On the need to take on the ‘who are we?’ question

By Malinda Seneviratne

(March 07, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) I’ve been following the recent exchange between Dayan Jayatilleka and Nalin Swaris following Dayan calling the arrest of Sarath Fonseka ‘a perfect blunder’ and making other dire pronouncements about the overall political situation in Sri Lanka, which he confesses caused him grief. Swaris responded and Dayan responded the following day. Swaris has responded once again in a website called ‘Transcurrents’.

I think everyone has a right to feel aggrieved if things are not going the way he/she wants them to go. People are free to be despondent, to suffer ‘heavy hearts’ and any number of other ailments. People are free to elevate someone like Douglas Devananda to the position of ‘The Tamil Representative that Mahinda Rajapaksa Should Talk To’ never mind the fact that he, Douglas, is a thug and does not have any sway among the Tamil voters, not even the majority in the Jaffna Peninsula.

People are free to say ‘we should remain non-aligned’ and free to genuflect before Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi the next moment. People are free to pick on Israel for the horrendous crimes committed in Gaza and free to rant and rave about Zionist expansionism. They are also free to look the other way when a ‘Gaza’ happens in ‘Kashmir’. People are free to say ‘look, the Indian constitution grants religious freedom’ and they are free to pretend that periodic pogroms do not happen in Gujarat with Hindus killing tens of thousands of Muslims.

People are free, also, to champion the cause of democracy and democratizing; they are also free to worship the thrusting of a piece of law down a nation’s throat and to thank the person who did it, even though there was nothing democratic or good about it, never mind the complete violation of ethics in the manner the relevant document was presented and passed into law. People are free to ignore demography, geography, history, archaeological record and sustainability when singing the praises of a particular political or institutional arrangement.

Dayan Jayatilleka has stated that he will not debate with me. Fine. He has that right too. While watching with amusement the exchange with Swaris, and noticing that true to form Dayan is resorting to issue-dodging and name-dropping, I must say that he, Dayan, has in conclusion raised a very important issue. I do not see eye to eye with Dayan on a number of things, but I think Dayan makes a very important point about the state of affairs in our political discourse in his rejoined to Swaris in The Island of March 5, 2010:

It is an abiding failure of Sri Lankan political discourse to identify liberal democracy with the West and to use our necessary Non Aligned identification either as evidence of deviation from liberal democracy or as warrant for it. What we have failed to do is learn from the examples of say, Brazil, India, South Africa and many Latin American states such as Uruguay and Ecuador, which do not play the Western game and build countervailing international coalitions, while at the same time, adhering to the rule of law and functioning as exemplary pluralist liberal democracies. Do we or do we not share those values of non alignment, sovereignty, progressivism and rights based-liberal democracy? Who are we and what kind of state are we evolving into? That is the question before Sri Lanka: one of political practice, ethos and identity.

What is important is to be Sri Lankans. We don’t have to take anything from anyone believing that it is necessarily good (refer the Kalama Sutra on this), but neither should we refuse to borrow idea or concept from someone just because that person or entity is an international bad boy or has had bad relations with us or has harmed us in some way or is simply bad news. A good example is Prabhakaran. There are a million reasons to reject him and to treat with utmost contempt the things he did and the way he did them. One would be a hypocrite indeed, however, if one did not acknowledge the fact that there is something positive about a man who succeeded in building an organization that was capable of challenging the Sri Lankan state in the way it did, the commitment he obtained from the men and women un him etc.

What is necessary is to figure out who we are for that is the operational bedrock in the exercise of picking and choosing what we want from the world out there. Liberal democracy should not be rejected because it is usually associated with ‘the west’. Nor should it be embraced for that reason. The decision has to be informed by who we are, what we want, what works for us and what does not.

Dayan is right when he implies that things like non-alignment, sovereignty, progressivism and rights-based liberal democracy are not anybody’s preserve. He does imply that there is something inherently good in such things and that argument can be made to look good, I have no doubt. Dayan often qualifies such flowery ideas with a heavy dose of ‘political-realitying’ to suit the particular positions he’s picked at the particular moment and the overarching preferences he’s fond of alluded to above. Let that not take away however from the key line in this otherwise Dayan-as-usual venting: Who are we and what kind of state are we evolving into?

In this necessarily national exercise of exploration, let the time span flowing both into the future and into the past be long. The question ‘who are we?’ for example is not a simple matter of a demographic breakdown along various identity lines. There are claims and counter-claims, there are territories that are references. There is selective articulation of example, a convenient allusion to certain systems and a manifest refusal to acknowledge guilt and culpability in things that are horrible whichever way one looks at them. There is a manifest absence of humility and a tendency for reason to be ‘irrelevanced’ by passion. These are the landmines that exist and should be tiptoed around.

The kind of state we are evolving into should not be extrapolated looking at the past four years or the past three weeks. It should not flow from a consideration of personalities currently in the news. It should be a logical extrapolation from the answer to Dayan’s first question ‘Who are we?’ That extrapolation must factor in today’s realities. Today’s ‘our-realities’. Throughout this process there is one thing we have to keep in mind. It is something that Peter Gouerevitch said writing about Rwanda: ‘power lies in the ability to make someone inhabit your version of their reality’. In short, the entire exercise should be an ‘our’ thing. It should be done because we want it and not because it is the current pet fascination of some ill-informed idiot who is suffering from post-empire angst (someone like David Miliband for example) or is quick-sanded in the agonies that were undergone under various tyrannies (I am thinking of Navi Pillai)

Dayan has set the ball rolling again. I mean, it’s an old ball and one that’s been rolled before, but it is a ball that will nevertheless (and happily) remain new as each generation engages in self-worth, questions past and looks to the future. It is a ball that we haven’t touched in a while as a nation or done so with fingers moved around in a Gouerevitchian sense. It is time we did things ourselves. Any takers? I know that Nalin de Silva has addressed this question in many ways and in many forums for many years. Any others?