Once upon a time there was a happy boys and girls club in Colombo. Made up of Anglicized young people mostly educated abroad, these boys and girls were quite conversant with the language of new liberalism. They believed they were somehow superior to the rest of the citizenry, more enlightened and thought they were put no earth to educate the uneducated, make aware those who were unaware, give sight to the blind, light to those in the dark and in short messiahs of a kind.

They were for the most part marked by a curse: their fluency in English went along with a striking inability to converse (forget writing) in Sinhala or Tamil. They probably believed this was a virtue. ‘English’ was their ‘comparative advantage’. It is what gave them the inside track in the race to access donor dollars for various ‘civil society’ projects/initiatives that really gave nothing to the targeted beneficiaries but allowed them to take home hefty paychecks.

It was for the most part a masturbatory and/or incestuous club. So their effectiveness in terms of changing anything was based on two things: whether or not they had the ear of the powerful (either in the Government or in the Opposition) and the fact that they threw parties to the expatriate community in Colombo (those who peopled UN agencies, INGOs and diplomatic missions). They did have sway in terms of the first of these hooks during Chandrika Kumaratunga’s tenure and later when Ranil Wickremesinghe was Prime Minister but lately have been forced to play ‘spoiler’, yes, by playing the second of these hooks.

For years they dangled what they first called ‘The F Word’ and later, gathering confidence, called ‘Federalism’ before us though it was a cure-all piece of heaven-on-earth. The people, i.e. the ‘uncivil’ in our society, essentially told these boys and girls to F-off in 2004 and in case they hadn’t heard properly repeated the expletive in November 2005. They didn’t get the message but the man they championed (Wickremesinghe) got it and quickly junked the federal-toy.

They then settled to fight the good fight, i.e. for the consolation prize. If they were not going to get the state scrambled in ways that pleased them then they would destabilize it. That seemed to be the plan. The options were quite clear. The biggest threat to the integrity of the state was the LTTE. The civil dudes and dudettes had for a long time sided with the LTTE, directly or indirectly, gone out of their way to legitimize that terrorist outfit and done their best to give Prabharakan parity of status with the President. Things had changed. It was damage-control time. It was time to take refuge in an old saying ‘those who fight and run away, live to fight another day’.

These boys and girls did just that: fought tooth and nail to get the Government to stop the military offensive. They wrote and wrote and wrote to the local newspaper and filled webzines and blog sites with fervent appeals for ‘both parties to put a halt to the fighting’ while urging the big boys in the international community to bring pressure on Mahinda Rajapaksa. They vilified the security forces, engaged in incessant name-calling, lied to the world about what was happening in Sri Lanka and made out that we were living in a failed state.

They failed. They changed their tune. They came to accept that what happened on May 18, 2009 could not be reversed, that the LTTE had indeed been crushed. What next? They talked about fine-tuning the systems of governance, democratization and for the first time used a term that they never dreamed they would utter, ‘post-LTTE’.

Then Sarath Fonseka announced that he wanted to be President. This had a strange effect on our ‘civil’ society. They were caught unawares. Those who had vociferously pleaded with anyone who was willing to listen that they should work day and night for change’ were now presented with an outside chance. Their darling, Ranil Wickremesinghe, was backing Fonseka. Fonseka was seen as a more credible candidate than Ranil. He was promising constitutional reform. He said he would abolish the executive presidency. He said he will eliminate corruption. He has been speaking the language of ‘good governance’. He hates the Rajapaksas. A lot of common ground, one would think.

What’s the problem then? Simple: Fonseka was a soldier. He was part of the high-command that executed the war and defeated the bigger darling of civil society, Prabhakaran. In the last weeks of the war, these boys and girls were crying copious tears about human rights being violated. Then they shouted themselves hoarse about the conditions in IDP facilities. Fonseka was part of those they believed were guilty of such crimes. It was not easy to back the man.

So what do we have now? We have people like Jehan Perera and Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu keeping mum (for the most part) and when they do say something it’s so wishy-washy that it can be taken to mean everything or nothing, usually the latter.

It’s just three weeks from the election and most commentators are pretty clear on where they stand regarding the issues they believe are important and of course the candidates. Our civil society boys and girls are still doing a number that we call hora gal ahulanawa in Sinhala. Their antipathies towards the President are clear and they reiterate these, albeit in softer tones than was used before the LTTE was taken out of the political equation.

This is a key election. There is no way that any political analyst worthy of that tag could be as vague as the Jehans and Saravanamuttus have been. Important issues are being discussed these days and they can’t get themselves to do anything more than mumbling some precious nothings.

These are ladies and gentlemen who love riding the moral high horse. They love being above the rest. They love pretending that they fell from the sky and that somehow that are above party line when in fact they are as thick as thieves with the card-carrying members of this or that party.

I am not saying that Jehan or Saravanamuttu or anyone else in the ‘Civil’ Society Club should back one or the other of the main candidates. They should stop the hora gal ahulana business though. They can come out and criticize, they can weigh the pros and cons of each option, they can do what perhaps one would expect such ‘neutrals’ to do: take the ‘principled’ stand of objecting to substance being trashed in favour of rhetoric, invective and unadulterated malice.

They can push the logic of a protest vote, mobilize support for a candidate who has not compromised on the principles they claim to cherish. Why aren’t they doing this? Why aren’t they championing the candidature of someone like U.B. Wijekoon, Sivajilingam, Wickramabahu or Siritunga? Is it that they are essentially playing safe?

These ladies and gentlement need to understand that in politics one cannot be ‘absent’. When one is ‘absent’ it is a deliberate choice. It is a ‘presenting’ of sorts, it is a statement, an affirmation of a particular position.

I must admit that I am amused by the girly-boy kind of disposition that is fairly apparent in these people right now; they are twirling around this way and showing a political coyness that is quite at odds with their vociferous true-selves.

On the other hand, they have to understand that what they are saying by not saying, what they are doing by not doing and where they are when they absent themselves are not going unnoticed.

One can’t be absent in the political discourse. There is respect for those who take a stand, even if one disagrees with the particular individual or the position he/she takes; but hora gal ahulana udaviya are essentially seen as the worst kind of political actors/commentators.

Something has got the tongues of these once loud and obnoxious individuals. I wonder what.