Fallout of power sans responsibility

Anybody, Nobody, Everybody and Dead bodies

The few lines reproduced below may provide the guidelines to those who are attempting to affix the blame on particular individuals or parties for the most horrendous tragedy that befell Lanka on Easter Sunday.

There was an important job to do and everybody was asked to do it.

Everybody was sure somebody had to do it; Anybody could have done it but nobody did it. Somebody got angry because it was everybody’s job. Everybody thought anybody would do it.

But nobody realised that everybody wouldn’t do it.

It ended up that everybody blamed somebody when nobody did what anybody could have done.

Yes, everybody blamed somebody when nobody did what anybody could have done.

The sordid result: Around 250 bodies lie dead and hundreds are grievously wounded.

The hunt is on for the killers as well those who passed the buck. President Maithripala Sirisena went into the normal Sri Lankan reflex mode: He appointed a probe committee which was called upon to report within two weeks.

While some pundits claimed that the Sri Lankan intelligence services had been ‘dismantled’ and diverted towards ‘witch-hunting’, the operatives did a remarkably good job, arresting the key suspects, eliminating killers and raiding their hideouts and getting to the sources of global evil. On them will depend how soon this Middle East insanity spreading into this island will end.

A much more important issue is that which most Sri Lankans have been asking themselves for years: Whither Sri Lanka? Investigations on how this former British Colony which was considered to be the Pearl of the Orient reached the present subterranean depths in just 71-years of Independence may provide the answer.

Historians, sociologists, geopolitical theorists and the like have made known their learned theories of how this Pearl of the Orient metamorphosed itself to its present state. As a student of politics and journalist who has observed the political scene for over half a century, the saying of Rudyard Kipling (English journalist, poet and novelist of the Victorian era) in quite a different context, hits the mark dead centre: Power without responsibility has been the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

That the prerogative of power without responsibility is a common feature to both the ‘ladies of the night’ and politicians is well known even in our times. For our purpose, let us forget these ladies and focus on the prerogative of the politicians exercising their power without giving a damn of their responsibility to the people for the consequences.

Solomon Dias Bandaranaike’s ‘Revolution of 1956’ did away with English as the language of state administration and brought in Sinhala Only with ‘one flourish of the pen’ (Eka paen paharakin). Sinhala Only did open the doors to education and provide opportunities to the vast majority of the poor who did not know English. But Bandaranaike’s irresponsibility was that he did not consider the absolute need of an international language for higher education or even communication with the outside world.

Within decades Sri Lankans who were considered the most articulate in communication in South Asia with their fluent English became stuttering zombies at international gatherings.

Can Sri Lanka any more produce a Shirely Amerasinghe (Chairman of the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea), Gamani Corea (Secretary General of UNCTAD) and ambassadors of the calibre of Ben Fonseka, Neville Kankarartne and their contemporaries, all of whom the country was proud to have as their representatives, unlike the ‘baggage boy’ ambassadors carrying bags of former VIPs or those who sell off their embassy premises or are engaged in various nefarious criminal activities.

Solomon Bandaranaike died after two years in office and was followed by his wife Sirima.

Her 1972 Constitution was enacted without the participation of representatives of the country’s second biggest minority, the Tamils. It set in motion the separatist terrorist movement that lasted for a near 30 years, from which we are still attempting to recover. Velupillai Prabhakaran gave the ‘Standardisation of Examination Results’ as a prime reason for him to take to arms.

The most destructive act in the process constitutional reform of 1972 was the scrapping of the Ceylon Civil Service, an administrative service free from political interference whose members were the best of the intellectual elite, having been successful at the competitive examinations. It was replaced by a subservient service which resulted in administrators becoming minions and bag carriers of political thugs. The process continued through governments of even different political colourations because politicians wanted government officials to be their obedient servants, not the servants of the state.

Beginning from the ‘70s, every branch of government became politicized -- armed services, police, all government departments and universities. They became fiefdoms of the Nayakathuma -- the Leader. The lowest point of this sordid process came about with the impeachment of the Chief Justice during the Rajapaksa regime -- which is now clamouring to return to power to restore ’discipline’.

It is unimaginable that the colossal blunder of vital intelligence information being handled the way it did leading to the Easter Sunday attacks would have taken place in the old days of the CCS.

Governments came and governments went—JRJ, Premadasa, Chandrika, Mahinda and now Sirisena—but the rot continues. Sri Lanka is not a democracy it is a demo-crazy. Everyone is an authority on any subject -- from solar power to jurisprudence -- though most are bereft of the basic GCE-OL.

The country has now reached the stage where some leading political factions are trying to promote ‘strongmen' to impose discipline and restore law and order. Whose law and whose order that is envisaged is not known.

As we had written in recent columns of Doublespeak, the remedy of ‘Strongmen’ can be worse than the disease they are called upon to cure.

After 20 years of rule as President of Algeria, Bouteflika wanted to run for a third term but was compelled to resign after months of violent street protests. Omar al Basheer has been the strongman of Sudan for more than 30 years and only violent street protests finally ousted him, but now the problem of the Sudanese is to end the military rule of Basheer’s former army still holding on to power. The legendary leader of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega who has been in and out of power since 1979 is also facing street protests by his fellow Nicaraguans who want him out. Another Strongman Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, is being threatened to be ousted by the Opposition but is supported by the army and his own factions. The country is on the verge of starvation with thousands of people fleeing the country.

Strongmen of the military variety is no ‘Kokatah Thailaya’ (panacea) to country’s ills, hysterical activists should realise.