Within these necessitous caveats, I believe Neelan-san that you would have indeed welcomed the President’s brief prefatory remarks in Tamil, where he speaks to us all in the languages of a new politics of a caring maternal state: Sri Lanka is a ‘mother-land’ for all Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims.’ The ‘war against LTTE, it now gets fully said, is not against the ‘Tamil people.’ Neelan-san, I believe that you would have further saluted the Presidential declaration:

You would have been second to none in applauding the Presidential call to ‘respect all ethnic and religious identities’ and to construct ‘a new society that protects individuals and social freedoms’ and anew imagery of Sri Lanka that rejects ‘any arbitrary, savage or brutal rule’ (emphasis added.) Yet, I still sense that you would have after all benignly questioned the celebration marking the sovereignty of the Sri Lankan state. This gesture of celebration would have remained incomplete for you without an alternate construction of the imagery of ‘constitutional patriotism’ far exceeding any triumphalist reading of the further Presidential remark that the ‘defeat in Sri Lanka of the world’s most ruthless terrorist organization in the world that is made up of all these deadly qualities can be considered second to none.’ At stake, as you would have gently but firmly reminded us all, no celebration of a new form of biopolitical sovereignty may conflate politically impermissible irredentism with any sincere regard for constitutionally-based legitimate autonomy movements as fully destructive of Sri Lankan forms of ‘democracy.’ Outside the immediate compulsion of the political event, I believe that the learned President may also have, after all, agreed with you.

His Excellency suggests with all ethically decent persons in Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, that: ‘At this victorious moment, it is necessary for us to state with great responsibility, that we do not accept a military solution as the final solution’ (emphasis added.) However, it remains a lamentable global social fact that, for weal or woe, we all now live in an era of the reinvention of the dreadful languages of the ‘final solution,’ privileging militarised politics and governance styles as the only, and even the best possible, prelude to social peace. Thus, any moral/ethical reading of the President’s Address now has to resolve some dilemmas constituted by the margins of extraordinary political generosity on the one hand, and on the other by the logics and languages of responsibility towards human rights vales, norms, and standards

A poignant question stands thus raised for any new envisioning towards a postwar Sri Lanka constitutionalism. His Excellency says thus:

We have removed the word minorities from our vocabulary three years ago. No longer are the Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays and any others minorities. There are only two peoples in this country. One is the people that love this country. The other comprises the small groups that have no love for the land of their birth. Those who do not love the country are now a lesser group’ (emphasis added.)

Of course remain writ large some deeply volatile contexts of the postwar Sri Lanka in the Presidential Address. Even so, as a friendly outsider, may I read his Address as not altogether canceling some very hard-won achievements of the justly celebrated standards and norms of international humanitarian law and human rights? Episodic political utterances, as international lawyers full well know, may never cancel international law conventional and customary regimes; the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties regulates the power of consenting State concerning any of unilateral denunciation of international law-making and framework treaties.

A difficult moment of reading posed at the threshold by the term ‘minorities.’ For one things, I so not know (though should know) how may translate either in classical or contemporary Sinhalese, Tamil, Persian, Arabic, or Urdu. I do know, however, about some nefarious difficulties that attend the Indian constitutional discourse that renders ‘minorities’ as alpa-shankyaks (literally, the official census constituted ‘minuscule’ peoples.) I may, but will not, speak volumes about how this diction has all too often run violently aground in India. Further, as you always stressed, systems of proportional representation aggravate any understanding ‘minorities’ as electorally constituted groups.

The President of Sri Lanka must be accorded the full dignity of discursive courtesy. His Excellency would have appreciated with John Rawls, the great and gentle philosopher of justice and rights, that plurality is a ’social fact’ beyond political acts of eradication and the tasks of constitutional politics always consist in fashioning approaches towards ‘reasonable pluralism.’ Surely, all this may not be achieved outside the matam aroused by the histories of dominance and resistance, of wounded identities, and some per-enduing histories of cultural belonging and pride, and the histories of violently imposed harm and hurt.

Further, we all know, or ought to, that the state and the law, must somehow know their rather severe limits in tasks of mediating ethnic conflicts; these may never be done to a point of denying very existence of the ‘old’ cultural, linguistic, and religious minority group rights, as well of the newly emergent ‘minority’ rights as different as those of the internally displaced peoples, sweatshop labour in Special Economic Zones, and the rights of people relegated to the orders of despised sexuality. I can almost hear you, dear Neelan, saying this much in your Parliamentary speech responding to the Presidential Address!

I do not think that it may be constructive, or even fully warranted , to analogize the Presidential remarks as echoing in some extraordinary ways the erstwhile British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s dictum: ‘There is no such thing as society.’ If otherwise, and in passing, I cannot help wishing that some future Sri Lankan Foucaults will, in course of time, produce as stunning a work as his Society Must Be Defended.

His Excellency’s further distinction between the people ‘that love the country’ and the people that do not’ and therefore worthy of as peoples of a ‘lesser regard’ indeed puzzles!. Incidentally, my life partner Ms. Prema Baxi, in an early reading of my draft texts of this Lecture, acutely reminds me that this phrase–regime of lesser rights may not be read as entailing no regard for human rights of the ‘minority’ peoples. I think you would probably have agreed with Prema, leaving a margin of appreciation towards His Excellency’s Address as allowing future narrative spaces for re-envisioning the multi-ethic and deeply plural profiles of Sri Lankan society.

By way of a marginal remark, I do not think that you would have been much interested in a detour that I now wish to briefly offer. Post-Auschwitz progressive Eurocentric thinkers, whom I rather fondly describe as A-to-Z (from Arendt to Zižek) thinkers regard the notion of ‘peoples’ as inherently capable of diverse, and often genocidal, appropriations.

Regardless, no moral reading of the President’s Address may suggest, I believe, any gesture of political refusal entirely condoning war crimes and crimes against humanity on both the sides of massacre and the politics of cruelty and impunity. These auspices of international treaty regimes, and even those customary law regimes of humanitarian law, fashion an ethic of ambiguity that allow, at any rate, vast margins of national appropriation, appreciation, and application of state conduct in times of peace as well as of war. Impertinently, perhaps, though in no way entirely politically incorrect, remains my act of saying today that any future renaissance of Sri Lankan constitutionalism invites now an end to Sri Lanka’s much debated vacillation toward the obligations under the Rome Treaty establishing the International Criminal Court. It is out of such acts of postcolonial prose of the ‘politics of friendship, even towards peoples worthy of ‘lesser regard, Neelan-san you would have surely said that the best possible futures for peace, justice, and human rights may thus be constructed.

Towards some future envisionings of Sri Lankan democracy?

How may postwar Sri Lankan constitutionalism my after all still speak to us of our ‘responsibility,’ or ‘response–ability’ towards ‘memory? Listening to Derrida remains important because he maintains that "no Justice" at all "seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present.’

Precisely because there are no known (pre-given) just ways to identify the ‘friends’/’enemies’ of democracy, the question notoriously persists: ‘Who/what may we exclude/disarticulate in limine [at the threshold] from an over-inclusive imagery of peoples worthy of a ‘lesser regard?’ I believe with Jacques Rancière (in his by now justly celebrated Ten Theses on Democracy) that ‘democracy’ always entails forever innovative modes of politics, which continually foreground the emergences of ‘parts’ of the demos, which ‘have no part’ in forming the whole43. In complete plain words and with a sincerity of obstinacy of politics of hope, I believe with you, Neelan–san, that the Presidential declaration may not after all mean what it actually seems to say.

Well-beloved Neelan-san, you lived amidst the pursuit of a new dawn for Sri Lankan constitutionalism amidst its thousand sunsets. Yet, you never relinquished the responsibilities towards the tasks of memory and justice, because you made worthy the very idea of constitutionalism in terms of morally decent state and society orderings. For you, the tasks of the ‘rule-of-law’ theory and movement always signified making State incrementally ethical, power in state and civil society, in all its hidden habitats, more fully accountable/responsible, and governance progressively just.

In this imagery surely you would have warmed, I believe, to the unfinished political work of matam via a recall of an extraordinary gesture of Ms. Priyanka Gandhi. Visiting with Ms. Nalini Sriharan, now serving a commuted life sentence for conspiring towards the assassination of her father Rajiv Gandhi in the Chennai jail, she memorably stated: ‘Meeting with Ms. Nalini was my way of coming to peace with the violence and loss that I have experienced.’ Priyanka Gandhi said that while she may not be fully able to ‘forgive’ her, she still strove to ‘understand’ her.

Neelan-san, perhaps you may agree that such magnanimity of moral sentiment must after all mark approaches towards new forms of Sri Lankan constitutionalism, as this did surely emerge for a post-apartheid South Africa. Put another way, how may we acknowledge in the contemporary contexts of Sri Lanka, and fully with Hannah Arendt, that political responsibility must entail acknowledgment of responsibility for ‘something I [we] have not done’ and for that reason ‘no voluntary act of mine can dissolve … my responsibility [of] membership in a group (a collective).’

Perhaps, this precisely also animated the Sri Lankan President’s moving invocation of the ‘qualities of Mettha (loving kindness), Karuna (Compassion), Muditha (Rejoicing in others’ joy) and Upeksha (Equanimity), which ‘the philosophy of Buddhism can present.’ It is another matter that a further reference to the great Thiruvalluvar, the legendry author of the Tamil classic, Thirukkural would have gloriously supplemented the Presidential invocation of the Buddha.

The question now is just this: ‘How may this great recall of the salient Buddhist virtues further assist the birth-pangs of new forms of a new postwar Sri Lankan constitutionalism?’ How may the noble virtue of Mettha be creatively crystallized in terms of a profound ethical concern now for the rather abruptly declared ‘non-peoples’ of Sri Lanka? How may the post-war reconstitution of the Sri Lankan society, politics, and the economy emulate the all- encompassing virtue of Karuna? In what ways Upeksha be achieved without fully piercing the regimes of politics of immunity and impunity for mass atrocities?

Granting His Excellency’s insistence that: ‘We do not have the time to be experimenting with the solutions suggested by other countries’ and therefore, ‘it is necessary that we find a solution that is our very own, of our own nation,’ how may we further envisage (as also articulating at the same moment the resurgent South African spirit of the Ubuntu) ‘a solution acceptable to all sections of the people? Put starkly, the question now is simply this: ‘What is to be Done?

I shall not conclude this conversation by any invocation of the matam of our esteemed good friend Roberto Unger, who asked at the end of his magisterial Knowledge and Politics the Biblical question: ‘Father, Why Hath Thou Abandoned Me?’

Rather, the elective affinities of our matam require me to ask of you, Beloved Neelan, to please speak to us all to us now, amidst the debris of our deeply wounded and wounding togetherness. I do so because you always spoke to us with the poignant urgency of the saying of the great poet–philosopher Schelling: ‘Tasks left undone one moment/May be restored by No Eternity ’

Thank you, Neelan-san, for remaining present thus this evening severally marking the politics of ‘unfinished grief.’

There is simply no way for me ever to express gratitude for dear Sithie-san, and all our dear friends, companions, and your successors, and admirers who still in troubled and trying times seek to preserve the gift of your being.