Sunday Times 2
Requiem for a supremacist
The presidential election is done and dusted and a new man sits in the chair, which the previous incumbent had converted to a throne. Sri Lanka now has a president instead of a king.
What follows after? Assuming that there will be a change for the better is not enough for the people of this country. The hope generated by this change must be converted to action and the new beginning taken to a logical end. Perhaps the promised general election, not far off, will enable the voters to make well-informed choices, with minds uncluttered by the assault of the repulsive propaganda with which Mahinda Rajapaksa unsuccessfully wooed the populace. Shorn of the kind of vulgarity and dishonesty displayed in the MR campaign — which was symptomatic of the corrupt governance of two decades – the general election may be conducted with all contestants competing on a level playing field.
Former President Rajapaksa
Rajapaksa’s defeat has suddenly opened a new window into the freedom of expression. Journalists are writing with greater candour, public display of disenchantment with a corrupt regime is more open and widespread and, overall, there is a discernible absence of self-censorship in the expression of dissenting points of view. It is as if a pervasive pall of fear has dissipated, overnight. Given that more than twenty journalists and allied professionals were murdered during Rajapaksa’s tenure, no writer or media person can be faulted for having exercised caution in the criticism of the ruling elite.
Perhaps, finally, the space has been created for the properly constituted investigations of these crimes, which include the murders of 17 aid workers, five Tamil students and illegal incursions on media institutions and representatives. The blatant human rights violations of a decade must be addressed and victims or their dependants compensated, not necessarily financially, but at least emotionally and psychologically.
There is also a refreshing transformation in the dialogue of parties — conventionally perceived as extremist or hardline — such as the JHU, JVP and the TNA — in unison articulating the need for reconciliation, consensus and political and administrative reforms. For the first time in decades, there appears to be a convergence towards consensus by groups, hitherto seen as being congenitally antithetic to each other. Formerly disparate and ideologically divergent groups have found common ground in recognising the danger that the Rajapaksa regime posed, to both collective and individual freedoms and ethical governance.
Now that the country has been relieved of the ball and chain of the Rajapaksa cavalcade, it needs to move on with necessary reforms to ensure that the dignity and norms of democratic governance are restored. It is also essential that the allegations of massive corruption against prominent administrators and politicians of the Rajapaksa regime, specifically named, are comprehensively probed and if proved, the people involved punished appropriately. All regimes in this country have produced corrupt individuals but the Rajapaksa regime has eclipsed all preceding regimes by an order of magnitude.
In bringing such people to justice, President Sirisena is faced with a serious problem. It is alleged that many of those politicians who have now sworn allegiance to the President, are those with records which warrant investigation. Already, there are demonstrations, seemingly genuine and spontaneous, in various parts of the country, insisting that named people are not admitted to the Sirisena administration. The new President needs numbers in his camp to ensure the majorities necessary to push through the reforms he has promised. On the other hand, he cannot renege on his campaign assurances for a clean administration and punishment for the wicked. This is a dilemma which will not admit a compromise solution.
We have a populace with short memories for the crimes and peccadilloes of favourite politicians and a general lack of concern for the ethics of those in power, provided they deliver desirable outcomes as, tragically, most accept immorality and corruptibility as the norm in a politician. To my personal knowledge there were many, educated, well-informed and affluent, who were prepared to overlook the very visible excesses of the Rajapaksa decade, simply because the roads were better, access to distant destinations facilitated through superhighways, or because Colombo had never looked more beautiful, combined with the easy availability of a wide spectrum of sophisticated and expensive dining and wining experiences .
In outstation areas the hierarchy of needs is different and one very valid and overriding theme in favour of Rajapaksa was the ending of ethnic conflict and the ushering in of peace under his watch. The majority of those who died in the fighting were sons and daughters of families at the lower level of the income tier and, mainly, from outstation farming areas, from villages with difficult to pronounce names like Kahatagasdigilya, Agunakolapelessa, Girandurukotte and Galenbindunuwewa. For them peace was an understandably massive dividend because it spelt the difference between life and death for kith and kin.
In Sri Lanka, as in many other countries in Asia, there is a literal veneration of the politically powerful and no politician has leveraged this aspect of the national psyche, as cynically and as successfully, as Rajapaksa did. The adulation, sycophancy and servility accorded to the politically powerful in this country can be nauseating to the objective observer. The rich and the affluent pay homage to politicians in the hope of becoming richer and more affluent. The poor and the marginalised do so for marginal improvements in their daily lives. The latter cannot be reasonably expected to be concerned with the ethics of those who govern them.
A factor that Rajapaksa had not entertained in his calculations was the weariness of the voting population with the shenanigans of his government and the First Family in particular. Leaving aside the silent but visible anger and resentment of the minorities which, in an incomprehensible degree of political obtuseness in a man with five decades experience in politics, he failed to grasp, there was also a growing disenchantment within his Sinhala-Buddhist vote base. Notwithstanding the mounting criticism from professionals, media personnel and groups of ordinary citizens — sometimes obliquely expressed owing to apprehensions of reprisal — and the serious challenge posed by his renegade colleague, he exuded total confidence of victory. His election campaign focused, not on righting genuine social and economic imbalances but on reviving the ethnic war and winning it all over again.
The reality is that the billions of rupees spent in massive infrastructure development in the North and the East failed to win over the minority. What Rajapaksa failed to understand is that this objective could have been achieved, at a fraction of that cost, had he, on conclusion of the war, instead of engaging in triumphal gloating and then imposing fresh shackles on a populace earlier enslaved and brutalised by the LTTE, simply restored to them their dignity, personal freedom, the space to mourn their dead unconditionally, and the lands lost to them.
This obliviousness to reality is a common feature in the makeup of most autocrats. They succeed because of their unshakeable belief in their self-worth and the ruthless and unscrupulous pursuit of personal objectives. They fail when this belief, this confidence, metamorphoses into hubris and are dethroned, when the citizens realise that they have been subjects of the State and that those whom they have elected to govern, have now become their masters and oppressors. Fortunately, in Sri Lanka, this was achieved without bloodshed and near total administrative and social turbulence, as in Iraq, Syria, Egypt or Tunisia.
The reality that Mahinda Rajapaksa must now understand is that he cannot return — and must not be permitted to — because with the repression his regime imposed on dissent now relieved, the suppurating underbelly of his governance is being exposed for public scrutiny. Every hour there are new revelations of mind-numbing corruption and the mismanagement and exploitation of State resources for personal consumption.Unsolved political assassinations are being revisited and suppressed investigations, revived. Even if MR did not commit any of these acts personally, he made it possible and consciously facilitated them, with his patronage of criminals who helped to perpetuate his power. The misconduct of the Rajapaksa regime must be given maximum public exposure, to ensure that the voters are not once again seduced by Rajapaksa’s insincere posturing and blandishments, delivered with actorish skill.
The presidential election was a triumph for democracy, in which a near totality of minorities participated as enthusiastically as the majority. For Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his loyalists, to project it as a triumph for “Eelam” and as a sign of danger for the majority, is to devalue the excellence of one of the most free and fair elections conducted in recent times, notwithstanding the vitriol generated in Rajapaksa’s campaign.
It is deeply entrenched in the Rajapaksa mindset that the minority must continue to remain unequal to the majority. His strategy was, and continues to be, a deliberate and unscrupulous attempt to stoke the anti-minority consciousness of the majority, so easily aroused, which led to ethnic discord and thirty years of bloodshed. Given that ethnic divisiveness — posited by Rajapaksa as “patriotism” — is to be Rajapaksa’s platform for a revival of his political fortunes, his return to power must be thwarted by all fair means possible.