Politics of sleepwalking

TUESDAY, 23 JULY 2013 

The virulent attack by a state-run television channel on reputed writer, translator and media activist Gamini Viyangoda on July 14 is another decisive (and derisive) step in the state’s top-priority project to create  obedient, soulless artists and journalists who will work like robots to promote a singular, uniform culture  functioning  as its propaganda and information tool.

Gamini Viyangoda is one of the few remaining dissenting voices against this monolithic onslaught against the country’s established democratic values and freedom of expression, protesting with supreme courage in his weekly column in the Ravaya newspaper, as well as in speeches and discussions on public forums and on television.

No wonder he has become a prime target for the television which is anything but independent. This attack was based on Viyangoda’s defence of the award-winning film the ‘Flying Fish,’ made by a young filmmaker called Sanjeewa Pushpakumara and screened at the BMICH on Friday, July 12 as part of the French film festival. Officials were so incensed with the screening that the entire festival was suspended, and this led the TV channel to vilify Gamini Viyangoda as an LTTE sympathizer and ‘conspirator.’ The government claims that the film is an insult to the security forces.

In the government’s definition, the security forces are sacrosanct and can’t be criticized on any grounds. Any criticism amounts to an insult. It has been a long-established tradition in Sri Lanka that religion can’t be criticized, or given a modern interpretation, in the arts (as novelist Martin Wickremasinghe learned at great cost in the 1970s). Now, the military too, have been elevated to that sacrosanct level, hence all the fuss over ‘Flying Fish.’

" Gamini Viyangoda is one of the few remaining dissenting voices against this monolithic onslaught against the country’s established democratic values and freedom of expression "                              Read more.