The Government In The Nude: A Revolting Sight

News from Sri Lanka had been disquieting for the last several months
with the escalation of conflict, the collapse of the rule of law and
the protection of fundamental human rights. It was also becoming clear
that the government was rapidly taking leave of its senses and losing
sight of any moral compass that it may have possessed.

That, however, did not prevent widespread double-takes and sheer
incredulity that greeted the Neanderthal antics reported today, of the
expulsion of Tamil people of North-eastern origin from Colombo,
enforced, SS-style, by the police. It is possible to cite chapter and
verse the violation of international human rights and humanitarian law
as well as Sri Lanka's own constitutional rights that this kind of
executive action entails. Basic expectations of the rule of law and
citizenship such as equal treatment and non-discrimination, civil
rights such as freedom of movement and the fundamental personal
liberty not to be harassed by the State have been denuded.

But these legal niceties have no traction in a society suffering under
the jackboot of a government whose insouciance, even sadistic
pleasure, in contra-constitutional conduct requires no retelling.
After all, the intentional violation of the constitution by the
deliberate nullification of the Seventeenth Amendment would have
attracted impeachment proceedings in any constitutional democracy.
Likewise, the government's relaxed complaisance with regard to a
mounting epidemic of abductions and extra-legal executions would have
elicited shock and revulsion elsewhere.

However, the crudeness and post facto self-righteousness of the
herding and bussing of Tamils from Colombo - including in one farcical
moment the assertion by Keheliya Rambukwella that only 250 Tamils were
rounded up as opposed to upwards of 500 according to media reports -
in the pursuit of the Final (military) Solution is in a deplorable
class of its own. That a police spokesman defended the government's
action on the basis that these Tamil people 'had no valid reason' to
be in Colombo is chilling proof of what has now become a Police State
pure and simple.

This attempt at ethnic cleansing, for it cannot be called anything
else - recalling such moments of infamy as when the government shipped
Tamils in Colombo to the Northeast in the wake of the 1983 communal
pogrom and when the LTTE evicted Muslims overnight from the Jaffna
peninsular in 1990 - lays bare the moral perversion and degradation of
humanity this government is capable of. The spittle-flecked ranting of
such figures as Champika Ranawaka and their theories of supremacist
racial eugenics could, until recently, be dismissed as the noxious
vapours of the lunatic fringe of Southern politics.

Now, these people are in charge of the government and wield the power
of the State, unconstrained by anything so inconvenient as the rule of
law or an independent judiciary.

What is so bloodcurdling in the menace represented by Rajapakse,
Weerawansa, Ranawaka and other high priests of pseudo-patriotism and
ethnic antagonism is that they represent merely the more unsavoury
(but now increasingly respectable) aspect of a more widely held
majoritarian nationalism among Sinhala Buddhists, which is unable to
contemplate the principle of equality of Tamils and minorities vis-à-
vis membership in the polity. The wellsprings of this ingrained
nationalism in the Sinhala Buddhist psyche are both historical and
ideological - founded on a mythological hagiography and religion used
as a means of political mobilisation. As with nationalisms elsewhere
they involve economy with the truth, intolerance both of diversity and
dissent, and a profoundly anti-democratic tendency to
authoritarianism.

And as with nationalisms elsewhere, it eviscerates society of moral
decency and vitality and when politically dominant in democratic
settings, has a remarkable capacity to secure, sometimes without, but
quite often with recourse to legal and violent enforcement, the
suspension of the collective conscience of ordinary people. That is
how national-socialism was possible in Germany and apartheid in South
Africa, and how sheer evil and inhumane immorality rendered legal and
acceptable over an entire generation. It is neither hysterical nor
apocalyptic to state that this is what is happening in Sri Lanka
today. And to pre-empt the usual argument about the LTTE's record of
human rights violations: what we are talking about is a democratically
elected government of an ostensibly constitutional State, not an
organisation branded as terrorists by the international community and
whose evils the government reminds us on a daily basis, lest we
forget.

The State has been hijacked and all its appurtenances are being
liberally used in entrenching this ideology, including the rejection
of inconvenient democratic values, bar the reification of
majoritarianism. The violence done to our capacity to live peacefully
and the prospects for reconciliation may not be repairable. It will
reopen festering wounds and leave deep and abiding scars upon our
polity, and aspirations to peace and prosperity cruelly mocked and
retarded. The dehumanising of fellow Sri Lankans distinguished by
ethnicity that the expulsion of North-eastern Tamils temporarily
resident in Colombo reflects, and the casual and cavalier complacence
of Sri Lankans in the face of this outrageous abuse of the authority,
indeed the very purposes, of the State, reduces us to moral pygmies
unable to overcome callous self-absorption. It tells us how thinly
close to the surface the conditions that made July 1983 possible in
our society are. Picking up the pieces after this government's
handiwork, quite literally because there is no better guarantor of the
LTTE's pursuit of secession than a government such as this (and
indeed, the compelling validation by the expulsion of Tamils from
Colombo of that central pillar of the Tamil nationalist project - the
concept of the Tamil homeland), does not have to be the necessary
destiny of Sri Lanka. But it is increasingly looking inexorable.

What this depraved government is doing thus is nothing less than
defecating on the social conscience of Sri Lankan society and
shredding apart its soul. The utter desecration in this process of the
ethical precepts of the Buddhist philosophy is tragic, but merely
incidental. How we emerge from the trauma of this rape of our social
fabric and the pillage of our historical patrimony of rich diversity,
one can only guess. In a dreadful realisation of the barbarian
invasion described in Constantine Cavafy's famous poem 'Waiting for
the Barbarians', Sri Lanka is now well and truly ruled by the
barbarians, and Cavafy's hope of deliverance from this terrible fate
has been extinguished. Ensconced in ethereal Nirvana, what Siddhartha
Gouthama thinks of what is being done in his name by self-appointed
defenders of his dharma in an incendiary pursuit of the earthly ipse
dixit of the Dharmadveepa, is a no-brainer. If this is what political
Buddhism and nationalist exclusivism has done to ahimsa, mettha,
muditha and karuna, what remains to be seen is whether we are at least
capable of the shame - the lajja - that can be our redemption.

Published: Jun 08, 2007 13:58:03 GMT

Comments [ 1 ]:

Thanabal from Sweden on Jun 08, 2007 14:14:01 GMT

Don't sweat too much. MR is helping Pirabaharan in making the Eelam
comes true. Tamils have been send to their HOMELAND only. Got it pal.
THE MESSAGE IS LOUD AND CLEAR THAT TAMIL HOMELAND DOES EXIST.