Columns

If I have changed a word or two from Andrew Marvell’s classic poem “To His Coy Mistress” with its metaphysical conceits, it is for good reason. Yes I could hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near as I lay in a hospital bed earlier this month contemplating the tragic and continued happenings nearby as thousands of innocent people died as the government tried to halt a pandemic that it was not prepared to deal with initially and is now struggling to overcome.

Even worse are the repulsive and dangerous developments going on around the world as politicians old and new and others greedy for power readily use this worldwide phenomenon to further their personal and political interests and subjugate their peoples.

As I spent those days in hospital talking to patients and medical professionals and hearing stories of distress from many parts of the world they came from it was not hard to guess what was in store for many, as societies were being forcibly changed and some being reduced to servility. Time-honoured institutions that free people so admired seem, I fear, being gradually turned into instruments of subservience.

Riding on the back of the coronovirus a new world was being created in the name of a new-fangled ultra nationalism that is sweeping across the globe, from the Pacific to Europe to the United States. And as elections approach these forces become increasingly dangerous as they try to force their majoritarianism on pluralistic societies.

Just across from Sri Lanka, India’s long standing democracy is being put to the test. At various times under the Modi government, India’s democracy has been shaken to the roots as racial and religious triumphalism has threatened to end the country’s years of democratic traditions.

But India’s waning democracy, brittle in some states where laws are used to crush dissent, hardly supersedes the deplorable conduct of China readying to impose new laws in the next few days to suppress the Special Administrative Region’s independent judicial system and control Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal. The idea is to crush dissent and the freedoms that were promised to the Hong Kong people.

Even while China’s authoritarian regime was battling on the one hand the coronavirus which first erupted inside its own territory leading to widespread speculation that it was the result of experiments gone wrong, Beijing did not halt its planned crack down on Hong Kong and its justice system.

It was a despicable betrayal of the promises it held out to the Hong Kong people and the world in the international treaty that came to be called the Sino-British Joint Declaration that served as a legal marker of how Hong Kong was to function as an intrinsic part of the “one country two systems” formula that Deng Xiaoping had enunciated as a solution for the next 50 years.

Not only have President Xi Jinping and his communist cabal betrayed Deng Xiaoping who changed the face of China’s economic thinking, modernising it to suit global trends, they are now returning to hardline repressive politics.

It is not just China that is throttling freedoms and engaging in abrasive politics. Today Poland goes to the polls led by a party that is appropriately abbreviated as PiS and hypocritically named Law and Justice.

Poland’s president Andrezej Duda is a another rightwing dictator that President Trump to whom sanity appears a pariah word and continues to sow reckless chaos within his administration and in the country, holds to his bosom.

Is it any wonder then, lying in my hospital bed I could hear, as Andrew Marvell did in a different context, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. Time, alas, is running out as power-grabbers around the world manipulate to sink their hands into what is not theirs and destroy institutions that have over decades and even centuries provided stability and rights and freedoms to people.

I scoured news from several parts of the world for some signs of a return to sanity and a world untrammeled by political pestilence and peoples’ with a pathetic trust in a brace of amateur Machiavellis beginning to jump over the parapet in the name of reforming their nations.

In that hospital bed, too, heard the sounds of the winged chariot coming closer for, in the words of the poet Robert Frost, I too had promises to keep but seemed to have forgotten or casually pass.

If I look for a starting point then perhaps the most relevant would be at the turn of this century when I hosted a lunch for departing High Commissioner Mangala Moonesinghe and his wife Gnana who were returning to New Delhi for a second posting there.

I knew him from the time he entered parliament in 1965 as MP for Bulathsinhala. It was perhaps inevitable that our conversation with Mangala and my other guests turned to politics and society from the early years in Ceylon to current times.

As we talked and laughed and joked, Mangala struck a chord that I could not forget. Yet I have been too lazy or indisciplined to put it into writing. Mangala said that some of the anecdotes I mentioned were hardly known and in some instance known only to me and the other person.

He urged me to write a book and include in it some of the episodes I mentioned then as otherwise they would never be known and would disappear with me.

I said I would. When I met him again in New Delhi which I visited at the invitation of the Indian Foreign Ministry while I was with the Hong Kong Standard, he asked me how far I had proceeded with my book. I had to shame-facedly admit that I had not got down to it. But then Mangala is not the only one who I seem to have let down. Some of my university colleagues, close friends of mine, have been pressing me, almost each time we met in Colombo or elsewhere. Sarath Amunugama, a year senior, but from that time developed a close friendship, is one.

Another is Dr Nihal Jayawickrama, my batchmate and colleague at Marcus Fernando Hall and now internationally-known jurist and legal academic who I also met in Hong Kong where he taught law.

A third is legal luminary Faisz Musthapha, a former high commissioner to London, who was also a university colleague and with whom I met each time I was in Colombo except last February.

They are among several who come to mind as I rolled over in my mind those unforgettable decades in journalism and life in Colombo and elsewhere.

As they persist in saying not to let those memories die and those anecdotes vanish with the mists of time, like the JVP’s attempt to kill me in August 1989 and the LTTE targeting me here in London, I suppose they must be told.

Perhaps I should resurrect some of the political stories originating from associations with our prime ministers and ministers and later, presidents, some of our well known diplomats and memorable civil servants and administrators and my years as a diplomat and present them through this column — the Editor of this newspaper willing.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor, Diplomatic Editor and Political Columnist of the Hong Kong Standard before moving to London where he worked for Gemini News Service. He was later Sri Lanka’s Deputy Chief of Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning to journalism)