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