On The Dimensions Of Colombo-Phobia
Uditha Devapriya
A friend of mine, who suggested on Facebook that democracy touting Colombo 7 liberals have been calling Maithripala Sirisena a gamarala and a gramasevaka, got the following reply from an irate Colombo citizen: “Those insults came from the SLFP when he contested.” This same friend, when he suggested that “Colombo 7 wants democracy but not elections”, got an even pithier response: “Aren’t they Sri Lankan citizens too?” To which the friend retorted: “Supposedly.”
Both sides have a point. Colombo, specifically Colombo 7, hasn’t exactly been quiet about its preferred political outcomes when it comes to its rhetoric about democracy and good governance. On the other hand, Pamankada is as much a part of this country as Alimankada and for this reason, dishing the blame for the country’s problems to a specific suburb is as self-defeating as claiming that what this country needs is a leader from Cinnamon Gardens and Colpetty.
When Malinda Seneviratne once suggested that residents of these places would be perfectly happy to secede from the rest of the country and install the Queen as their head of state, he was indulging in caricature. Many of those who bash Colombo today, however, are not indulging in that sort of caricature. They are indulging in invective. The anger of these bashers, in that sense, is more complicated.
At one level it’s a reaction against the simplifications many of those from Colombo tout. It is true that Sirisena was branded as a gamarala and godaya and gramasevaka negatively by the SLFP (before he won the 2015 election), but as commentators like Seneviratne have observed, long before Sirisena thought of defecting, those same Colombo democracy-loving good governance-fetishising citizens minced no words in their insults against Mahinda Rajapaksa over the latter’s rural roots.
Sure, it’s hard to say whether those insults were motivated by a sustained antipathy from their end towards the non English speaking majority, but it’s not hard to say that they were provoked in part at least by anger at seeing an “outsider” calling the shots in their part of the world. That the UNP, the preferred party, scrounged up the highest number of votes (101,920) and seats (24) FROM THE WHOLE COUNTRY at the 2011 Local Government election in Colombo, DESPITE the Urban Development Authority’s unparalleled beautification drive (spearheaded by Gotabaya Rajapaksa), confirmed just where this milieu’s loyalties were. They also confirmed what Rosy Senanayake once crassly remarked during her campaign as the UNP’s candidate for Mayor of the city: that Colombo was the heart of the Party. “Is Buttala its buttocks then?” Malinda asked. Tongue-in-cheek, of course.
Given these facts, equating Colombo with everything anti-Rajapaksa and anti-Sirisena and equating everything anti-Rajapaksa and anti-Sirisena with everything anti-rural and anti-outstation is not the sign of political reductionism some cut it out to be. On the other hand, that this means a vast majority of Colombo residents are opposed to those outstation areas is a hasty conclusion to jump to. If at all, it betrays the critics’ inability to see beyond simplistic binaries, since in their discourse, Colombo is “bad” and outside-Colombo is “good.” (If there’s a single statistic proving this dichotomy beyond a shadow of a doubt, I am yet to come across it.)
Let’s get some perspective here. What is Colombo? It is a city spanning an area of 37 square kilometres extending from the four storey households of Cinnamon Gardens to the two roomed apartments of Pamankada. It begins just after Kohuwela, Nugegoda, and Dehiwela in the south and ends in Mattakkuliya up north. It houses those who attend Colombo International and reside in Ward Place as well as those who attend Royal College and reside in the shanties of Thimbirigasyaya.
The national majority (Sinhalese and Buddhist) make up less than 50 percent of the population, while the figures for Tamils, Muslims, and other minorities exceed their corresponding national percentages. Like most capital cities, it drains people from the rest of the country, provoking a massive rural-urban exodus. The population density, the highest in Sri Lanka (more than 50,000 per square mile), which this exodus serves to compound, makes strange bedfellows out of racial diversity and social disparity: an engineer can expect an opening monthly salary of Rs. 45,000 living in an annexe with a monthly rent of Rs. 15,000, while the driver of the Uber you just hailed sleeps in his cab parked next to a kiosk every night. It is home to both opulence and poverty, both amity and bigotry. In short, it is a world inhabited, and shared, by two cultures.
