By

N Sathiya Moorthy

The West has lately been miffed that the Sri Lankan Government should be resisting the UNHRC probe just for the sake of it. Worse critics, some even nearer home, attribute it to apprehensions of personal vilification at the hands of the probe, and political and personal consequences for some.

The truth is far from it. It is not only about Sri Lanka. The whole of South Asia in particular and the Third World in general has a socio-cultural civilisation dating back to centuries prior to western societies and democracies came into being. Maybe not as ‘modern’ in concept and practice, they have had democratic values of a kind ingrained in the DNA of the rulers, who were hereditary and the people, who came to be dubbed ‘subjects’ in the colonial lingo.

The DNA-coded perceptions for the ruling class was based on ‘sin’ that travelled with them in this birth and the next, and carrying on to generations of the kind. The rulers were thus told not to sow bad seeds in this birth and leave behind a worse crop for generations to reap. The family, and not the individual, being at the nucleus of societal existence, it helped. It worked.

There were bad apples there too – just as there are dictators even under the modern democratic scheme. If the bygone royalty ‘fooled’ the subjects, any working and more successful democracy of the world today is systemised at being a ‘guided democracy’. In a way, ‘market capitalism’ and the interests of the capitalists from among them is at the centre of all such democracies. Not the people, who are just given a choice between two political forces – invariably not more.

‘He who has not sinned…’

The problem with the UNHRC kind of probes in the nations of South Asia in particular is that the people at large still believe in the encoded Biblical preaching of ‘he who has not sinned alone can throw stones’. So when nations that they think have ‘sinned’ in Afghanistan and Iraq before their eyes start throwing the UNHRC book at their own nation, they are not amused.

Given again the inherited social philosophies of these nations, the people don’t even think seriously about such text-book, template models of ‘accountability’ and the rest. For ’em all, that which lacks the moral authority ingrained in them does not matter. They are less serious about it, in turn. A government, as if it were under siege, cannot even explain the predicament to its people. They just refuse to hear. If they were to see their government capitulating under international pressure on moral issues of the kind, they are repulsed – not rejected. From repulsion to revolution is not a great distance.

One has to be a South Asian, not only by birth, but also by instinct, to understand it. Appreciation comes next. It is true of other ancient civilisations, where all western template models have been put to practice, and have failed. More importantly, they have failed the nations and peoples concerned.

Centuries of colonisation had created a local community who was ‘modernised’ in thought, word and deed by the colonial masters, for the former speak their lingo. The end of colonialism has thrown up new opportunities for the neglected sections of the society, seated in rural areas.

It is a spin-off effort from franchise-centric electoral democracy. It came to Sri Lanka decades later and owing to historic reasons, long after the international community had got used to dealing with the ‘elites’ of ‘Colombo Seven’ as they are known, in politics and bureaucracy. The fact is that the world does not know how to deal with the new, rural-based political leadership of Sri Lanka.

Rather than having the patience to learn the lingo of the new ruling class in countries such as Sri Lanka, the West wants to bring back those who had adapted their own lingo without being asked. It is also in the DNA of these classes. Coupled with the even more deep-seated socio-cultural embedded DNA, they have stood out in public life, but not anymore.

Democratic transition

The temptation to compare Sri Lanka with the northern Indian neighbour cannot but be avoided. India is after all the world’s largest democracy, as understood by the West. There are reasons, again. The colonial masters did not have the patience and reach to take Westminster democracy to the rural masses in India, as with Sri Lanka, too. The Indian Independence movement did it. The refusal to accept colonial practices, other than what India needed, with the launch of Gandhiji’s ‘Swadeshi movement’ was both the forerunner and catalyst.

There again, the convulsions of ‘democratic transition’ from the urban middle class elite to the rural classes (middle and lower classes) are all so visible in ways successive elections have thrown up combinations that would have been hard to perceive under the colonial dispensation. The West is learning to cut the cloth according to what is available. It will take time.

‘Modern societies’, if they could be termed so, have the ‘advantage’ of being able to challenge the ‘status quo’ social values and win. Rather, they side-step those social values, nor do they have the time and energy for the same, driven as they are by more materialistic goals and aspirations. The US as a nation is the world’s best and first example. Inside nations and societies too, there are very many examples.

‘Ancient societies’ in comparisons cannot be expected to change the same way. They just don’t. The ‘template models’ developed in classroom studies that do not provide for understood variations, do not also work in real-life situations outside of the ‘homogenised’ societies. ‘Homogenisation’ too is hard to achieve.

That leaves behind ‘conquered’ societies from where the conqueror wants to leave faster than he came. That has left behind devastated societies and nations, which do not know what had hit them, or why they were hit. It does not always provide for modernisation of those societies. In cases like Afghanistan and Iraq, the reverse happens. As a traditional society, Sri Lanka cannot have it, the nation cannot do it, either. The failure of the two JVP insurgencies and the ultimate extinction of the LTTE are pointers from the near past. The nation can do without pointers from the future.

(The writer is a Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter)