Decolonizing “Reconciliation” Itself
By Dilshan Fernando –FEBRUARY 12, 2020
Dilshan Fernando
There were many readers and interpreters of the 2019 presidential election result: some were jubilant, others lamented heavily. All strived to provide the most meaningful analysis of the post-election situation that for many, especially the losers, was a nightmare that couldn’t be explained under a consistent principle. Although I don’t agree, many from both camps almost unanimously agreed that the good governance (GG) government’s reconciliation outlook was a major factor that affected detrimentally to its later unseating. However, there are questions and assumptions about GG government’s reconciliation programme that we must confront, if at all we consider reconciliation is still a valid topic.
Before we get in to GG government’s reconciliation programme and outlook, we must entangle ourselves on a brief detour to place the problem correctly in the context. Some abstractions assist in this endeavour. From a theoretical point of view – those who despise theory must soon un-blind themselves by taking the example from devout theoretical practices of nationalist populists like Nalin De Silva that consistently anoint their hallowed power edifice – reconciliation does not strive to unite dis-unified parties. Philosophically, there is no harmonious “One” that later divides in to a differing “Two.” Rather, we should start with the non-binary “Two” itself. To put it simply, it is a grave conceptual mistake to think that reconciliation is a political project that endeavours to bring back the dis-unified parties (Two) – in our case ethnic communities – to a harmonious whole (One) that existed before they got dis-unified. The reason is that there was no such ethnically unified national identity in the first place.
There are no prodigal sons that a benevolent father needs to bring together in reconciliation. It’s not because that Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and other minorities are more than prodigal sons, but because that there was no “happy family” in the first place that the benevolent father – played probably by the GG government – must re-unite. Not only that there was no happy family before, but also that there cannot be one in future. Believing the contrary of the aforementioned, in my view, resulted in a colonial indoctrination of reconciliation that later brought down the very political force that brought it forth. Let’s peruse this apparent absurdity.
After all, what is so colonial about bringing the ethnicities together? The simple answer is that different ethno-religious communities have different conceptions about this togetherness itself. For example, for right wing Sinhalese, Sri Lanka is their historical and moral – referring to some transcendental right similar to the largely secular Israelites who nonetheless believe overwhelmingly that God gave their land – homeland which was later also inhabited by other ethnic communities who landed here for non-historic and non-moral reasons – from trade to chance. Contrastingly, for a Tamil, right to one’s land is determined solely by the self-affirmation of the concerned ethno-religious group, which also provides meaning to their nearly a century old struggle. Self-affirmation is no less moral than historic right in some sense. And for a typical Muslim, Islamic way of life – from Prayer to Parda – prevails over any attempt to integrate them to secular notions of life. Quite reasonably then, there should not be any justification to un-veil a Muslim woman who has self-veiled herself, where ironically, all women in Islam are veiled in essence, eluding to its fundamental metaphysic, even if they are not actually covering their faces. In this background, what perhaps does bringing people in these radically different walks of life together actually mean? The answer must be estopped for another moment.
In an 1853 New York Herald Tribune article titled “The British Rule in India,” Karl Marx notoriously asked whether “can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?” referring to the social conditions of colonial India. An occasion where Marx is often labelled as a Euro-centric white charlatan, on my view, is nonetheless a correct diagnosis of colonialism in our region. When the British arrived, or for that matter even the Portuguese, Sri Lanka back then was not in ethno-religious harmony. This is true even if the country had a unified kingdom from time to time. What constituted arguably such an ethno-religious identity is the very anti-colonial attempts to get rid of colonialism. Hence, Marx’s question is whether the then progressive social forces have been able to capture the historical agency to un-root the feudal kings and regressive aristocracies without the unforeseen – no less brutal and barbaric – intervention of the colonial forces. I think not.
The interesting story then is that not only that the anti-colonial movement allowed the inter-ethnic communities to unite against the British, but also the historical situation provided the downtrodden oppressed classes, including the minorities to channel their rage against their own oppressors. This meant that the Tamil speaking people in the country stood against their counterparts – the Sinhala majority – in view of winning political sovereignty. Does this mean then, that the Tamil – or the ethnic – question is a colonial scapegoat? Answer: No, precisely because unbeknownst to the British, the historically oppressed classes – from Tamil speaking people to the lower castes – were able to articulate their suffering for the first time in history. On my view, British were a necessary price that the national pride had to pay in order to grant the language of struggle to the downtrodden.
What then is the Tamil struggle against the Sinhala state? Nothing but, oxymoronically, an anti-anti-colonial struggle par excellence, emphasizing its facet as an alternative anti-colonial struggle, against the majoritarian one. This radically means that the Tamil struggle was never of a kind that sought to plunge back to a harmonious whole that pre-existed the British. It is in this sense that the Tamils were the first moderns in Sri Lanka, just like the Dalits in India. Tamils were the first to know that there never was a “happy family,” when even their most progressive Sinhala counterparts – from various leftist forces – were singing this melody. Tamils knew that Farntz Fanon was right when he said in his “Black Skin, White Masks” that “there is no black mission. There is no white burden. I do not want to be victim to the rules of a black world. Am I going to ask this white man to answer for the slave traders of the 17th century?” There should not be any burden on anyone to pursue empty western multi-culturalism.
In this sense, we can conclude that the empty pressure to unite all ethnicities under happy family was never enshrined by an authentic vision about Sri Lanka. One could site India, as is often the case. Well, quite forcefully, I must remind everyone, that there is no united India without the fact of a Muslim Pakistan, irrespective of alluding to the numerous examples of anti-unitary protest movements in India. What a debacle it would have been if all the two hundred million Muslims who are living in present day Pakistan were asked to live in India? Inter-state diversity of India while true of being diverse, did never threaten to undermine its Hindu identity – according to Arundhati Roy – in comparison to its perceived threat of Islamization. Therefore, ‘reconciliation as harmonization’ is undoubtedly a colonial, elitist indoctrination that represses the “Real” of brutal otherness pertaining to each of the ethnic communities concerned. Concisely, it wipes out “difference.”
