By
Vishnuguptha
“One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!”
~Winston Churchill
In 1787, after the delegates in Philadelphia signed the new United States Constitution, a woman approached Benjamin Franklin. ‘Well Doctor, she asked, ‘what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?’ Franklin replied, ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’ Benjamin Franklin knew then, as most of the political leaders today tend to forget that keeping a republic going is the responsibility of the people as it is of anyone else’s. If we sacrifice liberties as the price of peace, we deserve neither liberty nor safety that comes with peace, Franklin said.Peace should not be a dividend of a political process. History may have shown ample evidence to support the contra argument.
It might stand in opposition to the utopian dream of a proactive process of peace, emanating essentially from the depths of a puritan heart that is devoid of hatred and malice and all other evil emotions and human folly, the kind of peace that Mahatma Gandhi professed about in the Twentieth Century. But history tells us that each time peace has come to prevail at the cessation of hostilities between two or more belligerent parties, that ‘peace’ which in a real sense is ‘absence of war’, the victor has always stamped his will and power over the vanquished and the loser is condemned to languishing in his own pit of lament and sorrow, of scorn and vengeance and of misery and hopelessness.
When the victorious party drives the vanquished to that hopelessness, there is no justice, there is no fair-play, and there is no mercy. Have we driven the people of the North to that unfriendly frontier of misery? Have we not been promoting blatantly discriminatory practices against a vanquished people? Hasn’t the usual practice of scorn and insult hurled upon Tamils by their Sinhalese brothers in the last couple of centuries reached its nadir? Various extreme groups, small in numbers but that have the exterior garb of patriotism and ‘Dharma’ but internally thoroughly corrupt, vile and evil are roaming the streets at will, dispensing ‘justice’ like minor ‘capos’ of a Mafia-style social cabal, instilling fear and terror in the minds of children and adults alike of citizen groups of different faiths and continue to enjoy more than easy access to television and newspaper headlines.
The political patronage and psychological pandering these ‘gangsters in saffron robes’ enjoy, have propelled the very perpetrators to cloud nine, making them the envy of some popular politicians who thought that they ruled the waves! The ‘veneration’-like esteem in which some of these individual ‘capos’ are held by the ordinary laymen of the Buddhist faith and the fear that members of other faiths harbor about them, make these ‘merchants of hate and racial division’ look like heroes of a superlative breed. The very intoxicating emotion such a mindset creates in these individuals knows no bounds or frontiers; a stigma has turned into a heroic sensation, a universally-condemned notion of racial-profiling has elevated itself to a patriotic passion.
The danger lies in the possible or even probable introduction of laws and Acts that would curtail the activities of minority religious sects scattered throughout the country. Only one instance is necessary to create a flurry of anti-this or anti-that regulations to begin a flow of hate-filled legislations and Acts. The consequent emotions so generated would facilitate easy passage in the Legislature and eventually Executive action would seal the deal against a powerless minority or minorities. Reasonable Sinhalese Buddhists would argue and settle into the usual comfort zone: “it’s only against the extreme elements of a small minority religious sect that propagates anti-Buddhist dogma”. But one does not realize that the stringent clauses and chapters contained within such cruel legislation would ultimately claim the very essence of free thought and free will. Liberties that are taken for granted by all would be the sacrificial lamb at the altar of ‘prime place for Buddhism’ and patriotism.
What is described above is a grim painting of a futuristic scenario. Before it becomes the present, one must take action. Action that can prevent such a chain of events and enactments that would definitely spell disaster for democracy and death of free will of a minority and that would engulf the mindset of an entire nation, must be taken and the people who would be subjected to such draconian rule must be forewarned. At the risk being adjudged melodramatic, paranoid and sensationalistic, one must write about the dangers and also talk about the danger and the looming peril that this mindset would engender.
All this has happened as a logical consequence of the war-victory. The notion of military triumph over a terrorist group should not create such a warped mindset. Nor should it entail suppression of legitimate rights and privileges of a minority group of fellow countrymen. Superior military power can crush an armed group of terrorists but it cannot kill the free will of a people.
These sentiments are no neo-liberal values as propagated by those with a vested interest in the perpetuation of political power. They are in essence, immensely-fundamental human values. When such human values are devalued and relegated to false notions of patriotism and nationalism, the ordinary folks who have no time and craft to understand the nuances and shades of craftier politics resort to the slightest provocation. Instead of acting they react to a sensation; they hear the sound and don’t listen to the voice and words. The chaotic and anarchical atmosphere so ensuing would overwhelm all rational thinking and reasoning. The average citizen, the average Sinhalese Buddhist himself will become captive to the intoxicating language and conversation that would label any contrary views as unpatriotic and those who articulate such views would be even tried for treason. Such is the power of irrational and unbridled nature of pseudo-patriotism.
If one is not pre-warned of the potentiality of coming events, one cannot take counteractive measures. Examples from recent history are aplenty; their meteoric escalation, especially in the first half of the Twentieth Century with Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung dominating the calamitous episodes of the human family, has only buttressed the argument against such unrestrained actions of various groups who inhabit the fringes of irrationality and madness. Democratically-elected rulers such as Marcos of the Philippines or even Indira Gandhi in India acted most irrationally and without any mercy towards their opponents and both of them paid their price most dearly.
A vibrant democracy like India couldn’t withstand the slaughter of her people’s fundamental rights and freedoms when Indira dominated the scene in the early seventies. Her suffering a humiliating defeat at the following elections may have had a lasting effect on her, for the visible change of attitude and policies that she followed in her second term reflected that change. The Nehrus, including Jawaharlal, the patriarch of the family, are quite notorious for sustained nepotism. Even today, after the demise of the last Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi, Indira’s elder son, Rahul Gandhi remains very much a possibility in the leadership succession ladder.
But Sri Lanka’s democracy is not as vibrant and forward-looking as India’s. The docility and laid-back attitude of the people towards looming danger, may be due to the influence of the non-fighting way Independence was obtained from the colonial powers, has made a larger segment of our population apathetic and inactive, to say the least. The usual vibrancy that is associated with a nation that is emerging from the throes of foreign domination has been thrown out the door, may be due to the ever-present resignation to higher authorities for the delivery of goods, being a people so used to life’s essentials such as rice, education and health services provided free of charge and being so susceptible to undeliverable election promises. They hardly realize that there is nothing called a ‘free lunch’. There is a cost to it and somebody pays.