What Victory For Whom?
Emil van der Poorten
As I write this, I am informed that the price of large (“Bombay”) onions, a staple for all the “rice-and-curry eaters” has doubled in price in the local market. I am also told that rice has jumped in price. Coupled with an increase in bus ticket prices and several other essentials inside and outside the categories of food, clothing and shelter, these are all costs that are disproportionately borne by the poor and middle class in a country where there is no progressive income tax structure and where, to add to the misery, a relatively miniscule part of the population pays any taxes at all, while the “stinking rich” get off scot-free thanks to “incentives” of various kinds that obviate the services of some slippery ‘tax consultant’ to ensure avoidance. And, please note, I have not so much as mentioned the contribution of the “kudu mudalalis,” extortionists and other practitioners of the truly ugly arts!
Yet, it seems with the additional provocation of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (attended by less than half of those “heads,” it appears), one’s auditory (if not olfactory!) senses are being assailed by the “peace dividend” that we are allegedly harvesting at this point of time. Maybe, the more affluent and city dwellers of the upper and middle-classes are enjoying life a great deal more than they did during the times of the lurking Prabhakaran monsters. However, those who lived and continue to do so in the hinterland have seen a significant reduction in what little they might have had as disposable income. Whatever food substitution was possible by virtue of living in rural circumstances has been increasingly reduced by the growth in numbers of vermin that compete more than successfully for what food the human inhabitatnts might have been able to grow above or below the ground. Suffice it to say that the numbers of wild pigs, porcupines, giant squirrels and that ultimate curse of rural Sri Lanka outside the forest areas, the macaque monkeys, seem to have grown exponentially. What (illegal) means of control this part of our population had via snares, trap guns and the like have been cracked down upon by the “guardians of the law,” while absolutely no attempt has been made to provide an alternative for those unwilling to surrender the fruits of their labours to their porcine, simian or rodent competitors. And PLEASE don’t give me that “the animals were here first” because that wasn’t true within the last couple of hundred years at least and if you seek to carry such patently fictitious statements forward, not God himself can convince you otherwise! Read More
