Mervyn de Silva and the Lankan condition

10TH DEATH ANNIVERSARY- June 22

"What made Mervyn rare within the liberal or progressive intelligentsia, was that he was highly sensitive to both radical Sinhala youth aspirations and Tamil and other minority sentiments and aspirations."
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By Dayan Jayathilleka

(June 22, Geneva, Sri Lanka Guardian) Father’s Day this year falls on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the death of my father, Mervyn de Silva, journalist and editor, literary critic and satirist, broadcaster and commentator on world affairs, or as Godfrey Gunatilleke put it in a sixth anniversary revaluation, “literary critic, intellectual, political analyst and media communicator all in one”. The founder editor of the Editor’s Guild of Sri Lanka, the award instituted in his name by the industry is the pinnacle prize of the annual Journalism Awards ceremony.

My first memory of anything was the perspective from the playpen, of my father alone at the dining table, in trousers and vest, typing, while my maternal grandmother watches us with a smile. My last memory of him was seeing him die, through a glass door, clearly, at the intensive care unit of a Colombo hospital. Hours or days later I walked back into his study and saw his typewriter, stubbed out cigars, well thumbed volumes of Walter Lippmann and I.F. Stone, the empty chair. “Aren’t you going to write anything on your father for the anniversary? Why not say how he might have viewed this time, after the war?” suggested Sanja, my wife, gently. So here I am ten years after and ten thousand miles away, typing.

He died just before he turned seventy and the world moved into the new century, millennium and (perhaps) paradigm. Had he been alive he would have welcomed Barack Obama at least as enthusiastically as he did JFK. What would he have said about the moment that Sri Lanka has arrived at today? Is it possible for us to extrapolate what his insights might have been from a recollection of what he wrote and said?

Mervyn would have written about the war, its aftermath and future prospects; the Rajapakse presidency; Tamil politics; the serious challenge to Sri Lanka’s external relations; the erosion or squandering of her “soft power” resources; and the structure of the international information order as revealed by the coverage of the closing stages of the conflict.

He described himself as a liberal and a humanist. He was both these things but not of a sort that shied away from the subject of warfare. He would have been a shrewd observer of the epic endgame of the Eelam wars. He would have done so with no trace of enthusiasm for either side but empathy for both, as would a literary critic with a grasp of tragedy or a masterful cricket commentator like John Arlott. Though his early columns such -- as the series of exposes on his boarding school -- were cathartic and savagely satirical, in his mature middle years Mervyn (unlike his son) kept his passions restricted to the precincts of his private life and outside the boundaries of his published writing. As Neelan Tiruchelvam told me, someone who did not know Mervyn could read his writings without once guessing which ethnicity, nationality or religion he belonged to. That is the objectivity, maturity of attitude and consummate journalistic professionalism he would have brought to bear on his comments on the Rise and Fall of Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers.

Mervyn de Silva would however had little patience for Colombo’s critics of the Rajapakse administration. It was Prof Michael Roberts who resurrected his three part defense in the Ceylon Observer in 1967 of the SWRD surge of 1956 and its successor project of a broad united front of the centre–left (which crystallized the next year at Bogambara with the inclusion of the Communist party). That essay contained a relentless critique of the effete “aesthetic” aversion of the attitudinally almost indistinguishable Westernized Right and orthodox Left, to the stirrings of the Sinhala rural masses couched as they were in cultural and linguistic terms. My support for President Rajapakse flowed directly from the influence of my father. As I told him in the days he became the Leader of the Opposition, at a party at Galle Face Courts hosted by a young journalist Farah Mihlar (now a London based, occasional Guardian blogger) at which Gen Sanath Karunaratne was also present, I would support him fully, not least because I had no emotional option but to do so since I knew that was what my father would have wanted. When Mervyn died many politicians had paid their respects, beginning with Mr. Thondaman Sr, but three had actually committed their appreciation to print that year: Sarath Amunugama, MHM Ashraff and Mahinda Rajapakse. The Rajapakse article appeared in the Daily News and recalled his presence as youthful observer at political discussions between Mervyn and his uncles George and Lakshman Rajapakse, Mervyn’s friends and class mates. He also recounted Mervyn’s and his convergence in solidarity with Palestine and the PLO.

As his support for SWRD Bandaranaike, which extended to Sirima Bandaranaike, and his open uncritical sympathy for Premadasa (long before my own association with the latter, whom I first met in our Ward Place flat when I was a school-kid) demonstrated, Mervyn endorsed and supported political leaders of both mainstream democratic parties who were left of centre or progressive, in twin terms of sensitivity to mass aspirations and the cause of the Third World. In this he was hardly alone, though there were only a clutch of Westernized Colombo based Sri Lankans with an elite liberal education, to do so. Most either supported the UNP or the Trotskyist LSSP. Supportive of the SLFP and broad center-left coalitions, he nonetheless mourned the absence of a policy elite and coherent moderate ideology for the SLFP. The UNP and Left had their ideology and intellectuals, but he observed that the centrist SLFP did not – a failure which made it permanent prey to pressure groups of one or other illiberal persuasion.

What made Mervyn rare within the liberal or progressive intelligentsia, was that he was highly sensitive to both radical Sinhala youth aspirations and Tamil and other minority sentiments and aspirations. What made him unique was that while he was prophetic about youth rebellion and strongly sympathetic to the radicalism of the university educated rural Sinhala youth, (“an angry young tiger at the gates”, was the poetically allusive concluding line of a 1969 Royal College lecture turned title of a Ceylon Observer series) he always kept his balance, scorning those Westernized fellow travelers of the JVP as seeking to regain their lost romantic youth, and dismissing as “grotesque”, the description of post-1971 Ceylon by Amnesty International’s Lord Avebury in the Guardian (London) as “an Island Behind Bars”.

Unique also was his combination of the defense of popular peasant based nationalism and the sovereign state in Sri Lanka and the Third World, with an explicit warning in his important Daily News debate of November 1972 with Regi Siriwardena, of the dangers of disregarding or derogating that of universal value within the Western literary and artistic canon, in a striving for greater grounding and relevance. Thus he balanced an understanding and appreciation of majority nationalism in Sri Lanka with a warning against too far a swing of the pendulum. For Mervyn de Silva, the universality of the human condition was the higher value and loyalty.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of his unique voice was that he sounded the alarm and implicitly took a stand on the Tamil question long before others, and after the Old Left, strident in its cautionary notes of the 1950s, had ironically been in the very vanguard of generating Tamil secessionism and youth militancy through its fashioning of the 1972 Constitution which it regarded as crowning achievement and acme of progressivism. Mervyn’s explicit early warning (and it wasn’t his first) came in a Ceylon Daily News editorial of July 1st 1972, titled “What's up in the North?”, several weeks after the new Constitution was promulgated ignoring the six point letter sent to the framers and fathers by Mr. Chelvanayagam and the Tamil parliamentary leadership, and Prabhakaran had picked up the gun, commencing a cycle of carnage that lasted close to four decades. Here are some salient extracts:

“…The emergence, however hesitant or faint, of a militant youth group in the peninsula is a phenomenon about which we have written before. If the observation is correct, it is a factor of enormous significance - especially to the government. It is tempting these days to make a fetish of youth movements and youth politics. In Lanka, the temptation is almost irresistible after last year's holocaust. In any case, this is not only a young nation but a country of young people, as the relevant statistics prove.

The frustrations of the educated young Tamil at a time when even science graduates cannot find suitable jobs do not require much explication. The fact that these frustrations are universal and that they are shared by his Sinhala counterpart does not make the Tamil youth's psychological load lighter. And if he feels, in fact, that the educational system and system of recruitment to the public sector have been deliberately contrived to reduce his chances, he has more reason for anger. An anger that reaches the limits of tolerance makes inflammable material for a certain kind of politics.

…A movement of militant youth rooted in the soil of Jaffna and nourished by material frustration, a feeling of humiliation and bitterness could be another kettle of fish.”

This 1972 editorial tells me very clearly that while Mervyn would have warmly supported President Rajapakse, brushed aside his cosmopolitan and Western critics with some measure of derision, and dispassionately recorded the dramatic fall and destruction of Prabhakaran with his tragic flaws of hubris and cruelty which consumed Mervyn’s friends and acquaintances A. Amirthalingam, Lakshman Kadirgamar, Neelan Tiruchelvam, and Shri Rajiv Gandhi, he would be posing today the question of the Tamil condition as key to the Sri Lankan condition and prospect.

In 1984 Mervyn committed his Lanka Guardian to a venture in partnership with the South Asia Perspectives Project of the United Nations University, which brought together some of Sri Lanka’s finest minds in a search for a solution. The document that resulted, if implemented, would have pre-empted the externally propelled Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987. Exactly a quarter century later, its platform of broad provincial autonomy remains valid and yet dormant and only partially fulfilled.

To what extent do the causes and condition of collective Tamil angst and alienation illumined in his 1972 editorial remain, after over three and a half decades of armed conflict? How will these be addressed, who by, and when? Mervyn had the knowledge and lucidity not to confuse war with the issue of ethnic identity. Unlike many affluent Tamil friends who sympathized with the Tigers, Mervyn’s knowledge of history would tell him that war, whatever its character and content, if fought relentlessly to its conclusion, has winners and losers; that the “rejectionist” type of terrorist or insurgent movement – such as one which could blow up Rajiv Gandhi and Neelan Tiruchelvam--make negotiated settlement impossible; and that if such a movement wagers all or nothing and loses, it ends up with nothing. He would know that history does not repeat itself in simple cyclical terms and that the threat of a renewal of insurgent or terrorist violence would hold no fears for a first rate, formidable and ferociously successful Sri Lankan military which has destroyed a world class irregular armed force on the latter’s own terrain, just as he knew that no guerrilla or conventional war by any combination of actors could militarily defeat the Israeli Defense Forces within its ’67 borders (as distinct from Lebanon, another country).

At the same time Mervyn would stress that the issue of the alienation of the Tamil people and the complex challenge of accommodating Tamil ethnic identity within the Sri Lankan state and society, reconciling it with historic Sinhala fears and ancient memories, emphatically do not lend themselves to a military or militaristic solution. In his travels through the Middle East, Mervyn saw (and I was there with him) how the scintillating Israeli military victories of 1967 and to a lesser extent 1973 (Sharon’s counter attack) turned into an endless quagmire because of the policies of permanent displacement, settler-colonization of the lands of the displaced and the refugees, increasingly fundamentalist religiosity, annexation masquerading as antiquarian archeological exploration, and harsh military occupation with its myriad daily humiliations and lacerating lived experience.

The widely traveled and enormously literate Mervyn was an admirer of both the American social experiment of melting pot, meritocracy and individual opportunity as well as of Russian and Chinese ethnic regional autonomy, neither of which have been adopted or adapted by Sri Lanka. His understanding of strategy was sufficiently broad and multifaceted to spur a sustained critique of Lalith Athulathmudali’s narrower National Security/“Total Defense” mindset, and the Lalith-Mervyn debate of 1984 (at the YMCA forum I think) was a precursor of the recent American debate on security between the neoconservative Bush-Cheney camp and the liberal Realists including Joseph Nye and Barack Obama. In his last years Mervyn supplemented Henry Kissinger and (Russia’s) Georgy Arbatov as staples of intellectual inspiration, with increasing references in his columns to Prof Joe Nye. Mervyn would have cautioned that designing the postwar order in Sri Lanka through purely or primarily National Security lenses, and worse still, attempting to impose Sinhala over-lordship on the overwhelmingly Tamil North, would erode Sri Lanka’s standing and legitimacy even among its neighbors, undermine the national interest and de-stabilize national security itself. Had he been around long enough, it would have been typically Mervyn-ish to write, perhaps as columnist Kautilya in the Island, that Sri Lanka’s problem is not an ancient, pervasive Sinhala Buddhism, but an obsolescent, lingering SINHALA BUSHISM.

(These are the purely personal views of the writer)

-Sri Lanka Guardian