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By Susantha Goonatilake

Lanka thinks with brains drained unlike India
India may or may not have attacked Kashmir in the recent stand-off with Pakistan, but she prepares carefully. Her military and civilian brains whirr, weighing options, selecting outcomes. A report said it was even studying the ancient text Kautilya's Arthsasatra, just like the Chinese strategists still study their ancient text The Art of War. Before he went on his campaigns, our King Parakramabahu too had studied Kautilya.

Indian preparations in international relations began even before she got Independence. She had her first study group on international relations in 1943. Since then she has developed many centres that study other countries. One such centre, India's leading University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) arose out of an initiative taken by her Foreign Ministry. Sri Lanka alone is studied by groups in Delhi, Chennai, Jaipur, Calcutta and Chandigargh. Last year at the 8th International Conference on Sri Lanka Studies in Jaipur there were nearly fifty Indian researchers engaged in research on Sri Lanka. They were drawn from academia, the military and her foreign office.

In Sri Lanka, the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies began 25 years ago with much hope. The newly formed off-shoot of our Foreign ministry, the Institute of International Relations recently had its first, house full, public meeting hosting the Indian scientist M.S. Swaminathan. When I mentioned to the Institute's Director Ambassador Sarala Fernando that Professor Karosi Singh, who had organized the Jaipur meeting and who heads its South Asia Studies Centre was in town, she suggested that I bring him along to address her colleagues. Here is an institute in the making and the half dozen audience was largely newer, freshly scrubbed eager recruits, the outcome of Kadirgamar's attempt to create a meritocracy as opposed to the ethnic catchers which an earlier Minister Hameed had tried to plant.

Singh traced India's attempt from the 1940s to build its study capacity through various centres. Singh described how Sri Lanka had attracted much international academic interest and that for its size, there were many books devoted to our problems. What he failed to add was that a large percentage of these books were in anthropology, an iffy Alice-in-Wonderland subject unsuited to examine our current problems and foreign relations. Singh was asked if a large number of Indians (and others) were studying Sri Lanka, how many Sri Lankans were studying India. Answer: none. And one should add: no specialists also on any other country. Fifty years after Independence, we do our foreign relations in an academic vacuum.

Two months ago the Australian Broadcasting Corporation did a twenty minute live interview with me in its current affairs programme "Late Night Live" on my recent book Anthropologizing Sri Lanka. The interviewer Phillips Adams accepting my central point that most anthropology studies on Sri Lanka were varieties of fiction that fail the most basic criteria of journalist reporting, asked how these writers could get away with it.

Weren't there in the universities anyone who would point out this fiction, was his implied question. The answer sadly is that hardly any in our universities read these tracts, because the books are not available.
I found in the Colombo University Sociology Department that these books on Sri Lanka are not available. The situation I find is no different in other universities. I volunteered at Colombo to get all the key books bought, with however one condition that like other disciplines they have a professional body and hold regular seminars. No takers.

This week a Lord Haw-Haw accented alleged "alternative" establishment group showcases the Belgian experience to us, just as similar groups earlier showcased asymmetrical devolution and the case of Canada. No one gives the contrary examples like Japan, Germany, the USA or France. Carefully pre-selected information is presented to a vacuous public.

While these circuses take place in the South, Jaffna dons it is reported, trek this week to Vanni to get instructions of the Sun God Prabhakaran himself. They following in the footsteps of the academics that bowed down to total dictators like Hitler and Kim Il Sung will now attempt to justify Tiger tyranny. These are to be contrasted with the PA academic hacks that got large sums of Norwegian money for the same Tiger ends. The latter through programmes like Sudu Nelum drained Southern will to resist Tiger tyranny.

The vacuum of informed discussion in the national interest is truly amazing. We are doing foreign and local policy with our academic hands tied behind our backs. Now that we have sold our soul to the alleged international community, it is time to import Western experts to teach us how to define and defend our real self interest. They will do a better job than the empty heads now masquerading as analysts.

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