The Government has convincingly decimated the LTTE along with its howling demons of irrationalism. With that, a number of uncomfortable truths have been revealed. One of them is the abject failure of the so-called Western intellectuals in Sri Lanka (who were carrying water for the LTTE), to fathom what was going on in the country. They have been exposed in their utter nakedness; it is hardly a pretty sight! These pathetic dupes, wittingly or unwittingly, provided a cover for the unspeakable bestialities loosed upon our society by the LTTE (It has to be pointed out that only some of them were on the LTTE payroll) .They were freely throwing around words such as civil society, rule of law and democratic polity in our face as if these terms were justificatory synonyms for murderous terrorism. These colonial mimics were wearing the protective garb of radicalism; some of them were working in universities and others for various local Mickey-Mouse institutes supposedly dedicated to development studies and ethnic studies and media studies. It was evident that they were busy disseminating ill-digested and dimly understood concepts trotted out by their Western masters and benefactors. One such idea was that Sri Lanka is a failed state and a dysfunctional democracy.

How can a failed state win such a magnificent victory over one of the most brutal terrorist groups who had the clear backing of western powers and the international media, while increasing its popular appeal among all sectors of society? In fact, it is the first victory of its kind, and some prestigious foreign newspapers and journals have characterized it precisely in these terms. Sri Lanka is nor a failed state; rather, the idea of the state became a failed analytical concept in the hands of these self-serving mediocrities. As Giorgio Agamben pointed, the state as a concept is ‘over-burdened with contradictory meanings’ and only an inferior mind will seek to reduce it to simplistic proportions in the way that these offspring of Western confusions have sought to do. Concepts such as state, authority, cultural citizenship and security have to be re-thought; they are not simple and unitary concepts; they are multifaceted and complex and inhabit deeply ambivalent discursive spaces.

A curious situation has arisen in the West. The metropolitan pay masters who have been supporting these colonial mimics are now scratching their head and asking the question ‘How on earth did our minions get it so completely wrong?’ The answer is simple. There is not one - I repeat not one – among them who had the intellectual acumen to perceive what was going on. Even if they had, they lacked the moral rectitude to admit that they were wrong on the central fact that the Sri Lankan government could defeat the LTTE militarily. Their ‘theories’, such as they were, were built on the false and mistaken notion that the Sri Lankan government lacked the will, the ability and the stamina to defeat the LTTE. Events on the ground have conclusively broken the backbone of the desiccated theories that were put into circulation by Western ‘scholars’ of Sri Lanka and their local acolytes. The latter were far more interested in securing foreign trips and being regulars at cocktail parties and posing as radical intellectuals who were quick to thumb their nose at the supposedly ignorant and narrow-minded local intelligentsia. In fact, they continue to practice the worst form of neo-Orientalism as they happily dance to the tune of the colonial pay masters.

One of the primary targets of these West-worshipping ‘intellectuals’ was the so-called band of ‘Sinhala chauvinists’ which strangely included such writers as Gunadasa Amarsekera, Nalin de Silva, Dayan Jayatillake, Rajiva Wijesinha, Susantha Goonatillake, Nalin Swaris, H.L.D. Mahindapala, S.L. Gunasekera, to name but a few, as if they all belonged to a unitary group and came from the same profession and bedrock of purpose. Interestingly, these much- maligned chauvinists got it right; they knew exactly what was going on in the country and how the ground was recognizably shifting beneath their feet. The colonial mimics, on the other hand, were wildly off the mark. They were living in an echo chamber of their own creation readily endorsing each other’s delusions about a failed state and other wishful myths. They had, of course, the approval of so-called South Asian specialists in Western universities none of whom could read and write Sinhala and did not have the remotest feeling for the pulse of our society. The tired rhetoric, exhausted conceptual frameworks, the jaded analytical vocabulary, and the obsolete rules of practice deployed by them and their metropolitan masters should be jettisoned in favor of more homegrown thinking in tune with indigenous imperatives and realities. This is not a call for cultural essentialism or a self- restrictive provincialism; rather, it is an invitation to a collective pursuit of an enlightened and innovative indigenism.

It is clearly evident that a new area has dawned. These West-worshipping ‘intellectuals’ associated with various local Mickey-Mouse institutes and who enjoy the blessings of imperial academics in Western Universities (who are no less confused than their local minions), have become totally irrelevant to our current needs and concerns. They will, of course, steadfastly continue with their pilgrimages to Western centres of intellectual power to invoke their blessings and the concomitant vilifications of the government and the demonization of ‘Sinhala chauvinists’; they will conspire with crafty NGOs, and vile UN officials with concealed agendas, to undermine the achieved victories of our country. However, an anguished recognition has descended on most discerning people, namely, a new mode of thinking, realistic and sensitive to the local structures of feeling, is needed. A close examination of the body of ‘scholarly’ writing produced in English for foreign consumption in relation to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka will reveal how inseparably local knowledge production was linked to the insidious colonial power play. (The disgusting charade being enacted in Geneva in the name of human rights is only an extension of this mind-set and body of practices). They set in motion an ‘academic’ discourse that was saturated with crumbs of borrowed ideas and stale formulations picked up from the West. A profile of the characters who were busy prognosticating on the local scene, rushing from conference to conference, getting money from foundations, lecturing to the government, offering blueprints for national salvation, and all the time maligning the un-deracinated indigenous intelligentsia, would prove to be extremely revealing. The foreign "experts" who were writing books and research papers on Sri Lanka, while cultivating their ignorance, produced a body of work that was equally deceitful. Both these groups, who lived according to the Gospel of Disbelief in which Sri Lanka was condemned to eternal damnation, were embedded in a culture of deception and self-deception. This farcical situation that I have sketched demands that writers and thinkers and journalists who have up until now been branded as ‘Sinhala chauvinists’, and left on the margins, need to be brought into the national conversation in a vital and productive way.(Sadly, anyone who disagreed with this misguided bunch was immediately branded a chauvinist) They have earned that right by their perspicacity, courage and honesty; they stand vindicated. We need new sites of self-critical knowledge production, and the ‘gamayas’ like us who were shut out should be an integral part of these newer sites. To answer the famous rhetorical question, from now on, in Sri Lanka, the subalterns can, and will, speak forcefully. We should fashion new counter-practices of research that boldly challenge privileged Western modes and institutes of knowledge production and dissemination. These modes and institutes are vitally connected to the unseen hand of metropolitan powers. It is these metropolitan powers that now lie flat on their face still dazed and disoriented by the triumphs of Sri Lanka and fretting and scheming impotently in Western capitals. The time is ripe for an indigenous research agenda that would stimulate new discursive interventions. It is as simple and complex as that. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise – a little patriotism is never out of place!