VIEWPOINTS

INTO EACH REALM A LITTLE RAIN MUST FALL    

Wijith DeChickera is a tad under the weather as the people’s sovereignty is being eroded under the umbrella of national security

The recent interminable rain brought to mind a flood of creation myths in which so-called deities who fashioned the world deployed inclement weather to scour the planet of a parasitic race they had created – only to regret.

Nothing so apocalyptic occurred in Sri Lanka where antediluvian paradisal gardens – Adam’s Peak is speculated to contain a primal footprint from before the Fall – still flourish in sunshine and rain…

But for islanders reeling under unending deluges, it seemed as if the elements sought to drown them… in sorrow, if not in truth. Coming after a hideous thrashing at neighbouring India’s hands at our national religion (yes, it’s not quite cricket anymore), our island nation slumped into a downright emotional nadir.

We all felt it – at least until that redeeming cascade of gold, silver and bronze at the recent Asian Games where Sri Lanka’s star shone bright through overshadowing clouds.

Also heaping further helpings of national existential angst was a disheartening announcement that the IMF – following its review of the country’s performance since the International Monetary Fund approved the first US$ 330 million tranche of a 2.9 billion dollar Extended Fund Facility (EFF) – would delay the release of a second; ostensibly, dissatisfied with shortfalls in governmental revenue targets.

To add insult to injury, learned critics – spanning the gamut from economists to experts in matters fiscal or financial – observed that the ongoing economic recovery project to put a once bankrupt nation back on the rails left something to be desired.

Of great pertinence to these commentators was a growing realisation that the neoliberal engines of growth, which characterise the Western ethos of running the world’s failed economies showing up on its doorstep, tends to ‘privatise profits’ and ‘socialise losses.’

This suggests that those who caused the unprecedented economic crisis – or contributed to the country’s downfall in 2002 or clammed up in chummy solidarity as the horses they had backed politically bolted – are being rewarded for their chicanery and culpability… while those who suffered at their governors’ and cronies’ hands are being further burdened. In fact it seems, also punished further for their penury.

You don’t kick a man when he’s down… Yet, Sri Lanka seems to have a knack for kicking itself in the shins. The abrupt resignation of a magistrate in Mullaitivu appears to indicate the cauldron of seething ethno-cultural and sociopolitical troubles that what was once the northeast of a war-torn nation has still to have its wounds convincingly healed.

More to the point – if guardians and enforcers of the land’s laws on benches around the island are subject to the pressures that could ostensibly be brought to bear on them by legal apparatuses close to centres of power in the political capital, can the average citizen feel safe under the state’s aegis or be persuaded to seek recourse from the ‘awful (an appropriate adjective) majesty of the law’?

Of far more sinister import arguably was the passage of a subversive piece of recent legislation in parliament. The national Online Safety Bill ostensibly seeks to safeguard the realm from hate speech and sundry offences against the commonwealth of Sri Lanka.

But it would not be the first time that a law allegedly designed to protect the people becomes a tool of oppression against them, stifling dissent by default.

Sri Lanka has an unfortunate track record of jailing its poets and other scribes – contravening commonsense as much as international norms – whilst permitting (if not protecting) the agents provocateurs posing as guardians of our nation, state and culture who abuse the ‘freedom of the wild ass.’

While the state of the nation in an uncomfortable limbo demonstrated that its denizens’ nature was ‘red in tooth and claw’ when it comes to protecting the hegemony of majorities and a class of elites seemingly above the law, ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ was only superseded by our island humanity’s neglect of its elephantine cohabitants of the blessed isle we once all revered and treasured as a pearl of great price.

First, it was a slew of exposés on the abuses to which pachyderms are subject, to have them perform at religious parades and cultural ceremonies.

Then there was the revelation that no less than 13 jumbos were mowed down in the path of oncoming trains on the northern line in the space of 48 hours – while the pack of wolves that comprise striking unions crippled passenger trains especially at office time when people return home clinging precariously to footboards for dear life… whilst our so-called statesmen and women run around in supernumerary convoys or swan about overseas on costly official junkets.

And last but not least, it remains to be seen if the former mammoth of a once united national party will make electoral gains at a future election, given its leading ‘lone bull’ tusker’s proclivity to privilege the powers that be over a vast majority of people who remain apathetic to his appeal vis-à-vis the elites of our organically recovering nation state.