February 4: Day Of Taking Stock Of The Country’s Performance
Latheef Farook
On February 4th, the country celebrated 71 years of Sri Lanka’s independence. Freeing the country from foreign rule is of course an occasion to be jubilant.
However, under the existing circumstance, the need of the hour is to do some stock taking and assess the country’s performance since independence to understand where we were during the time of independence, where we are today, who is responsible for the current mess and what needs to be done.
During our independence Sri Lanka was an enviable role model for newly emerging countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. With free education and recognized universities the literacy rate was high compared to many third world countries. Equally developed were health services that Indians visited the island for medical treatment. The country also had substantial foreign reserves, communal harmony and peace.
Those were the days one could walk from south to north and east to west without the fear of being way laid.
Sri Lankan is a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi linguistic, multi religious and multi-cultural society. The richness of this unique blend is enhanced by the presence of all great religions in the world such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity.
Members of all communities lived in harmony in the midst of one another. Each community practised and maintained its own religious and cultural life and their destiny has inevitably been interwoven and common.
This enviable rare diversity naturally enhanced the natural beauty of the Island which has been described as Pearl of the Indian Ocean. Some even said that Sri Lanka has all the potentials to emerge as the Switzerland of the east.
Today’s thriving Dubai was unknown and unheard of. Former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yu said “Ceylon should be a model which other Asian regions should emulate”.
The plurality of communities, religions, races, languages and cultures were God’s gift to this country.
Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and all other citizens wanted to live in peace and harmony and move ahead as they did in the past. However it became a distant dream due to the short sighted racist politics of the two major political parties-United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party- which ruled the country since independence and divided communities for their political survival and brought about today’s chaotic situation.
Sri Lanka lacked a visionary leadership which could think for the whole country and lead all communities as one nation and ensure the rights of all.
Almost every political leader from the majority community in the post independent era thought in terms of the interest of the majority community .By promoting the majority community at the expense of the minorities, political leaders promoted their own interests with their target firmly fixed on the next general elections and not on the welfare of the coming generations and the national interest of the country.
In doing so they sowed seeds of dissension within communities. If only the majority community had produced a visionary leader Sri Lanka would have been the envy of the entire Third World today.
Tamils wanted to live in peace with other communities with equal rights. However racist politics isolated the minorities. Mrs Srimavo Bandaranaike’s republican constitution providing prime of place to Buddhism and Sinhala languages united Tamil political parties under the banner of Tamil United Liberation Front-TULF. Late President JR Jayewardene’s draconian constitution turned the country into an all-powerful dictatorship. It became a democratically elected dictatorship. The country is still suffering due to Jayewardene’s megalomania.
Repeated violent attacks against Tamils culminating in the July 83 attacks led to Tamils taking up arms to fight for a separate state. This turned the country into a killing field. While innocent people died and the country as a whole suffered, politicians and their sidekicks flourished in the form of commissions from weapons purchase.
