A Tale Of Two Brotherhoods: The Rajapaksa And The Muslim
By Rajan Philips -July 14, 2013
Rajan Philips
There is no direct comparison between what began as a High Noon drama in Egypt two weeks ago, and what has been going on for quite a while in Colombo as a low level street theatre involving 13A. The comparison, if at all, lies in the main orchestrators and actors in the Egyptian showdown and their counterparts in Sri Lanka. In Egypt, the army, the Muslim Brotherhood and their extremist variants, and the vocally united but otherwise hopelessly divided secular opposition are all in play, in full public view, on the political stage that is the state itself. The Sri Lankan situation is less dramatic but more insidious. There are also striking contrasts while a parallel might be seen in the preoccupation with constitution making in both Egypt and Sri Lanka.
There is a brotherhood of a different kind in Sri Lanka. The Rajapaksa brotherhood constitutes the regime, controls the army, and orchestrates the extremists among the Sinhalese, who without the regime’s support and protection will be run out of town in no time by the real majority of the Sinhalese people. The opposition to the regime in Sri Lanka is nowhere near the opposition in Egypt by any measure. Remarkably, it is the opposition in Egypt that gave the Egyptian army the justification to dismiss the regime of President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. But one must be crazily out of touch with reality to envisage a parallel development in Sri Lanka. The thrust of my argument, however, is that Sri Lanka is heading towards a situation that Egypt is trying to escape from.
