Police Attacks & Good Governance
By Ashan Weerasinghe –November 3, 2015
Ashan Weerasinghe
The brutal police attack on the HNDA student protestors on October 29 urges us to re-think of the fate of ‘citizen-life’ in a country with an unbelievably corrupt political system such as the “Democratic” “Socialist” “Republic” of Sri Lanka. Especially, this allows us to safely assume that the police is no longer the ‘agent of protecting law and order’, as it theoretically promises. Political thinkers including Marx, Gramsci, Foucault and many others have said enough about the role of state apparatuses like police, military etc., within hegemony and the SLDP has given concrete evidence at several occasions during the recent past to argue that it is non other than a repressive tool at the hands of the dominant/hegemonic group. Gramsci has already shown the importance of such repressive tools to the dominant group to exercise its hegemony when the subaltern masses do not ‘obey’ and when the ideological leadership alone does not work. (Gramsci, 2000: 420). Is the present government conveying the message that it is not the extinction but an extension of what I often call the corrupt ‘Mahinda Ideology‘? Needless to say, behaviour of government institutions such as the police is a manifestation of the state attitude towards citizens.
This is a critical incident where the basic human right of freedom of expression has been severely violated by the so-called ‘guardians of law and order’. In attempting to disperse the protest, police not only fired tear gas and water canon but also inhumanely assaulted student-protestors with batons. Brutality of the attack became a controversial issue especially after photos depicting violent police attacks were published on the websites and social media as well as in printed media. One of the photos that show the brutality of a police officer beating an unarmed female student with a baton even when she is on the ground, has already gained wider attention. Social media, especially Facebook, is still full of videos that include the “criminal” behaviour of the police.
