By

Vishnuguptha

“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.”–-Jane Austen

pic via: facebook.com/KaruJayasuriya

Memories, memories and more memories, that’s all what we would be eventually left with. If our legacy to our children is only those memories, then we have let them down very badly. As a country, as a nation and as a people, we have come sixty five long years, celebrating the dawn of Independence each year on February 4th or more precisely expressed, granting of Independence from the British Colonial powers with pomp and pageantry, with glee and glory and with passion and thanks.

No person can and should understate the significance of a nation freeing itself from the crutches of foreign rule. Although Ceylon did not have to endure the brutal suppressions and unspeakable agonies that India had to absorb and suffer in her own ‘Freedom Struggle’, the universally-felt indignations and humiliations our ‘Independence Leaders’ went through are no mean by any standard. Yet there were no massacres of the magnitude of the ‘Amritsar Massacre’, no national-level leaders underwent prolonged and frequent jail terms similar to those Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and the rest of the Indian leaders went through.

It’s true that during the infamous ‘Muslim Riots’ in 1915 some national leaders in Ceylon, the likes of D S Senanayake, F R Senanayake and others, were unfairly incarcerated by the then British Governor, yet drawing a parallel between our Muslim Riots and innumerable occasions on which the Indian leaders had to spend time inside prison due to actions that were directly related to their Independence struggle is self-deceiving and illusory.

In no way, manner or fashion am I trying to belittle the arduous efforts undertaken by our pre-Independence national leaders. The significance of their loyalty to the cause of ‘Free Lanka’ and the innumerable occasions on which many a groundbreaking speeches were made from political platforms and the countless times they sat down and debated with the British rulers both in London and in Ceylon, cannot be just understated.

Yet one needs to realize that at no given time in our ‘freedom-struggle’, were the ordinary people scattered in all corners of the Island, engaged as one cohesive community nor were they subjected to the vagaries of imperialism the way in which a suppressed colony usually endures it during a time of subjugation.

Whereas the Indian people of all walks of life were positively involved, lock, stock and barrel, in the ‘Swaraj’ movement of India with their leaders, the average Sri Lankan was not even remotely engaged in the struggle for Independence. It was viewed by the average Appuhamy, Kadiresan and Mohamed as one embarked upon by an elitist group in the country to preserve and advance their own privileged status in society.

This disconnect with the masses contributed most decisively to the ensuing mindset that later defined and shaped the destinies of a nation emerging from the crutches of colonialism. The distance that existed between the masses and the then leaders, especially of the National Congress which later evolved into the United National Party and its dependence on a British liberal Ivor Jennings to draft the first constitution of a free Lanka, remained very much a latent problem until it found expression in a landslide electoral victory for the nationalist forces led by S W R D Bandaranaike in 1956.

While Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru entrusted the task of drafting a new constitution for free India to B R Ambedkar, a Harijan by origin and an outcaste in terms of the rigid Indian caste system, who presided over the drafting process, Sri Lanka’s new Constitution was drafted by Ivor Jennings, British constitutional expert and personal friend of D S Senanayake. When Ambedkar inserted some critical chapters and clauses in the Indian Constitution that ensured the rights of minorities, the caste and class-sensitive Indian political leaders made sure that the document that is charged with empowering the Legislators, the Executive (Prime Minister and the Cabinet of Ministers), the Judiciary and the people, evolved with the times without bartering the fundamental features of the document for political favors or social strings. Federal in fundamental terms, the Indian Constitution enabled, despite rampant corruption and blatant nepotism both at State level and the Center, a vibrant democracy to grow with the times.

Today India could boast about being one of the most vibrant and pulsating societies and a country where the freedom of expression, Independence of the Judiciary and other such fundamental rights which feature very prominently in the American Constitution as ‘the Bill of Rights’ are in practical existence. Both accountability and transparency characterize the Indian socio-political life in a most vivid way and it is manifest in the manner in which the Indians as a collective community have managed to withstand the whirlwinds of racial and religious riots, terrorist attacks on their soil, corrupt practices enabled by politicians and so forth.

That absorbing quality of the Indian mindset, in spite of being a society steeped in caste, class and religious sectarianism, has been a direct product of the self-correcting structures that are contained in their Constitution. We in Sri Lanka on the other hand, have discarded the best features of the Jennings Constitution and inserted some potentially draconian Chapters which are aimed directly at sustaining a mythical superiority of the Majority.

Furthermore, the introduction of the Eighteenth (18th) Amendment, more or less has disarmed this vital document of almost all characters of internal checks and balances. On the theory side, doing away with the ‘term limits’ imposed on Executive Presidency, the very discarding of the Seventeenth Amendment and making a mockery of the independence of the Judiciary, Police and of Members of Parliament have made our Constitution a piece of paper abused by those in power while on the practical side, nepotism practiced with callous disregard for basic norms of governance, has ensured that the people at large and the traditional vanguards of their rights and privileges such as the Media are kept under severest of pressure by way of physical harm and even the commission of ‘murder by the State’.

The self-censorship has pushed away all free-thinking mechanisms of independent-minded media personnel and the numerous threats and intimidation these media practitioners are being subjected to, have made sure that the self-censorship is in fact adhered to without any hesitancy. The pluralistic character of our society is being downplayed by those in power and any legitimate arguments are being buried under an avalanche of pro-Sinhala-Buddhist rhetoric. This continuing practice of deliberate exaggerations of myths, legends and fairytale-like history lessons have, instead of freeing the average mind of man and woman, strangled all expressions of free will and given rise to a new-found sense of phony patriotism and fake devotion to ‘righteousness’.

Independence of mind and independence of all expressions are being rendered futile. Angry rhetoric, vituperative attacks on reasonable arguments for fair and balanced media practice, castigation of Western Powers with severely-charged hatred and narrow and outdated talking points are all pointing to a vanishing saga of ‘Independence’.

Sixty six years of political life, independent of foreign influence and power have left us with an utterly regrettable legacy; a legacy of dependence, inner contradictions, collapsing social values and declining cultural ethos whose patent rights are being owned and administered by those who claim to have won a military conflict. Our legacy to our children is full of patriotic crap and dependency disorder, all ingredients of a recipe for how a pluralistic society should not be governed.

The writer can be contacted at ~ vishnuguptha2012@gmail.com