What can each of us do to end race-hate?
View(s):We read almost every day about how injury has been added to insult in the new war on minorities. And we wonder, why now? why again? what can we do to stem the tide and stop the rot? If we are honest, many (if not most) of us vent in anger or sigh in frustration – and return to our humdrum lives in which nothing important happened, nothing significant needs to be challenged and changed, and no one can or will or shall try at least to make the much-needed difference. We have bought the lie that we few can do little – if anything – to shape the ends of our nation’s destiny. I beg to differ. There are ways to get about saving our country from another unnecessary holocaust which you and I hold closer than we think. Here are a few of those ways…
We must actively recognise, by vocally and visibly championing, the right of people of diverse ethnicities to express their views in the public discourse – rather than (both we and they) remain silent in fear of repressive retaliatory responses from any regime. We can do this on a soapbox in a market square or take the professional-academic route of strategically targeted communications.
We must endorse the right of competing nationalisms to responsibly air their respective grievances vis-à-vis the dominant majoritarian ethic. When one of the many minorities in Sri Lanka today comes under threat of oppression or persecution, we all do, even those among the majorities who disagree, but whose silence is construed as consent. This type of public discussion (an independent nation talking to itself) still remains a viable way to counter ethnic nationalism’s growing threat in a post-war post-democratic milieu. The free media – what’s left of it – can and must use this opportunity to regain its credibility.
We must create a national debate about the validity and advisability of subscribing to the insidious ethno-nationalist worldview that a few racists running amok (or “running a-monk”) espouse. This will mean to show theories of favoured ethnic descent, notions of racial purity, and assumptions about majoritarian superiority to be scientifically untenable, spiritually unwholesome, and culturally unacceptable for a pluralistic polity such as we presently claim to be. The scientists among right-thinking Sri Lankans could lead the charge in this respect.
We must cause public opinion to gravitate towards an ethos in which the conventional wisdom will be that to be genuinely nationalistic is good, rather than the last refuge of pseudo-patriotic scoundrels. This is so especially as there seems to be a psyche which blindly subscribes to one of many competing nationalisms, sans any critical apprehension of their problems and pitfalls. Ask any vernacular newspaper reader, and he or she will tell you that this is just so. Could we all begin to critique some assumptions being made in the media?
We must impart some of the most sterling principles of genuine pluralism, by creating space and generating socio-political will for reimagining an all-new national identity. To shape such an identity using human, universal, or essential values – rather than ethnic attributes – may not be as idealistic as you think. Diplomats and ambassadors, this lot may fall to you!
We must champion change towards a Sri Lanka for all Sri Lankans – at home and abroad; where values like punctuality, hospitality, decency, are the norm rather than the exception. (Feel free to add character to this ethos, but only as long as these are non-ethnic attributes.) There will no longer be Muslim, Tamil, Burgher, Sinhalese, Veddah, or resident visitor; but an island-race in which everyone is potentially part of a new national order to come. All of us could do this: everywhere, everyday, everyway.
We few (can I count on you, too?), in Sri Lanka’s ultra-nationalistic climate today, as agents of common sense and conscionable goodwill in our once truly pluralistic society, have a key role to play in addressing and redressing ethno-nationalism. That many believers in our peacefully multi-cultural multi-religious milieu have remained silent is a severe indictment of the urban and suburban middle classes.
It is an early warning that the only salt left may have lost its savour. Those among us called to shed light on the issue may be guilty of hiding their illumination under prudence, propriety, and pusillanimity – concealing a stultifying apathy and a staggering ignorance. We seem to neither know nor care. As urban middle class leaders sensitive to the issue and its ramifications have observed, we will all pay heavy prices if chauvinism continues to rule over Sri Lanka. The urban and suburban middle classes have to act. The time is now. Tomorrow may be too late for the island-race we love so much to lose it to war-mongers and purveyors of race-hate.
We watch and sigh in frustration, even as ethno-nationalist chauvinism is the fuel fanning the flames of Sri Lanka’s erstwhile ‘ethnic problem’. What the urban middle class can – and must – do, say, feel, think, teach, preach, reflect, critique, challenge, and pray about vis-à-vis this phenomenon in its day and age, in the here and now, is very clear to all. For as regards another holocaust on a possibly not-so-distant horizon, the writing is on the wall.
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