Columns

As I sit down to write this column on this gloomy day with grey, overcast skies and the drip-drip of rain since morning, the scene somehow seemed to have Shakespearean symbolism. Not exactly King Lear but the atmosphere outside seemed to reflect British politics of recent times — dirty, racist and personal, all wrapped up in tissues of lies.

For the first time since moving to the UK from Hong Kong 20 years ago, I did not trek to the polling station within striking distance from home. I have never consciously missed an opportunity to vote be it in Sri Lanka or even Hong Kong.

It is a civic duty I take seriously as I told my Hong Kong colleagues including a TV crew that followed me and my wife all the way to the polling station as though I was some crazy foreigner.

As I said to the TV presenter nearly 25 years ago, citizens in some other countries have died fighting for the right to vote, a fundamental right that should not be easily surrendered or casually abandoned.

Today the people of Hong Kong have become increasingly conscious of the importance of the right to elect their own leaders, though that right will remain heavily circumscribed. Hong Kongers are not their own masters.

While death and destruction have rocked Hong Kong in the last six months as protests over obnoxious, dangerous legislation have expanded into other demands, the underlying cause for this unprecedented outburst of anger and violence is the denial of promised political reforms that would have brought a semblance of democracy to a territory now under an iron fist.

As I sit here with another five hours for the polls to close at 10pm, wondering what the electoral results will bring in the morn to a disgruntled populace fed up of politics and politicians and the uncertainty it has brought to their lives.

It is both the weather and the trust deficit in today’s political parties and their leaders that has made me sit this election out. I do not have much faith in opinion polls having witnessed the polls upended at the end of the day in several previous elections.

At least the exit polls which have proved to be more accurate, coming shortly after 10 pm will tell me which way the country is heading.

Though I have been put off by Conservative leader Boris Johnson’s bluster and bagsful of untruths that have created uncertainty among the voters and the business community and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s political shibboleths and lacklustre performance, I would place my bets on the Conservatives pulling it off.

So, one is most likely to see Boris Johnson back at No 10. What is most dangerous and distasteful is his close relationship with Donald Trump whose racially-tainted policies might well contaminate British pluralism that is already being discoloured by creeping discrimination and ethnic taunts.

With more than 5-7 hours before the first results are due to trickle in and with time on my hands, attention turned to two riveting television programmes that focused on the unadulterated nastiness of politics elsewhere in the world and the transmogrification of an internationally-respected personality now vested with power in a state run by a military junta.

The BBC was telecasting the proceedings of the US House of Representatives Judicial Committee where attempts to impeach President Trump were being hotly debated and the minority Republicans were conducting a rearguard action.

As expected the irascible President Trump had dismissed the proceedings as a “witch hunt” preparing to oust him from office next November when the elections are due.

But Trump’s conduct since assuming office, his sacking of officials he himself appointed to various positions in the White House and state agencies, his angry outbursts against the media that refused to go along with him sheepishly approving his policies and his disgusting behaviour were considered unbecoming of a US president, the most powerful man in the world.

The basic problem with Trump is his arrogant view that he is above the law, that the US president could act anyway he wishes and that no law can touch him. That is not all. Trump acts as though he is not bound by any moral values — he could break away from any moral moorings that restrain his obnoxious conduct.

Therein lies the danger of investing leaders with so much power that they think that there no law or institution can hold them back. Even if there are limits to presidential power those who are power-hungry will want to break those legal restraints and dare anybody to stop them.

Sri Lankans would remember the attempt by former president Maithripala Sirisena in October 2018 to launch a political coup and change his prime minister and instal another despite the constitutional restraints imposed on him.

Eventually it was the third arm of the State, the judiciary that stopped him. But what if the judiciary is corrupted in various ways or driven to fear and is quivering in a corner.

There are numerous occasions when dictatorial leaders have cowed the judiciary into submission or have allowed judges to be corrupted or to corrupt themselves through greed and the desire for aggrandizement. There are examples from near and far that show the moral collapse of one of the three pillars of state.

Trump has fearlessly castigated witnesses before the House Committee even as their evidence was being recorded. That is classic Trump — no scruples, no moral values just the desire to stay in power any old how, even by undermining institutions and the legal system.

While Trump was playing the unimpeachable president, over at the Hague the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was defending her country Myanmar before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide.

What an unbelievable turn of events. Who would have thought that this internationally-respected activist for human rights and democracy who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace would end up defending a corrupt and murderous military junta that held her under house arrest for several years denying her the very freedoms that she was fighting to win for others.

How the mighty have fallen! When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991 the chairman of the Nobel Committee called her “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless.”

Well now she has acquired that power-though she cannot be president because of Myanmar’s constitution- thanks to a uniformed junta that has carried out a systematic campaign to eliminate the Rohingya Muslim minority burning their villages, killing thousands of men, women and children and exiling them to neighbouring Bangladesh .

When I served at our embassy in Bangkok in 2009 and beyond, there were many occasions on which voices were raised against the violence and atrocities committed in Myanmar and evidence of these atrocities presented.

How this once respected democracy and human rights activist and daughter of the then Burma’s freedom fighter and independence hero Aung San could abandon all her once cherished principles and values for power reluctantly handed to her so that the military rulers could appear in less dirtied uniforms, beggars belief.

Myanmar is essentially a Buddhist country. How those who claim to be Buddhist could unleash such violence in the name of fighting Rohingya terrorism only undermines their own case.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s words before the ICJ were hardly convincing. Naturally. How could they be when there is overwhelming evidence to prove the contrary.