The Story Of The Escapee Genie
By Mahesan Niranjan –June 23, 2016
Prof. Mahesan Niranjan
It was a day in the year 1976. A teen aged boy returning from his calculus class stops his bicycle at a political rally and listens to persuasive arguments from the stage. It was, in the eyes of the young boy, emotional, narrow minded nationalistic thinking at its very worst.
“It is all the fault of the ‘other’,” the young boy heard the speaker lament. “It is all because of them, it is they who have controlled our economy, sent troops and bombs to suppress us, erased our great identity, and taken away our sovereignty. It is their fishermen who sail down here and take our fish away. We should be free to mind our own affairs and re-establish the greatness we once had,” speaker after speaker thundered from that stage.
There, however, was no acknowledgement of the societal injustices we ourselves had created from within.
There, however, was no clear analysis of how feasible minding our own business was going to be.
There, however, was no plan of how to move from freeing ourselves from the clutches of the other, to that imagined state of milk and honey flowing in our very own sovereign state.
There, however, was no acceptance that the problems of our few that were being exaggerated to take us down a path that was going to affect us all.
Aspiration of a few power hungry politicians to take control of their party was to be confused with a far more serious issue of how to tackle known problems.
Emotion drove a people into the abyss.
S.J.V. Chelvanayakam
The event the young boy witnessed, readers ofColombo Telegraph will readily recognize, was the Vaddukkoddai resolution of the Tamil nationalists in Sri Lanka, calling for the establishment of a separate state in the North and East of the country, being passed.
The genie that was let out that day in 1976 enjoyed a long field day starting with a killing spree and enjoying thirty years of war, the end of which came about only by the total destruction of a community and its way of life. Even seven years after its bitter end, you only need to travel two hundred yards in either direction perpendicular to the A9 highway to see its residual scars. That is the cost of letting the genie out.
