Life After Independence – Malignancy Of Corruption
By Lankamithra –February 4, 2017
“Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings”. ~Victor Hugo
They say we got independence from the British colonial powers in 1948. It has been sixty nine long years and the journey has not been very exciting to look back upon. At the beginning of this journey, those who were dubbed as ‘fathers of the nation’ and others who were originally engaged in the so-called ‘Independence struggle’ began the navigation of a nation’s journey towards self-fulfillment, its goals of serving the masses who were mostly below poverty level, three fourths of who were living in remote rural areas.
Since Independence, this nation has gone through seven regime changes. These changes have been swapped between two political philosophies which are diametrically opposed to each other. The United National Party (UNP) and Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which could be broadly termed as the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ respectively, have been fundamentally dominated by two families except in two circumstances. Once was when R Premadasa assumed the leadership of the UNP and the other when the Mahinda Rajapaksa was honored with the responsibility of leading the SLFP. Since Independence, the leadership of the UNP was in the hands of two family clans- Senanayakes and Jayewardenes. Except for the short term of R Premadasa from 1989 to 1993, even up to the present time, the UNP’s leadership has not been outside these two family clans. The present leader Ranil Wickremesinghe is a nephew of J R Jayewardene. If not for the fact that J R Jayewardene had the foresight, equanimity and a great sense of equality and above all the daring to name Premadasa as his successor, we would not have seen a representative of the so-called déclassé leading our nation. After Premadasa, although Gamini Dissanayake, again a representative of the Kandyan, Govigama Buddhists assumed leadership of the UNP for a very short time up to his unfortunate and gruesome assassination, the leadership of the party went back to a Jayewardene-relative.
On the side of the SLFP, although falsely claimed as a party of the ‘common man’, there is nothing ‘common’ about the SLFP leadership until its present leader Maithripala Sirisena assumed its leadership. Fundamentally a family-centered political party, the feudal genre of those who held the leadership of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, at a time when the people at large were looking for an alternative to the UNP, appeared on the horizon as a savior. Some social scientists and historians attribute this to the nation’s historical subservience to a ‘King’, an authoritarian head at the top. This argument might have some credence, yet the British influence on the shaping of the national mindset towards a democratic, constitutional type of governance is real and evidence abounds in the dynamics of our people adjusting to and adoption of democratic systems and other administrative organisms. This clash between propensities towards authoritarian rule and democratic principles continues and the political parties of today are confronted with this reality. Whether the current leaderships of our political parties are capable of or have the elementary capacity to understand these nuanced undertones of politics and adopt a strategic approach to achieve their political ends is yet to be seen.
