Where is the real acrimony between Muslim India and Hindu India now with the Indian economic engine roaring and thereby banishing sectarian conflict, in the all-engulfing nature that it was manifest during the height of the BJP’s power and the Ayodhya mosque clashes?
by Rajpal Abeynayake
(October 04, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Why are ‘we’, meaning the so-called analysts commentators and the talking-heads speaking and writing on the subject of regime continuity, or regime change, and the viability or otherwise of Sri Lankan democracy quite a bit these days in the first place? Why aren’t we talking instead about the great economic bounty that has been promised in the years to come, for starters?
It’s the best sign yet, in my view, that Sri Lanka is not Singapore or Malaysia, and also that Singapore and Malaysia are largely irrelevant models not worth talking about until the goods are delivered here in this country in the economic department.
This is not to be cynical and say that the goods will never be delivered, but to suggest that the jury has not even sat on ‘delivery’ which is an open question, whose answer will be decided in the future alone.
One-dimensionality is something dangerous in making political assessments, particularly in times of great fluidity and of quantum political leaps particularly in our geo-political region.
Who would have thought in the pre-Gorbachov early 80s for example that global realpolitik in less than a decade would be defined not in terms of the Cold War but in terms of other clashes and confrontations, such as one that has been now dubbed famously the clash of fundamentalisms? National democracy may be the political credo in Sri Lanka at the present moment, and getting Ranil Wickremesinghe out of power in the UNP as we definitely must, may be the political compulsion of the day, but in the longer run it is not conceivable to this writer that the future would turn on any of these factors.
Ghost of Prabhakaran
Soon, the question of whether any extraneous global force operating in cahoots with the ghost of Prabhakaran would seek to destabilise the Sri Lankan state, I wager, would cease to be one of great import. With time, Tamils and Sinhalese Sri Lankans may for example be joint collaborators in controlling some of the world’s most important harbours which would be the key points in the maintenance of some of the sea-routes that would be crucial in maintaining dominance over all important global trade conduits.
With such a paradigm shift, people would not be talking about patriotism nationalism Sinhalaism or Tamilian ethnicity in the first place, to begin to break down my argument to its rudiments.
If one were to take Taiwan (ROC) as an example, does anyone in the ROC today seriously talk about repossessing the mainland? Hardly likely, as the mainland today is the world-beater at the economic system that the Taiwanese huddled together in their small island enclave of Formosa to protect.
Ergo, the fact that seems to elude the political pundits who elucidate at length decorating their arguments with book-learned theories, is that political developments are not linear, they are not even incremental, they often happen in quantum.
I would dissuade anybody trying to scare me off this theory because I’m not saying we should throw caution to the winds and not be watchful of our internal security in the immediate term. All that is being said on the contrary is since the best laid plans of mice and men go awry, those who plan for the nation with a real eye to the future should shake off ideological blinkers and political baggage of the past in a way that they can not only predict the future refreshingly, but be helpful in moulding it, with what they write and the observations they make.
If all of this may sound abstract, no it is not. Definite crossroads and historical conjunctures are clearly visible to the naked-eye observers today, only if they are not so blind as to refuse to see.
Take this for example: the Tamil problem simmered from the time of the grant of independence and having reached boiling point, boiled over last year in the final conflagration that marked the end of the violent LTTE, and though the racial chasm, if taken as a receptacle that kept this conflict alive may still be hot, the fire that drove the Tamil-Sinhala acrimony under it in my mind, is now out.
Diaspora rump groups
Despite the best efforts of the diaspora rump groups and the rah-rah tub thumping ultranationalist Tamil offshoots and some of the Sinhala ultranationalists who are spoiling for a fight — after the fight — it seems stupid to wager that after over half a century of confrontation has boiled over, that the Tamils and Sinhalese would return to a period of mutual acrimony that can only wear down and rob both sides of their true potential.
Where is the real acrimony between Muslim India and Hindu India now with the Indian economic engine roaring and thereby banishing sectarian conflict, in the all-engulfing nature that it was manifest during the height of the BJP’s power and the Ayodhya mosque clashes? Somebody might tell us that there are alleged Muslim-fundamentalist terrorist bombs going off in Mumbai and other crucial Indian cities, but he or she would know that it would be a giant prevarication to equate jihadist Muslim fundamentalist violence which is a fallout from what is happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to sectarian Muslim Hindu contestation in India.
So take India’s transformation from the strife-torn sectarian backwater into the potential economic powerhouse that it is today. Now, that is called a political quantum leap, and it was not achieved by Indians watching their backs to the point of the paranoid or the Congress party striving to be BJP Lite, or by India being paranoid about neoliberal multinationals — or even about that sly robber Baron in the form of Uncle Sam...
It’s why I say that even though the orthodoxies may sometimes be stubborn and appear to die hard, die they must. In the brave new world at whose cusp we are poised we should not take lessons in post-war nation building even from those who won the war for us.
Why, even Churchill learnt that - the hard way.
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