Columns

The sorry sight of a meekly genuflecting Minister of Health before a crowd of militant monks in front of the Presidential Secretariat who were insisting that, ‘they’ brought this Presidency and this Government into power and that, ‘no Muslims’ were involved in that exercise is just an inkling of potential hatreds and misery that 2021 holds in store for Sri Lanka.

The greatest existential threat since nationhood

This is, mind you, quite in addition to the frightfully burgeoning covid-19 virus spread and the decimation of the economy. At a time when a calamitous global pandemic has crippled even robust economies, bringing the nation together to collectively confront what may perhaps be the greatest existential threat to its survival must be our sole aim and single minded focus. But what we have is the exact opposite with fearmongering, ‘magic tonics’ and political grandstanding ruling the day. Parliament and institutional democracy, which performs crucial though imperfect functions in steering the people through great national crises, are delegitimised while the Presidency becomes monarchic.

Clearly, excellence of performance and rational decision making, even when lives are at stake, is of secondary importance when the objective is to superimpose ultra-national, ultra-rightwing and ultra-military leadership over the civilian democratic process. This we saw in practical terms after the public health sector successfully handled the first wave of Sri Lanka’s covid-19 in March 2020. In appreciation of a peculiarly ironic kind no doubt for doing his job too well, the Director General of Health Services whose face the public identified with and had confidence in, was unceremoniously transferred to handle the subject of Environment.

Now military overlords have been appointed to each district to ‘guide’ the anti-covid-19 effort in what promises to be the final ignominy to Sri Lanka’s public health sector. In fact, there are interesting parallels with the chaos gripping the United States as President-elect Joe Biden poises himself to take control of the country in the coming days. Much of the tumult in that country, which has led to a poorer and weaker America and irredeemably reduced it to ‘clown status’ in the eyes of a mocking world was deliberately brought about by a coterie of right-wing fanatics, emboldened by as well as (undeniably) part of the Trump Presidency.

Refusal of the American military to be drawn into politics

Despite hard realities being stubbornly to the contrary from gold gilded elevators in the Trump Tower to golf resorts and an obscenely bloated Trump family chequebook fattening off public funds aggravated by public boasts of having outsmarted tax revenue regulators, the ‘America-First’ charade was astoundingly successful. Indeed, it remains so to the Trump base notwithstanding the 2020 defeat of their candidate. The delegitimising of institutions and the elevation of a strongman masquerading as a protector for the ‘marginalised’ common herd was a carefully manufactured construct that worked. It would have worked once again in the 2020 Presidential run if not for three factors.

First, the grassroots base of American rights activism hailing back to the Martin Luther King days of ‘I have a dream’ got activated. This was not through wildly tweeting diaspora outside the land or by hollering Opposition men in the legislative assembly, both of which Sri Lanka has (unfortunately) aplenty, but by getting down and dirty in the trenches. Trump’s defeat in Georgia, for example, is attributable to the formidable efforts of two black women and their teams, one, the Mayor of Atlanta who recently refused a seat in the new cabinet in order to remain focused on priorities in her State and the other, Georgia’s former gubernatorial candidate and an activist lawyer. Both held the line in their constituencies, to manage a narrow lead for President-elect Biden.

Though the outcome of Senate elections this month in that State remains to be seen, this was a notable  win. The ‘black lives matter’ protests which took American cities by storm, prevailed against naked racism. Legitimate doubts regarding the aptitude for visionary leadership of a (white) President-elect criticised as ‘too establishment’ and ‘too old’ were pushed aside as Americans, black, white and brown rallied against a leader reviled for being divisive as no American leader has ever been in history. Second, the credit goes to America’s military leaders who declined to be drawn into the power games of the President even as a conflict hit country teetered at the edge of civil war.

Uselessness of appeasing racists

Thirdly and perhaps most tellingly for Sri Lanka, American judges stood their ground, at state and federal level. Fears of a ‘Trump-packed’ Supreme Court proved to be in vain as each challenge mounted by the outgoing President and his motley band of lawyers to his 2020 election defeat was tossed out. Simply put, these are the threads that held the grotesquely twisted fabric of ‘We, the People…’ together. There is much to learn from these realtime lessons in how a divided nation survives, even narrowly and at the risk of a future implosion as the case may be.

But to return to that sight of protesting monks and a pitifully cornered Health Minister, there is an element of grim amusement to the spectacle if the context was not so inflammatory. The monks were agitating over not permitting burials of the Muslim dead. As a normally rumbustious Minister explained in muted tones to her gesticulating tormentors, the Government was being guided by scientific advice and this advice was to the effect that only cremations will be allowed. But there was a point that she missed in this exchange of ‘we are the forces which brought the Government into power.’

She may have educated the monks that, though the boast may be that the Presidency was won on Sinhala-Buddhist votes, the 20^th Amendment to the Constitution which reduced Parliament to irrelevancy was most emphatically made possible only by crossovers of Muslim parliamentarians. This was a Faustian bargain struck by Sri Lanka’s Muslims and their representatives with a Government which made no secret of its contempt towards the country’s minorities. Perhaps this bargain was not so much Faustian in the sense that one’s dissatisfied soul was sold to the devil for worldly pleasures but rather, a far more common or garden path approach of appeasement and pacification with a not inconsiderable serving of personal self advancement thrown in.

Between a rock and a hard place in the New Year

That is a deadly mix. We see its poisonous results in very many ways, ranging from the quite unnecessary hot air over refusal to cremate the dead to propaganda by private electronic media that covid-19 spread is largely due to Muslim communities. Even so, the Minister’s own defence leads to an evident dilemma for this Government. The committee of ‘actual’ experts, comprising virologists, microbiologists and immunologists which repaced an earlier sham committee, has recommended the eminently sensible option of allowing cremation of the Covid-19 dead but subject to rigorous health protocols including the use of virus impervious material such as non-bio degradable body bags.

Covid-19 has been categorically confirmed not to be a water-borne disease with contamination of the soil to reach levels of infection being, as termed politely by the experts, ‘remote.’ Leading voices from the Buddhist, Christian and Catholic clergy have meanwhile called for rationality, decency and humanity to be uppermost in handling of the dead. But while we are at Faustian bargains, this may be extraordinarily hard given the trade-off by this Government with its extremist followers in saffron robes.

That unholy bargain has landed it between the rock of racism and the hard place of a devastated country, economically, socially and politically. Unsurprisingly therefore, we approach a New Year with more dread than cheer.