The Magic Of Pāda Yātrā
By Yudhanjaya Wijeratne –August 5, 2016
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Pada Yatra: rough translation, pilgrimage. They’ve been around for awhile, but the most famous is Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent Salt Tax protest. That original Pada Yatra started with 80 people and went down in history as the famous Dandi Salt March: it even inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.
Leave it to the Joint Opposition to organize their own Pada Yatra. Mahinda Rajapaksa and Co basically rallied thousands of people who marched, on foot, from Kandy to Colombo, while their political overloads trundled by gently in jeeps sucking on cheap ice cream.
It didn’t overthrow the British Raj, of course, but it was pretty impressive. It began in Peradeniya and spread to Nelumdeniya. Kiribathgoda was packed. Residents of Kelaniya reportedly hung grass from electric wires ‘for the protestors’. A disorganized crowd of several thousand strong preceded the actual rally. Most of us in Colombo didn’t feel it, but everyone on that route definitely did.
Let me get something off my chest first: that really should be Pādha Yāthra – unless our Media is having well-organized chuckle by making Mahinda’s rally sound like the Fart Pilgrimage. In that case, well played, Lake House, Wijaya. You’ve made us all proud.
Phew. Now, on with the conversation (photos by Shehan Gunasekara).
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Protest marches are generally organized around a single specific grievance – British India’s Salt Tax, the deployment of troops to Vietnam, Taylor Swift’s never-ending albums of breakup songs. The Joint Opposition, who likes to multitask, seems to have decided to go for a shotgun approach: let’s protest about everything we don’t like. Most of the slogans are divisible into four broad categories:
- Economic hardships under the current government
- ‘Selling the country’ to foreign masters
- National sovereignty threatened by constitutional reforms
- Miscellanious (stuff like Maithri being a muppet, Ranil being a fag and so on)
I find this whole thing stupid, and not just because they actually had a Maithri-muppet on display. Because if you step back and think about the first three slogans:
