A response to Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

June 23, 2013, 8:32 pm

By Sarath De Alwis "Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be clarity between two dark tingles?"

- Pablo Neruda

"Ethnicity and religion and their Ideological and political influences" was the title of a three part essay by Professor Rajiva Wijesinha published in The Island. Despite its ambitious title, the academic, Parliamentarian and leader of the Liberal Party offers only a marginal reference to both ethnicity and religion.

This long anecdotal essay opens up the strange world of the phenomenal reality inhabited by the Sinhala intelligentsia burdened with the task of critiquing the post war policies of state and national reconciliation or the absence thereof.

He begins with a broad sweep. "Ethnicity and Religion are perhaps the most obvious elements through which people distinguish themselves from each other." He then heaves a sigh of relief. "Fortunately, we in Sri Lanka do not have too much experience of this, though we should constantly be aware that the phenomenon exists, and needs to be guarded against. "

The curious observation he then makes indicates that he lives in a different republic from the one I inhabit. He says "What we do have, which keeps people apart even where there is the ‘utmost goodwill’, is barriers created by language." [Emphasis mine.]

The choice of the adjective utmost borders on the ridiculous and represents the epitome of hyperbole. With the Ravana regiment and Bodubala battalions on the march what we have is not utmost goodwill but mass hysteria of a lunatic fanatic fringe on display at their utmost. A raucous minority by sheer intimidation has intimated the vast majority of this land into acquiescence if not abject submission.

The barriers of language are not responsible for the new fissures that have appeared within our society. The present confrontational militancy has its origins in a new form of cultivated hatred. It is a new post war process of brand building by a section of Buddhists who have discovered that public protest organized in the form presumed piety can be an instrument of coercive politics.

The Professor knows it. Yet he fails to identify the phenomenon or express his opinion despite his stated desire to examine the ideological influences of religion and ethnicity. He is not alone.

Many liberal intellectuals and academics believe that the elimination of the LTTE separatist terrorist movement was not merely a successful endeavor of the legitimate state to reclaim its authority over a swathe of territory. They hold that the thirty year war that ended in 2009 was a just war. Therefore the triumphant state must celebrate ‘a positive historic event’ every year just as the French celebrate the Bastille Day or the Americans celebrate 4th of July as their Independence Day.

In this assertion they have an eloquent comrade in arms in the form of Barack Obama, who earned the Nobel Prize for Peace not for preventing war or ending a war but for his declared good intentions. They cite Obama who in his Nobel acceptances said that ‘a necessary war is a just war, and some forces are so evil that war becomes necessary to defeat them.’

If indeed this long war that ended with a cold peace was a just war, the necessary corollary that should follow is that it should produce just consequences. The first consequence should be that the peace that follows is a just peace. The ‘peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.’

As a confessed liberal, as a distinguished academic and as an appointed Member of Parliament Professor Wijesinha should examine how ethnicity and religion have become the arbitrators in determining the paradigms of peace, just or unjust.

In that process Wimala Wijewardene being a cousin of JRJ by marriage or that JRJ by introducing the resolution on Sinhala only provoked SWRD to up the ante by announcing Sinhala only in 24 hours are important non essentials in a serious debate.

When Emperors Ashoka dispatched his Buddhist missionaries abroad he was presiding over an empire that was multi religious, multi lingual and multi ethnic. [Ethnicity here is defined in the post colonial sense]

Yet, the introduction of Buddhism to Sri Lanka created a homogenous nation. That subsequent history made inroads in to that homogeneity is a verifiable truth denied with great vehemence by a substantial segment of the Sinhala Buddhist majority.

The Pakistan born historian Ayesha Jalal sums up the topography of the terrain that provides the happy hunting grounds for these zealots.

"The vibrancy of regional cultures, languages and histories, not to mention politics, throughout the subcontinent’s history disturb the confident claims of the most entrenched historical ideologies of centralized post-colonial states."

In present-day Sri Lanka the vulnerability of ethno religious minorities to possible marginalization is real. It is real because they are numerically weak. In a representative democracy which has more emphasis on representation and far less on democracy numbers are crucial at every level.

Our form of democracy is not the most conducive to resolve the demands of ethno cultural diversity. The moral superiority of a quasi theocracy acts as an invisible fist that asserts that ‘ours ‘is the righteous path and ‘yours’ is the path of error.

The debate on the provincial councils and the recognition of language rights are incidental to the main crisis we face today. Our laws must safeguard the right of equal treatment of all citizens.

I am no authority in political science. My knowledge of constitutional law is abysmal. That said, I find the following passage from a paper by Professor Li-Ann Theo Professor of Law of the National University of Singapore to be of extreme relevance to our present dilemma that calls for excursions in to religion and ethnicity as ideologies influencing societal conscience or behaviour.

"Constitutions as a political technology designed to organize power, are predicated on a distrust of human nature and a greater faith in institutions to channel and restrain power by setting the legitimate borders of government action….

… Constitutions are designed to be above populist passions, most notably, by containing counter-majoritarian checks as a form of a long-term pre-commitment strategy framing a constitutional bargain, along whose terms a minority group may accede to membership in a new polity."

Anecdotal reminiscences of manipulative politics of arrack renters who later turned to be rent seekers of the post colonial economy are of no consequence to the new polity that we desperately need. What we need is an act of faith or rather a leap of good faith in unraveling the spatial and ideological boundaries within our modern nation state.

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