Editorial

As irony would have it, while President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was preparing to leave for a seminar on the security of the Indian Ocean in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, where thousands of Sri Lankan and Pakistani nationals work shoulder-to-shoulder in great amity, out in the Punjab province of Pakistan, a most barbaric murder of a Sri Lankan factory manager was to take place.

The reasons for this cold-blooded murder seem clearer now that the worker who tried to save the Sri Lankan has spoken. For someone who had worked for 10 years in Pakistan, leave alone a newcomer to that country, to have deliberately torn a poster containing Quranic verses is an absurd proposition in the extreme, but the mob reaction to it is what is at issue.

Pakistan was created in 1947 as a state for ‘Indian Muslims’ by the departing Britishers in a bloody and botched partition with mainland India. Ever since, the country has been embroiled in periodic attempts to turn it into a quasi-theological state. Its religious fervour exploited to the hilt by foreign powers, it has long-running conflicts with neighbouring India and been accused of fanning cross-border terrorism. Through it all though, Pakistan has remained a steadfast friend of Sri Lanka.

The Pakistan Prime Minister moved swiftly to condemn the lynching in Sialkot and offered his commiserations. But his own Defence Minister struck a discordant note, all but justifying the ‘boys’ who perpetrated that dastardly killing; not too different from our own northern politicians who once defended the ‘boys’ and their terror campaigns.

PM Khan is in an unenviable position heading a country embedded with religious fanaticism, riddled with intrigue even within his cabinet and separate power houses from the military and spy agencies to radical politico-religious groups and the clergy jostling for influence. The moderate elements, maybe even the silent majority, are getting pushed to the periphery and Premier Khan’s efforts to turn the country in the direction of a more secular state are meeting stiff resistance.

The Sri Lankan manager’s killing is not an isolated one and not the first against Sri Lankans. The national cricketers were shot at not long ago. Pakistanis themselves are at the receiving end. An undergrad was killed by his batchmates falsely accused of blasphemy. A Governor of Punjab was killed by extremists. Judges are afraid to mete out justice and politicians play to the gallery as it were seeking popular votes — that being the downside of electoral politics.

These are lessons for Sri Lanka in no small measure. One would have thought the northern politicians had learned a bitter lesson by sucking up to the militant groups only to be shoved off the centre-stage by AK-47 toting youth of the day. But lessons do not seem learnt when some pundits continue to hail mass murderers like Prabhakaran as heroes. The incumbent Government is also flirting with danger encouraging crude sectarianism that can have violent pushbacks. When you play with fire, it is said, you can get burnt.

The onus is now squarely on the Pakistan Government to deliver justice to the victim and his family and to clear its own tarnished name in the eyes of the world. There is already an internal discussion in Pakistan on the role of their religious establishments — the madrasas and their curriculum, and how extremists use these as recruiting grounds to commit violence against non-believers. Sri Lankan Intelligence agencies hopefully are keeping a watch on these mushrooming schools in the Eastern Province, partly funded by foreign governments including Pakistan, keen to export their brand of religion to the rest of the world.

What happened in Sialkot is also a lesson for rabble-rousing elements in this country who wear pseudo-nationalism on their sleeve. Some are pawns of foreign agencies or the Diaspora who exploit ethnic and religious divisions like they did in the past, promoting sectarian strife to destabilise the country. In the process they only bring discredit to their nation, and the religion they profess and pretend to protect, like those bigots in Pakistan.

And lessons from Myanmar

On the other side of the Indian subcontinent, Myanmar, there is another lesson for Sri Lanka. That country was also generating worldwide condemnation, for a different reason. It jailed its former de facto Prime Minister Aung San Suu Kyi and her pro-democracy party leaders after what has been widely called a ‘sham trial’.

Both Pakistan and Myanmar are friends of Sri Lanka, the latter a much older nation having longer relations due to the common Buddhist heritage. While Pakistan managed to struggle out of Martial Law and embrace multi-party democracy with a free press and independent judiciary, it remained saddled with religious extremism. Myanmar bucked the trend towards democracy and went back to the rule of the Generals. Sri Lanka is traversing dangerously between these two lines with a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.

The sham trial in Myanmar brings out the famous dictum ‘Justice must not only be done, but must manifestly appear to be done’. That dictum from a 1924 British case has been woven like a golden thread into the fabric of all proper legal systems in the world. When Myanmar’s judges closed their doors to lawyers, the press and the public, there was immediate and obvious suspicion that a ‘kangaroo court’ was in session.

Similarly, when cases are filed relating to prominent persons and then dismissed depending on which side of the political divide they are on, especially politicians and their financiers on the grounds that they lacked the evidence to convict; when charges are dropped even before a trial commences citing bad indictments; when a country’s Attorney General comes to court and condemns his own department for filing wrong charges or appears for persons who are no longer ambassadors but remain relatives of VVIPs; when ordinary people start making jokes about the charade taking place, that is when Sri Lanka begins its journey towards another Myanmar.

The Bench and the Bar, more than anyone else have that responsibility to see it does not drift into such an abyss.