“Fonseka’’ a F word for deeper fissures and faults..

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(February 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) For some people, there is a sign of deepening malaise in Sri Lankan society, but for others, it is business as usual. But last week’s peremptory incarceration of Sarath Fonseka, common opposition presidential candidate, seems also to highlight the developing chasm between two strands in our society —— the nationalist, and the globalist.

Now, these are narrow definitions that would almost immediately invite criticism for oversimplification or naivete or both. But there is a polarisation and a developing chasm in our society that’s self-evident, and there is a disaffected 40 per cent in society who haven’t had the heady scent of power wafting about their nostrils for over 16 years now - - - and that time period would very probably extend to 23 years.

Sarath Fonseka’s incarceration therefore, and the immediate events that preceded it such as the presidential election and the denial in some quarters of Mahinda Rajapaksas electoral success, are but corollary events that are only connected to the main issue, which is the yawning divide that’s opening up between the ruling nationalist government and the ostensibly globalist opposition.

The problem is that this divide is now underscored by fissures that are developing along the main fault line.

There is the growing ethnic polarisation, and then, on top of it, a certain ossification of patronage-style political tendencies that is perceived to favour the blue blood nationalists of the Sri Lanka Freedom party bent. (i.e: Simply put, to get a job you need to be “a Sri Lanka karaya.’’)

The sense of exclusion and abandonment endangered by these present tendencies are creating fissures among the main fault line in society which was earlier defined, for want of a better description, as a nationalist vs. globalist demarcation.

Though Colombo seems to have got a bad case of SFitis or Fonsekaitis after the recent events related to Sarath Fonseka’s arrest, the new fissures that are being created along society’s developing fault line are now poised to create several aftershocks, after the quake of a presidential election which left the main opposition bereft benumbed and belly-up.

No effect

Colombo elite formations are not resigning to the idea of another eight years of Rajapaksa rule, and then the international community and the Tamil Diaspora which have a vested interest in regime change, have been shocked by a feeling of collective impotence, after it was learnt that their collective stratagems seem to have no effect upon determining the shape of the regime that’s sitting in Colombo.

What has resulted is a mentality of siege —- Colombo elite formations, international Tamil diaspora formations and international supra national formations that have hegemonic interests over the Sri Lankan state, feel a sense of being besieged by a nationalism which they feel is not only puny but also “chauvinistic’’ and outmoded.

However, the current strain of Sri Lankan nationalism which is causing all of these convulsions within Lankan society’s many disparate groups and sub-cultural entities, may prevail and subsume all other challenges to its status quo, and relegate the so called anti national globalist formations to a disenchanted disaffected ineffectual rump.

In India for instance the burgeoning Shiv Sena movement had all the makings of an unstoppable juggernaut but in the end Raul Gandhi’s Neo Nheruvian politics of egalitarian globalisation prevails. Now, Hinduthava is a distant memory and a little bit of a social quaintism from India’s not so distant past.

Here in Sri Lanka, the poles maybe transposed, and what’s dominant may be the nationalism, the Sri Lankan mirror image of Hinduthva which seemed to have pummelled the young Rahul type UNP Nehruvite yuppie equivalent in Colombo to a pulp.

The elite still believe that Rajapaksaism would not prevail and that the current eddies that are lapping at the base of the Rajapaksa ship of state, would eventually develop into a giant tsunami of upheaval, that would upset the new wave of Sinahala nationalism personified by the Rajapaksas.

Why do many people believe this tsunami is coming?

One reason is that there is suspended disbelief —— there is a serious syndrome of denial, resultant from the fact that the internationalist globalist Diaspora and elite formations, needless to say, have been the dominant force in the entire post independence history of this country barring a few interregnums.

Therefore, this standing on the head of historical fact with the advent of the Rajapaksas is a new reality that too many among the traditional powerful Sri Lankan elite cannot bear.

The denial about the election is a first sign of this tendency of overall denial and to this extent, be it in Venezuela or on Iran, elections have been the starting points for disaffected groups who have not been able to stomach democracy at work.

In both Venezuela and in Iran, Chavez and Ahmadinejad have both, though they have enjoyed immensely populist support at a grassroots level, been very polarising figures for the same reason that the Rajapaksas are polarising figures in Sri Lankan politics today.

In the case of Ahmadinejad and Chavez, they have led political movements that have upset the median setting in the political magnetometres of their respective countries.

Holy cows

Their popularity has excited such a critical mass of people that the opposition formations which at least had a chance of being in power on a rotation basis, have almost entirely been marginalized and excluded.

Sri Lankan elite formations saw that after the war there was no chance for Rajapsksa brand nationalists to continue in power because they had simply upset too many holy cows and upped the political ante one too many times by thumbing their noses at the international big powers and “putting Tamil nationalists in their place’’ - both manoeuvres which would have been sacrilegious to a previous political elite.

By virtue of these cardinal sins they thought that even in the light of their popularity the “better instincts’’ among a people would enable them to see the back of the Rajapaksas.

It did not happen, and the elite formations are now looking down the barrel at another ten years plus out of power, and that seems to be too much to take.

This is why there is now the visible shape of a political movement that hopes to rely on a people-path to power, rather than the democratic electoral route.

People power oppositions can create the illusion of popularity while in fact genuine support for the agitators may in fact be limited. But street-protests seems to be the only device available to a Sri Lankan opposition which seems to have exhausted all other options and been totally outmanoeuvred at the game of playing franchise-determined politics.