Corruption Has Become The Norm
By Vishwamithra1984 –June 22, 2016
“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” ~Benjamin Franklin
Many of our rural folks have been conditioned and brainwashed with a notion that poverty is caused mainly by exploitation of one class by the other. The influx of Socialist Marxist thinking, in addition to the sheer arrogance and insensitivity of the ruling class which was dominated and spearheaded by educated, English-speaking elites who were clustered around big cities in the country, advanced the acceleration process instead of reduction or elimination of the impoverishing progression of the masses. In addition, with Sri Lanka gaining independence from the British in the mid Twentieth Century– at the height of the Cold War- that Marxian-based propaganda had a penetrating effect on the unsophisticated intellect of the poor men and women who did not know any kind of socio-political governance except nearly five hundred years of foreign dominance and being subjugated to a feudal system and as serfs of an emerging mercantilism-enriched class in the Nineteenth Century.
Dr. Kumari Jayawardena
Kumari Jayawardena in her book, ‘Nobodies to Somebodies’, most vividly spells out the chronology as well as the social structure that lent itself for the rise of a class of wealthy landowners and traders in Colombo and other big cities, mainly Jaffna, Galle and Kandy. She writes thus: “Members of another group of Sri Lankans, who were to form an important part of the emergent 19th century bourgeoisie, were landowners, whose holdings provided them with a means of accumulation and later, a basis for expanded growth in the plantation era. Just as the monopolistic policies of the Dutch and the British had located a stratum of officials in the cinnamon industry and endowed them with a basis for growth, their administrative policies also created a group of Sri Lankan officials, called Mudaliyars. Peebles (1973:1) has defined them as an economic and social status group “mediating between the alien rulers and the bulk of the indigenous population” performing functions that the foreign rulers were “unable or unwilling to do”.
Graduating from Mercantilism to Capitalism did not happen overnight. Nor did it occur without any socio-economic costs to the various stakeholders of an Island-nation. Emergence of a middleclass with a reasonable amount of spending power and access to factors of production saw to it that this developing socio-economic class developed their own ambitions and aspirations that went beyond just comfortable living and hobnobbing with powers that be. Although Kumari Jayawardena describes the mechanisms and means by which this emergent Mercantilist class accumulated wealth and proximity to the colonial officialdom at the time, she stays away from looking deeper into the mechanics which were employed by the British civil servants who held deciding powers to award contracts to the would-be-dealers of arrack renting business which, according Kumari, the main means by which this accumulation of enormous benefits of a rising specter of capitalism. Yet the total absence of trickling-down effect of such accumulation of wealth and business knowhow to the bottom dwellers of our society contributed to the widening of the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, the long-term effects of which would manifest themselves much later in Sri Lankan society.
