A Footnote To Rajan Philips’s ‘Post-Tsunami Debacle And Post-War Aggravations’
By Tissa Jayatilaka -December 30, 2013
Tissa Jayatilaka
Like all of my old Peradeniya friend Rajan Philips’s articles the above to which I offer a footnote, too, is lucid, intelligently provocative and incisive. There is, though one serious reservation that I have about it. Rajan has, perhaps out of his partiality to the ‘Old Left’, sought to glorify Dr. Colvin R. de Silva. In doing so, he has also sought to downplay what I like to term the decline and fall of the ‘Old Left’, especially in regard to its once principled and sacred stand on the parity of status for both Sinhala ad Tamil languages.
The quote attributed to Colvin in Rajan’s piece is slightly different from that which I recall. The words of Colvin that are etched in modern Sri Lanka’s history are:
One language, two nations; Two languages, one nation.
The above version echoes Benjamin Disraeli’s roman a’ these (a novel with a thesis) Sybil or The Two Nations (1845). Disraeli, in his novel, traces the plight of the working classes in England dealing with the ghastly and appalling conditions in which the majority of England’s working classes lived. It is a piece of writing that Colvin would doubtless have been quite familiar with and his quote may well have sprung from the title of Disraeli’s novel. I am not for a moment suggesting that Colvin could not have formulated his own thoughts without having to rely on Disraeli. Rather the point I wish to make is that we are often influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the writing of those we become familiar with in the course of our own reading. The Colvin of the above quote is the pre-1959 vintage Colvin of the ‘Old Left’, before the decline and fall of that group of once noble and principled politicians. What follows is some political history to substantiate my assessment of the fall also of the ‘Old Left’ to the lower depths of Sri Lanka’s murky politics. Read More
Post-Tsunami Debacle And Postwar Aggravations
By Rajan Philips -December 29, 2013
Rajan Philips
Nine years ago, in 2004, the day after Christmas, Sri Lanka became one of the major victims of the Asian tsunami. The nature’s fury brought the best and the worst in Sri Lankan society even as it ravaged most of the island’s coastal areas. The best response was from the people who spontaneously stepped up to help one another, humanely crisscrossing ethnic boundaries, with Sinhalese soldiers rescuing Tamil and Muslim victims and Tamil LTTE rescuing Sinhalese and Muslim victims. They responded before the state could mobilize itself and before needed and unwanted foreign help arrived from far flung places. The cynics invariably called the deluge of foreign help as ‘NGO tsunami’. A very positive explanation and hopeful teaching, in my view, emanated from the pen of Rev. Dalton Forbes, Catholic Priest and scholar, and longtime professor at the Oblate Seminary in Ampitiya. Writing from a common religious standpoint, Father Forbes provided an explanation for the overlapping of the supernatural and the natural, and human interactions with both. Read More