Sri Lanka’s Grand Failure
Dr. Ameer Ali
On 4th February 2018 Sri Lanka will be entering its 61st year of independence from colonialism. It is time that the citizens of the country at least its apolitical literati come together and collectively make an assessment of the overall achievements and failures made during the sixty years so that an informed balance sheet could be presented to be audited by the public. Such a balance sheet should counter the ‘alternate facts’ presented by politicians. The cycle of democratic elections, political campaigns associated with them and change of governments that result from them has the drawback of keeping even intellectuals obsessively occupied with judging and comparing short term changes made during each political regime rather than assessing the long term trend and directions.
What is now required is not a quantitative balance sheet which the economists, statisticians and other pundits usually produce but a qualitative one. It is not about GDP per capita or literacy rate or life expectancy but about unquantifiable social cohesion, national co-operative spirit or Khaldunian asabiyya and happiness. In short, it is not about Gross National Product (GNP) but about Gross National Happiness (GNH) as the monarch of Bhutan once famously announced. What has been Sri Lanka’s record in this regard so far and where is it heading to? Is the nation and its people happier now than what they were on the eve of independence?
Without going into all aspects surrounding this heavily loaded question I wish to select only one issue that is menacingly disrupting the growth of GNH at the moment and threatening its decline in the future. This is the issue of plurality or diversity management. It was Arnold Toynbee the famous British historian who once wrote that diversity is the sign of growth and development whereas uniformity is the sign of decay and decline. Diversity is also the gift of nature. One of the gifted resources of Sri Lanka from the beginning if its recorded history has been its cultural and ethnic pluralism and diversity of its natural resources. In both, the country’s rulers especially after independence have magnificently succeeded in mismanaging. It is a record of grand failure.
The Sinhala-Tamil-Moor-Malay-Burgher ethnic and Buddhist-Hindu-Christian-Islamic religious plural mix is a permanent historical heritage of the country and no amount of legal, constitutional and chauvinistic political gimmicks can succeed in disinheriting it. What is required instead is to learn and practice the fine art of plurality management on which depends the country’s GNH. Unfortunately, the history of post-independent Sri Lanka has been marked by progressive mismanagement of this heritage. Managing this plurality by successive political leaders has assumed the model of a zero-sum game in which each element of the mix is deemed to win only at the expense of the others. There is a lot to learn by the current leaders from the managerial experience of the earlier kings and queens of Sri Lanka. The pre-colonial economic prosperity and political stability of this island, and happiness of its people hinged largely on the ethnic and cultural tranquillity achieved under their management. Can the historians of Sri Lanka point out one incident of ethnic or religious convulsion let alone cleansing in the pre-colonial history of this country? It is time that our political heroes who champion the cause of their respective ethnic and religious communities re-read the history of this island. This applies even to the minority of Buddhist monks and other religious leaders who are now scare mongering the people with imagined dangers of pluralism. In contrast, what the past teaches is the promotion and preservation of a healthy spirit of cosmopolitanism amidst plurality which was disrupted in the interest of imperialism during the colonial era. That disruption has been allowed to continue by the new rulers who replaced the colonialists.
