SRI LANKA: Political Rein

Contributors: Nilantha Ilangamuwa    June 18, 2012
( Illustration by Indika Dissanayake)
The power of a community depends not only upon its numbers and its economic resources and its technical capacity, but also upon its beliefs. (Bertrand Russell – Power – P. 99)

The problem is not rising from outside but rather from within themselves. As long as the world about them does not change, the regime will remain content with their way of life and indeed, feel superior to other people around them as they can ignore them. The trouble is that the world is changing as it happened in the past. This ironically points to the need that we all have to understand, not only what the regime is doing, but also what other organizations are doing as well. However, the present regime is still able to manage the ground situation in the country while continuing their vulgarism as political ideology. Under these circumstances, the regime is still lucky to enjoy their ultimate power.
As long as the opposition parties engage in tickling politics that makes fun for them, the norm of freedom will never be born due to dissimilar power. But the people who are suffering most from this uncertain power would continue to manifest the tensions of life and the nudity of social control. These People represent the insight of the politicians. The current regime is thus seeing itself through its insight, the people, without the clothes of civilization acceptable to outsiders. From time to time, the people come out in their natural form, and become visible to the wider world and that is when the regime stands stripped of its clothes.

Keeping a weaker opposition or opposition with multiple internal conflicts or rifts is an important factor for the absolute power to systematically assassinate the social order and introduce disorder to the system. And then, as Slavoj Zizak described, we enter the situation where the regime only, "imagines that it believes in itself". In Zizak's words, "The formula of a regime which only imagines that it believes in itself" nicely captures the cancellation of the performative power ("Symbolic Efficiency") of the ruling ideology: it no longer effectively functions as the fundamental structure of the social bond."  (quoted: First As Tragedy Then As Farce -- Slavoj Zizak) This is exactly what Sri Lanka, like others countries in subcontinent, is facing.
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