within their native land. They have broken out of the tyranny of the mass, and their reference frame is no longer the rabble-rousing populism which small men exploit to ride to power. Rather, they see as one of their immediate tasks, that of educating and upgrading the populist mind. However, the populist mind will always resist any attempt by the enlightened leader to let those values intrude upon its fetid domain, but the test of his leadership is precisely his willingness, regardless of cost, to dilute those universal values into the structures of governance, so that they may start working like grains of salt dissolved into a bowl of soup. Seeing that there is a huge gap between the higher vision he is trying to objectify and the sectarian consciousness in which he is trapped, the great leader starts paddling upstream, against the torrent, however daunting the task. Admittedly, such leaders belong to a miniscule minority, among whom are Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Nelson Mandela, and now, Barak Obama. We may never replicate such leaders within our land, but we can at least hold them up as models constantly to be emulated.

May I at this point quote from my own memoirs, a passage that I think is very relevant, published in a recent edition of the Sunday Island,

"More than the power it derives from an overwhelming superiority in numbers, what exalts any majority community, and endows it with a true greatness and moral authority, is its willingness to guarantee to all those other communities who lack the advantage of numbers, a status and dignity equal to its own, and never to let them feel marginalised or disadvantaged because they are fewer in number, or because they are different in race, colour or religion.

Unless and until Sri Lanka can produce leaders who can realise that truth, and are strong enough to translate their understanding into policies, it will continue to be dismembered by conflict, long after the LTTE and Pirabhikaran have passed into history".

According to anthropologists, it was from his cave, some 250,000 years ago, that primitive man started his long ascent up the ladder of "civilisation", and from the very beginning, he fought ferociously to protect the sovereignty of his cave, albeit only with sticks and stones. Over the centuries the only things that have changed, have been the size of the cave, and the tools man has used for defending it, substituting deadlier and deadlier weapons for sticks and stones. However, regardless of the mansions he owns today, man has remained essentially a cave dweller, held captive within his several mental caves - personal caves, family caves, ethnic caves, cultural caves, religious caves and national caves, and he has yet to emerge from the cave mentality. Man is still in pre-history and the story of civilised man has yet to begin!

However, I believe that in the sublime teachings of the Thathagatha (by that I mean the doctrines enshrined in the Sutras and the Abhidhamma as opposed to pruthaggnana ( populist ) versions that make a travesty of them) Sri Lanka has a spiritual resource, which if properly understood, can dissolve the most stubborn cave mentality and produce genuine harmony and peace, and I say this with total sincerity, regardless that I have myself found release from my own cave, through another faith. Our indigenous Obama must harness his spiritual resources, and take the first tentative steps towards raising a united, righteous and just Sri Lanka.

Other gargantuan tasks

Besides raising a united and harmonious Sri Lankan nation, our indigenous Obama will have other gargantuan tasks confronting him, chief among them being,