A country that eludes definition
Prabhakaran has been totally destroyed in the New Statesman. Editorially, the paper says things to the effect that he is no more than a lucky thug, who has now fallen on lean times. But then, the Indian Petroleum Minister Manishankar Aiyer comes over here, and hands down a pep talk to all of us saying tht Sri Lanka should have followed India's secular experiment.

Indians and Sri Lankans together seem to never tire of debating this thing about Sri Lanka. The everlasting quality of this argument over 'secularism'' and the roots of the Sri Lankan conflict seem to prove only one thing - - which is the quality of the men and the women who are engaging in it.

There have been no men of quality who have been able to define the debate and swing it in their favour. In India Nehru was able to argue in favour of a secular state, and in Pakistan Jinnah was able to do the opposite. But in Sri Lanka, all we have is a swinging pendulum. Last year's UNP was very symptomatic of that, the chronological qualification being necessary because this year's UNP is totally different from last year’s UNP which was a vigorous party in power; not an opposition which has written itself off.

The UNP hopelessly succumbed to the church burning mania of last December, instead of taking a moral stand against it. The leadership got taken in by the tide, and lost the allegiance of both minority and majority in the process.

A friend mentioned the other day that Sri Lankan Tamils have almost totally been intellectually pauperised in the past few decades. There isn't almost a single Tamil today, he said, who is able to think outside the regular textbook technocratic mode. This he says was because education for Tamils was a means to an end. The Tamil social ladder became defined by education instead of caste, and Tamils began to read merely because they thought this would assure them a job, a dowry, and hopefully a house in Colombo.

The Sinhalese not being a minority, had the chips at least somewhat loaded in their favour. Some Sinhalese therefore read books just for the sheer heck of it. Now, this may be the most simplistic way of putting across this thesis, but these are the rough contours of the argument. Due to sheer economic necessity, the Tamil scholarly orientation became a very technical one. The Sinhalese were not much of a contrast, but at least a little bit of intellectual curiosity was retained on this side of the ethnic divide. A little bit but not enough.

The result is that like Naipaul's men who lead half a life, there are men and women in Sri Lanka today who can think only in half-measure. There are no giants who can define the discourse and swing it in favour of their argument, and this malady is seen everywhere from the professional lecture circuit to the NGO scholarly -paper industry.

Maybe intellectual cretinism was always present in the Sri Lankan leadership. The 'father of the nation' was not exactly known we might say, for his intellectual accomplishments. Then we had a leader who used to seriously wonder aloud whether this country should not be made part of the Indian union!

He wanted to cede one of the oldest countries, which the Roman cartographers used to depict in their maps as large as the Indian mainland -- to our northern neighbour, just like that! So the leadership to say the least was uninspiring in terms of focussing the issues.

But why had the rest of the community including academics writers and other free spirits also failed in this department?

A couple of years ago what passed off for serious discourse in this country at a certain point in time, was whether parliament or the judiciary is 'supreme'. Without any elaboration, that single episode can be put down as evidence of how confused and lost we are in terms of defining and focussing national issues.

Manishankar Aiyer in one way may have adduced some arguments that seemed a little bit of a stretch. He seemed to compare Sri Lanka and Pakistan as if these were two peas in a pod, in terms of the non-secular tradition as opposed to India. But in reality this country is no more religious than Thailand is, whereas Pakistan is a different kettle of fish.

But at least Manishanker Aiyer has thrown us a challenge. Which is that even unintendedly he seriously spurred some debate, which may at least belatedly take us to the task of defining ourselves.

It couldn't have come at a better time because it is again the December season of monks threatening to immolate themselves and take on what's left of secularism with a banshee like cry for a Dharma Rajjaya. But, if there are intellectuals of stature, they would have been able to write an inspiring argument that can then be taken over by the political leadership. Maybe any reader could correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't that what happened in India, where Gandhi and Nehru only provided the political leadership for a larger campaign that had its intellectual moorings elsewhere among thinkers such as Tagore and such?

Those who argue for Federalism and secularism in this country have done so carefully, almost glancing over their shoulders for comfort. But neither have the others who have argued for a unitary state been able to do more than muster crowds for large funerals. Somebody mentioned yesterday that the funeral of Ven Soma was the largest recorded, as the Mahawamsa never recorded a funeral that was so well attended -- and the Mahawamsa exaggerates! All that can be said is that we have done very well then in the funeral department, even though the country is still not certain where it stands. Are we (or are we going to be?) federal or unitary, secular or religious, one nation or two?

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