Putting Sri Lanka Back On Track

By N. Sathiya Moorthy-Sunday, October 14, 2012

Road development in progress

Chennai, 11 October 2012: Even as the months-long strike by university teachers was showing signs of an early end came reports of judges across the country boycotting the courts. The teachers were protesting for higher salaries and the latter, the physical assault on Judicial Services Commission (JSC) Secretary Manjula Thilekeratne, a senior District Judge. In between, for weeks now, the country has been reeling under scheduled and not-so-scheduled power-cuts, owing to poor rainfall, and sky-rocketing prices, mostly for reasons beyond the control of a nation as small as Sri Lanka in political and global economic terms, with charges and counter-charges on the law and order front, too.
Public memory is short. In a democracy, people expect a good government to ensure good rainfall and global price stability. In the 21st century Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, people have taken uninterrupted power-supply for granted. Power-cuts for long hours have been a factor for electoral reversals across the Palk Strait, in neighbouring India. Whether real, unreal or surreal, perceptions of ‘permissiveness’ are also back in Sri Lankan public discourse, often blown out of proportion in the middle class milieu – and there is an urgent need to arrest it all, if the nation has to shed its inherited trait of immeasurable pessimism, defeatism and desperation back with the decades of ethnic war, which ended equally ‘long ago’.
The leadership and Government that won what was once considered to be an ‘unwinnable war’ alone may be capable of repeating the performance with equal popular support. Or, so goes the general expectation. There cannot be any drift in purpose or method. If the war could be won on a ‘war-footing’, so should be peace and prosperity. Again, that is a perception. The air of permissiveness that seemed to have crept in too needs to be arrested – and reversed – if the nation and the leadership are to continue reaping the medium and long-term benefits of the former bringing the war to a relatively swift end.
It is not as if there aren’t any problems. It is also not as if there are no solutions. More importantly, there have been successes, too, in the past years – the conclusion of the ‘ethnic war’ being the most important and critical of them all. It should be said to the credit of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s leadership that even as the Government was pursuing what had been branded as an ‘unwinnable war’, it still was able to take big-ticket development to the Sinhala South, and to individual villages and homes, too, alongside.
Three-plus years down the line, to many in the otherwise discredited political Opposition, it all looks at best like a part of the ‘war strategy’, to keep the nation and the people on the right side of the Government, all the same. This was so after the East first and the North later was ‘liberated’ from LTTE control. Three-plus years down the line, no one contests the Government’s claim on development of the North and the East. Yet, the issues in the one-time ‘war zone’ are not one of development, but of democracy, de-militarisation and devolution. The issues may have re-prioritised themselves but the Government is sticking to its developmental agenda. Development in these parts are welcome as a part of overall governance but not as a part of the political solution, which has been hanging fire for decades now, war or no war, terrorism or no terrorism.
It is not as if the Government had not tried. On the law and order front, last year and earlier, too, the Government sought to come down heavily on urban gangsters in a big way. The Defence Ministry, of which the Police is still a part, and to which Urban Development was added, too, did its best. Yet, gangs and gang-menace have not been eradicated, as the attack on Judge Thilekeratne has shown. There have been any number of attacks on individuals – and institutions, as investigations into the attack on the JSC official could well show. Granting political motivation behind some, it reflects a gang mentality. Many investigations have to be left hanging, not always for want of trying or of sincerity of purpose. It is not about pre-judging the investigations, but is about perceptions that should not be allowed to seep in.  In a nation that was at war with itself, and armed gangs drew their inspiration and encouragement from those in war, restoring public order has proved to be more difficult than winning or losing the war. It is the kind of urban guerrilla operation, which neither the re-energised army, nor the demoralised police is equipped to win, overnight.  It is an attitudinal war to be fought and won from the grassroots-level upwards. It requires the right temperament, inspiration and inquisitiveness in the leadership. If nothing else, it cannot operate and succeed on a command-and-control model on which wars are won.
Educating the educated
The university teachers’ strike as an issue, for instance, has been brewing for years now. So have been the demands and protests of various sections of the Government employees. Having stood by the Government in times of war difficulties, they since seem to have concluded that they too needed to be rewarded for the loyalty to the nation in times of crises. If not to the full extent, they would expect compensation at least to commensurate with the ever-increasing prices of commodities in the market place, and similar pay-packets in the private sector. If the Government, for instance, is not against private universities, it should not also be against private sector pay-scales in higher education, though the protesting teachers may have another view on privatisation itself. In a nation that has taken pride in its high literacy rate, the reach of higher education has been woefully low. Sri Lanka has been turning out more and more of semi-skilled low-end wage-earners for the Global Inc elsewhere than high-earning technocrats, who anyway work in more open societies of the West than the Gulf region, and thus prefer settling down there as citizens of host-nations. In the run-up to the 2005 presidential polls, the two main candidates were competing with each other on the number of housemaids that they would be sending out jobbing elsewhere, and not in increasing the quality of higher education and turning out more and more of high-end wage-earners, for the local and global job markets. In any other country, the competing candidates would have had hell to pay. Not in Sri Lanka. The demand for six per cent GDP allocation for Education may have had higher pay-scales in mind, but there are still ways in which the larger issues need to be addressed.
Ethnic issue, UN and the UPR
It is unfortunate that over the past years, starting with those spent in ‘Eelam War IV’, Sri Lanka seems to be having a masochist pleasure in taking on the international community for right reasons and wrong, in right ways and wrong. Thanklessly for the nation, again, more recent months refuse to take away the odium of ‘war crimes’ and accountability that sounded feeble in the days and weeks immediately after the war. If it was the US-sponsored UNHRC resolution at Geneva six months ago, it is now the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), scheduled for November. In a way, all sections of the Government seems to be busy defending the ‘indefensible’ (in international perception) or ‘non-defensible’ (no ‘wrongs’ were done to be defended: Govt), with the result, little time or energy is available to address immediate issues of governance. Where compromises have to be made, not just in time and energy, it is where it seems to be.
What is often overlooked is that the UPR, unlike the March resolution, would go beyond war-related issues and concerns. For the same reason, the LLRC Report would be inadequate to address the concerns, which however have been flagged from time to time at Geneva, independent of who is ruling in Colombo and which feathers they had ruffled, locally or otherwise. It may thus be recalled that ahead of the last UPR in 2008, the civil society outfits in Colombo had made life miserable for the Government, flagging allegations of HR violations targeting them and others, particularly the ‘free media’. Their voices have silenced this time round. Yet, the opprobrium of the ‘white van’ invented and institutionalised by the dreaded LTTE remains after the LTTE. This time the shoe is on the other foot – and it hurts Sri Lanka.
The ‘ethnic issue’ refuses to go away. It never ever will, without a political solution acceptable to the local Tamils and acknowledged the rest of the world, where all the Diaspora Tamils live and influence decision-making. This is another reality that Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan State cannot run away from. If it is logical for the TNA to accept ‘incremental devolution’ as an interim solution of sorts, it should be equally logical for the Government to come down that many notches to address the legitimate aspirations of the Tamils and the political compulsions of the TNA, too.
Fair enough, the Government considers the PSC as the right forum to agitate, argue and resolve the ethnic issue. Fair enough, too, the TNA reportedly wants a ‘minimum threshold’ that the PSC would not violate. Ahead of leaving for New Delhi to brief the Indian leadership of their current concerns, some TNA leaders were variously quoted as saying that they had not settled for 13-A but feared that the PSC would seek to do away with even as much. For all stake-holders in Sri Lanka, it is as much political as it is constitutional. In all this, TNA should hold its friends and allies, from the past and the prospective ones, from within the Sinhala polity as much accountable as the Government – if not, more. After all, the TNA is starting off on a negative mind-set vis a vis the Government after the failure of the 18-round talks failed to show a way out of the deadlock. And the TNA should also hold itself accountable to addressing, directly and through the PSC, the concerns of other Tamil-speaking people on the island-nation. It should help put Sri Lanka back on the track, from which it has been slipping over the past decades, what with the camouflage of the war not being there any more to cover up for the wrongs of the party and Government in power, whoever they be!
(The writer is Director and Senior Fellow at the Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), the multi-disciplinary Indian public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi. email:
sathiyam54@hotmail.com)