An Acid Test For Democracy In Sri Lanka

By Emil van der Poorten –July 5, 2015

Emil van der Poorten

Being confined to the “boondocks” of Sri Lanka gives one a particular advantage in having access to the rural pulse of this country.

The unbelievable turmoil in matters political in the Miracle/Debacle of Asia is probably without precedent in the post-independence history of this country. There is no longer “left” and “right” in Sri Lankan politics or the three choices that S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike claimed we had when his Sri Lanka Freedom Party introduced his briefly-touted “middle way.”

We have before us and one needs add the proviso, “at time of writing” given the constantly changing allegiances, a real political “mallung.”
That said, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of the current situation.

In less than two months we will be faced with an opportunity to decide whether we want a democratic dispensation of a traditional (western?) kind, with all of its myriad shortcomings, or an autocratic government operating on a bed of corruption and violence. We have in our history after 1948 experienced both of these in a variety of manifestations.

My reading of January 8th 2015 is of a nation’s decision – even if one accepts the argument that the margin of victory might well have been constituted by the so-called minority communities – to reject the wholesale plunder of the national treasury by making “commissions” the cornerstone of the alleged economic development in Sri Lanka which, in its corrupt and violent entirety, had reached depths not achieved previously except, perhaps, in the first burst of the J. R. Jayewardene “liberalization” of the later 1970s. In President Jayewardene’s case his invitation was to the offshore “robber barons” who gladly accepted. In the case of the Rajapaksa dispensation, it has been far more local with the siphoning off of huge sums of money that should have gone into real economic activity into the pockets of a pyramid of corruption.

However, the immediate result of a seeming freeze on the most outrageous of these such as the port- and land-expansion monstrosity in Colombo, has been a concomitant freeze of economic activity downstream from the primary projects.Read More