The war of restoration

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(October 18, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) People seem to be taking for granted, the opposition’s innate inability to organize itself and mount a challenge to the governing party at elections that will inevitably happen next year.

All the opposition seems to be able to do at the moment is to launch a pseudo-Gramscian challenge, by marshalling civil-society as an organizing force against the state. Antonio Gramsci the 19th century Italian Marxist ideologue stated that undermining capitalist hegemony can be done through the trench warfare of appropriately positioning civil society.

With those such as Siritunga Jayasuriya involved in the opposition effort, there are shades of such revolutionary fervour that tinges the opposition’s approach, but the Gramscian approach of getting civil society to do the job seems, at first glance, hilariously inadequate in facing the Rajapaksa juggernaut.

But, on the one hand, today’s opposition is so tentative that it’s tentative to the point of being gun shy. An electoral contest is a matter of pitting one contending political ideology with another, and in many ways, the more pronounced the differences, the better for the opposition to contrast itself from the government.

Sarath Fonseka

But, what’s in fact happening is that half the opposition finds itself eager to morph into a clone of the government, and all the frenzied action towards fielding Sarath Fonseka as the common candidate of the opposition seems to be a pursuit toward that end.
The opposition’s almost Gramscian positioning (ie: a civil society led drive for power...) seems to be more as a result of poor organizational capability than due to conscious choice.

However, the question is moot — can civil society mount a campaign that would buffet the opposition and virtually land it the presidency, and a majority of seats in our parliament next year?

Let’s see. On the one hand, Sri Lankan civil society is partially discredited. The behaviour of civil society particularly during the last phase of the war was above all strategically shortsighted.

By virtually going down on their knees with a pathetic cry to save the LTTE, civil society lost credibility, and particularly those civil society actors who were in the forefront of such actions are now almost totally discredited.

So, for the true Gramscian or Gramscian prototype operation, civil society needs the fresh faces of articulate people, who are not affected by the taint of attempting a last minute rescue of the fascist Prabhakaran. A Gramscian putsch for power needs to be infused with sincerity of purpose; and a putsch for power it needs be, though not in the sense of a coup, but in the manner of an electoral uprising that would force the pace of change.

What the joint opposition now is, seems to be a cartoon or caricature of what it needs to be. There is no collective self-belief, but more than all, there seems to be a psychological train-wreck in the opposition, and its actors are behaving almost facetiously as if they are the kind of people who regularly laugh at funerals.

For instance, opposition civil society rallies are devoid of passion but are replete with ham-handed comedy; for example: last week, some of the opposition actors at a civil society seminar in Colombo poked fun at journalists who might have to tell their wives before they leave home that they might be coming home in a white van.

This is not gallows humour, it’s infantile elitism, where the opposition’s political elite seem to feel quite alienated from the very people they want to represent.

So, there is nothing epic about this opposition struggle we see now; rather, it appears more of an academic tilt at power.

This scenario would change if civil society is peopled by fresh faces, that are more sincere, articulate, and most importantly, far more credible than the currently discredited lot, who are providing the ballast for the common opposition’s charge.

Crippled

However, while the joint opposition, particularly the UNP is crippled by an inability to organize or even to envision the big picture, its marshalling of civil society forces is in many ways right - - even though the faces of those being marshalled are often the wrong ones.

Why is civil society the core (bedrock) opposition driving force at the moment? Yes, that’s how it should be, but why so?

The answer to that is simple.

After the strangulation of societal civil liberties during the war, and after the unavoidable emergence of jingoism that accompanied the also necessary annihilation of the LTTE, there is now a need for a profound social catharsis.

Civil society alone seems to have the equipment to engineer that catharsis as most liberties are never guaranteed by the state, but have to be won and sustained on the backs of organized social ferment. So it’s not that civil society is a dirty word, but it’s just that it has been dirtied, and needs to be recycled — instead of being hung out to dry.

Of course a genuine war on reclaiming the country from the slippery slope slide to lawlessness has to be based on values, and it has to be a values based effort and not a political effort that is manifest. It’s why cringeworthy worshipfulness of foreign destabilizing forces don’t have a place in this war of restoration of justice and rights - - and why civil society persons who represent that old order have to be replaced with genuine civil society actors who want change, though not change for furthering narrow political or personal agendas.

In other words, we do not want civil society narcissists, we want civil society activists. The civil society narcissists we have now offer a jejune reflection of society, which explains abundantly why they cannot inspire society, or fire the imagination of the opposition.

Much needs to be changed, and there is no time to wait. Society cannot expect the same old faces in government or opposition to do things for them.

The old order needs to change, and new and committed civil society troops are wanted in order to position themselves, and get things done very fast.

-Sri Lanka Guardian