We woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of screeching tires, booming exhausts and the smell of burning rubber recently. My cousin’s children had nightmares and could not get back to sleep when the test runs were done. Calls to police emergency numbers were ignored: there seemed to be official patronage for speedsters and noise polluters – including of course the daily Presidential convoys in the area.

Residents of Green Path and its environs, one of Colombo’s posh residential neighbourhoods, are worried about the latest sports extravaganza planned by the ever entrepreneurial Rajapaksa Bros Inc. Earlier this year they ran a weekend “Hawkers Street” there with loudspeakers blaring till the wee hours, but that was not a commercial success, so drag races are planned to bring in the crowds in November. Drag racing, however, can drive local communities up the wall, and there have been several fatal accidents recently in high profile races. Why inconvenience and traumatize already besieged city dwellers who look forward to some peace and quiet on the weekends? They are already coping with increased noise and environmental pollution as Colombo’s tree canopy is destroyed as part of city ‘beautification’ coordinated by the Ministry of Defence, that includes knocking down walls, painting facades, displacing shanty dwellers, and land and house grabbing. And now there is the pending legislation for Govt. appropriation of so-called “underutilized assets” that erodes the notion of private property beyond the reach of the sovereign/state.

Do savings, a habit encouraged even among children, qualify as ‘underutilized assets’?  Shouldn’t the government rather concern themselves with underutilized and under-performing state corporations and institutions such as Mihin Air or the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation and the 249 loss making Govt. institutions listed in the latest COPE report or the jumbo Cabinet of Ministers, most of whom could be considered both underutilized and overvalued?

Meanwhile, Green Path residents are questioning the necessity for so many sports extravaganzas (Hambantota Beach Games, Cricket stadia, Commonwealth Games etc.) which seems to be piling on the national debt. Is it to distract us from the fact that the Urban Development Authority has been taken over by the Defence Ministry?

Religion, Sports and Opium (aka Kudu)

“Religion is the opiate of the masses” wrote that brilliant theorist of capitalism and its discontents. Marx meant that religion was like the icing on the cake of the status quo – it enables the capitalist class to rip off the labouring masses by extracting excess labour value, while distracting the latter from the conditions of poverty, suffering and underdevelopment. Religion, in other words, discourages labourers, the wretched of the earth, etc., from protesting or asking for their rights (land rights, labour rights, fair wages, etc.). It teaches people to be patient and delay gratification in order to be rich, metaphorically speaking, in the next world. (recall: “men are born free but everywhere they are in chains,” and most of the time don’t even know it).

As inequality reaches breaking point in many parts of the globe (witness the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, the US and elsewhere, and riots in Greece, Rome, Britain, etc., and capitalism’s paper money castles melt away due to debt and likely default with unemployment rising), a witty observer of South Asian affairs noted that with modernity, city living, and new styles of consumption, etc., cricket has become the new opiate of the masses. Cricket, among other things, enables nationalism to flourish amidst burgeoning poverty in the South Asian region (poverty in the subcontinent is second only to Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UNDP), and makes precarious lives liveable, even enjoyable.

Well, one might ask, what’s wrong with religion, sports or a little bit of kudu? We all need some fun after all, especially since we have been liberated from the LTTE after thirty hard long years of war. Marijuana is after all legal in Amsterdam and California. The adrenaline and endorphin rush that sports enables may go a long way to make us all feel good. True, drag racing is a ‘rich man’s sport,’ as was recently noted on NDTV in a debate on whether India needs a Formula One race track built on Advise land, given the Maoist war, and all that jazz.  But that’s not the point.

The problem is that the current regime in Lanka seems to be on the fast track to aping the very same western model of economic development, inequality and conflict that’s causing all the trouble now: deficit spending, conspicuous consumption, resource depletion, encouragement of corporate colonialism, and financial crisis, with looming defaults. This model of neoliberal development enables the rich to get richer and the poor poorer, and increases social, economic and regional inequality leading to violence. As Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel (author of Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do) recently said, is it fair that CEO of Banks and even some athletes make billions of dollars while a school teacher who perhaps makes a greater contribution to the social good makes barely enough to get by?

Painting Facades, institutional de-development, and fixing (poverty) figures

Thus, not surprisingly, the regime seems to have figured that blurring the economic picture of growing income, social and regional inequality with a few sports extravaganzas and lots of spin may do the trick. The poverty figures (like the commercially borrowed foreign currency reserves that the Central Bank boasts about), have been fixed at around 9 percent only because the poverty line has conveniently remained the same for the last three decades, at around a dollar a day, obviously a sum insufficient for anyone to live on.  India has debated and revised its poverty line upward, but local poverty think tanks swallow the spin and look the other way, preferring to publish platitudes about the ‘multidimensionality’ of poverty.

Thus, Lankans living in the South (never mind our relatives in the northeast living with military occupation) are being given a double dose of liveliness and spin: religion, sports and opium (aka kudu) to survive the regime’s excesses and extravagant ways at this time. After all, ‘Buddhist’ values are used to justify militarism, war and violence, while the underlying values are actually fast cars, casino culture, and now, it seems drag racing.  Formula One has been suspended over the Indian Ocean for the time being till the land is filled, found or appropriated.

While painting facades and building infrastructure are certainly a good idea it does not add up to sustainable development which is about institution building and investing in talent and human resources. Despite government plans to turn Lanka into a ‘knowledge hub’, the Colombo Public Library languishes like a medieval relic, sans a computerized catalogue,  standard in any library  these days. The head of the library is only “acting” (as are so many other heads of state institutions), and hence there is no development plan or policy for what should be a flagship institution. Meanwhile the decennial National Census, scheduled for this year, which would be the first to include the whole county since the war began and a national priority for regionally balanced, knowledge-based development policy planning has been postponed due to understaffing and other problems.  The current governance practice of political patronage, corruption and militarized management is marginalizing qualified individuals with the necessary technical knowledge and actually de-developing institutions and hollowing them out. Heads of public institutions and department, be they universities, hospitals or libraries, are increasingly appointed on the basis of political connections these days, a practice that encourages brain drain. Thus, several universities have dished out free Doctorates to the Rajapaksa siblings.

Investment in human resources, institution building, people-cantered planning and good governance including promoting meritocracy (rather than mediocrity) is at the core of sustainable development. The question then is: why doesn’t the regime stop meddling and fix underutilized and underperforming state corporations and institutions that are misusing assets– such as Mihin Air, Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, Sri Lanka Cricket, rather than drawing up secret legislation to take over so-called underutilized assets? Are the regime’s coffers running so low — despite and because of borrowed foreign currency reserves? Appropriating and then selling or leasing underperforming assets may help pay off the interest on commercial loans and losses incurred playing the tanking stock market with EPF and ETF funds and other losses incurred due to delays with the mega projects, not to mention the 19 billion losses made by 249 Govt. institutions listed in the latest COPE report.

Finally, once take over will the under-performing assets? Will they be run by the military — as are many of the newly built debt-ridden cricket stadia?

Sports and Corporate Colonialism

At the same time, Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) has confirmed that the 100 national cricketers have not been paid their salaries for months, since April when the country co-hosted the World Cup together with India and Bangladesh. Capital expenditure on the recent World Cup left the country’s richest sports body facing a sizeable debt. There are also doubts about whether the SLC will be able to pay salaries in the next two months. Meanwhile Minister Mahindananda Aluthgamage earlier told BBC Sinhala that Sri Lanka still owes more than $18.1m (£11.2m) to the Chinese construction firm that built the brand new stadium in the president’s hometown, Hambantota.

Sports is a good thing, but the increasing capitalization and commercialization of spots has eroded the ethics of sportsmanship in many places resulted in corruption scandals – from FIFA, to the Indian Premier League scandal, not to mention the mess in Sri Lanka cricket that Kumar Sangakkara noted. Aside from the noble sportsmen and women, the sports enterprise is increasingly about band advertising and corporate colonialism and a lack of business ethics is apparent in the over capitalized global sports enterprise, of which car racing is a growth sector. Thus, recently in a discussion with Zainab Badawi on BBC, civil society representatives from India and South Africa, which hosted the Commonwealth and Olympic games, said that these sports events had benefited multinational corporations and media organizations rather than local communities and labourers, while indebting the country’s economy and hindering the fight against poverty in South Africa and India. The consensus was that such sports extravaganzas impoverish already poor countries and merely benefit trans-national corporations.

Take Back the City: The UNP Must

Colombo’s citizens are hoping that now that the Colombo Municipal Council has come under the control of the UNP there will be a rethink of development priorities, and that the sort of mindless activity that drag racing represents will be discouraged. Drag racing is really about car sales and corporate colonialism that the Rajapaksa regime thrives on despite its anti-western rhetoric.

Meanwhile, the Urban Development Authority was brought under the Defence Ministry as a means of justifying the increase in the Defence Ministry budget in 2012 and to keep the people quiescent– more than two years after the end of the war in May 2009, and in the context of mounting civil society opposition to the overt militarization of every aspect of governance, education and civic life. The Sri Lankan government has allocated the highest, nearly 230 billion rupees, expenditure to the newly organized Ministry of Defence and Urban Development in the 2012 Appropriation Bill, which was recently presented to parliament. According to the government, the total expenditure for 2012 is estimated at Rs. 2.22 trillion (US$ 20 billion) necessitating an increase in Recurrent Expenditure from Rs. 1.029 trillion in 2011 to Rs. 1.109 trillion in 2012, and the Capital Expenditure from Rs. 938 billion to Rs. 1.111 trillion.

As Mark Duffield in his book Security, Development and Endless War has noted, the current global trend of securitizing development ensures the policing of the boundaries of inequality that enables the rich to get richer and the poor poorer, in real terms. In the context, civil society and opposition parties in Lanka would need to form a Rainbow Coalition to resist the current regime’s economic development model, first by takeover of the UDA by the Defence Ministry and one might add the underutilized assets appropriation bill that sets a dangerous precedent.

Commonwealth Games and Regional Inequality

Last year India played host to the leaders of the big five of the United Nations Security Council: David Cameron of Britain, Sarkozy of France, Medvedev of Russia, Hu Jin Tao of China and Barak Obama of the United States; but they all ignored Lanka, even though Mahinda Rajapaksa had won the ‘war on terror’ against the LTTE amidst allegations of war crimes. The Colombo regime is thus desperate to have some distinguished visitors in Lanka and to show its status – hence the emphasis on the Commonwealth, an organization which is irrelevant. The Commonwealth is an institution which has no economic, political or social significance (unlike OECD or G8 or G-20 or BRICS or NAM). How much was spent on the show in Perth with all the security, for what? Couldn’t those funds have been better used as development aid? Why are all the anti-western governments such as the Rajapaksa Regime going along with this joke of an institution – a group of former British colonies so many years after the sun set on the British Empire? It is those who are desperate for a bit of recognition like Rajapaksa who sustain the great waste of time and resources that constitutes the Commonwealth which should be disbanded?!

In his breakfast speech at the recent Commonwealth meeting in Perth Mahinda Rajapaksa said that the Commonwealth Games in Sri Lanka would enable reconciliation. In fact, the Hambantota Commonwealth Games bid has meant that funds needed for reconstruction in the conflict-torn northeast of the country have been spent lavishly on the South, exacerbating regional socioeconomic inequalities – one of the root causes of 30-year war in the country. Sri Lanka hosting the Commonwealth Games will merely widen regional inequalities between conflict-affected regions in the northeast and the South

The Commonwealth Games will also push Sri Lanka closer to bankruptcy.  The 8 percent growth figure may conceal the real economic picture which as Nobel Prize economists Stiglitz and Amartya Sen have noted in “Mismeasuring our Lives: Why GDP does not add up”, while foreign currency reserves are fixed to conceal the country’s highly indebted status. The Central Bank is overvaluing the rupee in order to pay off some of the dollar denominated national debt but this is affecting exports  and harming the real economy.  This macro-economic policy subsidizes many white elephant infrastructure projects and the regime’s excesses, but is fundamentally anti-poor, as pointed out by a panellist at the State of the Economy 2011 seminar organized by the Institute for Policy Studies. GDP figures of 8 percent conceal the fact that most of the growth is due to consumer spending rather than on productive investments or Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in any case.

In Search of Development Alternatives

India built the Commonwealth village in New Delhi, a city with 14 million people, while Hambantota town has a population of 300,000. The whole of Hambantota District has a population of 525,370 of whom 96% are considered rural residents. The demographic and population profile as well as the labour market profile of Hambantota would not support the infrastructure being built, since it is unlikely that skilled labour would migrate there to fill job vacancies! While developing poor regions is of course important, there needs to be a national plan for balanced regional development that leverages existing assets including human resources rather than presuming that skilled service workers will migrate to Hambantota once an airport is built.

Why build an international airport in Hambantota, when the population of the entire district is only just over 500,000, of whom 96% are classified as rural residents?  If the country needs a second international airport, it should be in Jaffna which has the demographic and population profile, including the Diaspora, to support it.  Surely economic development policy and planning is about leveraging already existing assets, including human resources? Hambantota getting the Commonwealth Games would be the surest means of greater regional, economic and social inequality that would further strain the current highly militarized peace in Sri Lanka. There will be a lot of white elephant infrastructure and stadia once the games have come and gone, not to mention debt to China which is hedging its bets building Indian Ocean ports in Gwardar, Pakistan, Chittagong and Myanmar (String of Pearls).

Finally, communism collapsed in the USSR giving rise to mythologies about the ‘end of history.’ So too, capitalism is collapsing now under its own contradictions – much as Marx predicted. There must be a third way of development– an equitable growth model that remains to be sufficiently theorized. At this time, when talk in the global village is of the rise of the BRICS (Brazil, India, China, Russia and South Africa), and South-South cooperation, there is a need for southern voices and political-economic analysis for an alternative development paradigm to the current iniquitous model of growth sans economic and social ethics or justice.

As Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya has written in Taking Social Development Seriously, Sri Lanka must refrain from following the path of the Euro-American model of economic development, inequality and debt, so long held up as the model by the Breton Woods Institutions, IMF and World Bank, which now need a ‘hair cut’ and downsizing with early retirement for technical experts, much like the European banks exposed to Greek debt. Simultaneously, there is need to link economic analysis to the social, on the one hand, and political (governance and government, including militarization) on the other. This requires independent thinking and knowledge generation in the global south. Sri Lanka, which once had high social development on low per capita income and was held up as an example of human development by Amartya Sen in the seventies, should be investing in human resources and talent towards theorizing development alternatives rather than aping an increasingly discredited economic development paradigm- if it is to be an Asian Knowledge Hub.

Meanwhile, a plan to minimize noise and political pollution in Colombo is materializing – offer Rajapaksa Bros Inc. Hambantota as their very own country. This way the increasingly Gaddhafi-esque Royal Family and their playboy sons and nephews may drag race through the villages in peace in their Principality. And we would have some peace!

• In conversation with Dr. Indrajit Coomaraswamy on Sri Lanka’s post-war economic development
• In defense of the JVP campaign to support Sarath Fonseka
• Colombo night races: Racy development in post-war Sri Lanka
• After the fuel hikes and slide of rupee: State of Sri Lanka’s economy and future prospects
• Lanka @ 63: The ‘military business model’ of post-war economic development

I have always been a cricket fan.  Cricket turns me into a flag waving, national anthem singing patriot and believer in the power of cricket to unite, to overcome all that is ugly and divisive in our country.  As a child I even collected newspaper articles about my favourite cricketers which I pasted neatly in large exercise books.  I remember reading with pride what foreign cricketing correspondents had to say about Sri Lanka’s first test match at Lords, about the spirit of Sri Lankan cricket, the gentleness, humour and courtesy of our cricket team; I was convinced that Sri Lankan cricket and cricketers could do no wrong.  I have no illusions about this: these are clearly my latent middle class, romantic, public school impulses that years of exposure to a harsher and more realistic world have till recently failed to completely subdue.

Lately though my love affair with cricket (perhaps in best tradition of all great love affairs) has taken a bit of a beating.  It started while watching the last World Cup opening ceremony in Dhaka, Bangladesh.  After being entertained by energetic, vibrant displays from India and Bangladesh reflecting all the diversity and colour of those two countries as well as a spirit of fun and celebration, I waited in anticipation for the Sri Lankan slot.  And what we got to my complete horror was a history lesson, Rajapakse style.  As I first watched in disbelief a group of ‘modern’ Sri Lankan singers pranced around looking neither cool nor entertaining and I prayed fervently that things would improve from that point;  alas, then we had a re-enactment of something that looked like the arrival of Vijaya as chronicled in the Mahavamsa.  In complete contrast to how India and Bangladesh presented themselves, as modern nations looking forward and gaining strength from celebrating the diversity of their peoples and cultures, Sri Lanka presented itself as looking back to history for inspiration (not in itself a bad thing) but a particular history that highlighted only the story of one of its communities.

I was beside myself with frustration.  Didn’t this regime at least have the political intelligence to realise that whatever its intentions it should at least pretend that it is interested in reconciliation?  And that perhaps, to showcase the arrival of the Lion people in Sri Lanka was not the most inclusive message that should be broadcast to the world at the end of a devastating war?  Then I realised that this is nothing to do with intelligence but the sheer arrogance of this regime and an articulation of its truly racist base and that therefore to expect anything different would have been futile.  This regime is nothing if not based on Sinhala Buddhist supremacy thinking and that is evident in everything it does.

I lost any interest in the World Cup from that point.  The thought of how a potential victory would be manipulated by the Rajapakse regime to represent their personal agenda was too much to contemplate and for the first time in my life, I actually wanted Sri Lanka not to win a cricket tournament.  This feeling was merely reaffirmed with the sight of Namal Rajapakse, cocky and shameless as ever, handing out awards at the Mahinda Rajapakse International Cricket Stadium.  The instructions to residents around the Sri Lankan cricket stadiums to clean up their houses, to drape Sri Lankan flags on the roads, to present a ‘tourist friendly’ façade, whatever their actual poverty stricken circumstances merely cemented this feeling of disillusionment.  The spectacle of politicians (including Presidential father and his ambitious son) and cricketing administrators jostling for VIP seats at the final as if their place there was a god given right, rumours of political interference and the glum expressions on the faces of the Sri Lankan cricketers at the final in Mumbai was a fitting end to this World Cup.  I am no cricketing pundit, but clearly the one sport at which Sri Lanka was able to compete internationally and win, has also become a victim of the Rajapakse regime’s insatiable desire to control and invade every aspect of our lives for the sake of their aggrandisement.

And now we have Kumar Sangakkara’s much publicised speech at the MCC. There is no doubt, that Sangakkara is an extremely intelligent, articulate and eloquent man and his speech at the MCC displayed these qualities admirably. However, does the content of his speech warrant the excitement that it has generated?  Can his speech be hailed as a strike against this regime and Sri Lanka’s political structures?  I have no bones to pick with his analysis of Sri Lankan cricket and what happened to it after Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996.  The criticisms he made of the politicisation and corruption of the Sri Lankan Cricket Board were spot on. However, to pretend that this speech was anything more than that I think is a mistake.  To consider Sangakkara an anti-establishment hero, would be to read into this speech far more than perhaps even Sangakkara intended.

Sangakkara’s interpretation of key political events in Sri Lanka was either less intelligent or extremely discreet and shrewd. His portrayal of the JVP insurrection of 1989 was carefully one sided and his representation of the 30 year ethnic conflict and the end of the war was from a wholeheartedly Sinhala perspective.  His celebration of the end of the war and resulting ability of his children to go to school without fear left out a whole story about the suffering and pain wrought mainly on the Tamil community that was the cost of that peace.  One could arguably still justify the end of the war, but never without acknowledging the human cost of ending that war.  To do so indicates an extreme insensitivity to the pain and suffering of others.

In presenting this highly sanitised version of the last months of the war, Sangakkara fitted in perfectly with the Rajapakse regimes’ interpretation of events.  It is no accident that Gotabhaya Rajapakse has hailed Sangakkara’s speech or that the ilk of Gomin Dayasiri and S.L Gunasekera too have applauded Sangakkara.  Their approval comes from the Sinhala Buddhist supremacist’s perspective.   From their point of view, Sangakkara achieved what no Sri Lankan diplomat has been able to do so far; to present a sanitised view of the Sri Lankan conflict and to receive a standing ovation for doing so from a mainly white, Western audience – traditionally this regime’s strongest critiques!  The fact that the Sports Minister was unable to recognise this and instead proceeded to put his foot in it by calling for an inquiry on Sangakkara is merely an indication of his own lack of intelligence and foresight.  In doing so, he too contributed to making Sangakkara more of a hero than he need be – not only did Sangakkara speak the truth, now he is being persecuted for it!

Furthermore, Sangakkara’s analysis of cricket’s ability to unite and bring together people, to lead reconciliation efforts in the post-war era, while romantic and resounding with the spirit of the ‘gentleman’s game’ is unrealistic to say the least.  Sri Lankan cricket has never been able to do that.  For all the hype about the multicultural nature of the Sri Lankan cricket team, and Murali being constantly hailed as the symbol of this multiculturalism, Murali let us not forget is a ‘good’ Tamil: one that is acceptable to the Sinhalese.  I very much doubt if any other type of Tamil, or member of other minority group would have made it to the Sri Lankan team.  While Sangakkara’s tsunami stories were touching, they if anything highlighted the generosity and the resilience of the people in those camps than the power of cricket.  I very much wonder if the cricketers visited the IDP camps at the end of the war and what kind of reception they would have got had they gone then.

Finally, there is one other point that perhaps explains the excitement that Sangakkar’s speech has generated; Sangakkara comes from the kind of elite social background that gives him the kind of standing and protection that appeals across political divides.  A product of Trinity College, from a well connected family, his polished English and cosmopolitan ways speaks to a certain class as well.  Unsurprisingly, even the more vociferous critiques of this regime especially of its conduct during the last days of the war have been uncritically admiring of Sangakkara’s MCC speech.  That admiration is perhaps not so much for the content of his speech, but his delivery and image which makes him such a hit within the international community as well as among the Sri Lankan elite community.  Although Sangakkara pointed out the elite nature of cricket traditions in Sri Lanka and applauded its gradual democratisation (at least socially), again, this is not the whole truth.  Sanath Jayasuriya and others may have come from less privileged backgrounds but where are they today?  Do they in any way represent the interests of those whose backgrounds they once shared?

The overwhelmingly warm reception for Sangakkara’s speech clearly affirms that at the end of the day, social and class ties speak louder than any political position. The fact that Sangakkara’s performance was so polished and that he held his own at the Mecca of English cricket would have warmed the cockles of the hearts of most self-conscious post-colonialists.  After all, he showed them; that a Sri Lankan can be as good if not better than any one of them!

Arjuna Ranatunga is perhaps the anti-thesis of this; Ranatunaga would never have been invited to make such a speech in the first place; neither would he have managed to please so many people.  He would definitely have caused far more controversy and garnered far less support.  Ranatunga’s positions (rightly or wrongly) are far more challenging and make more people uncomfortable. Ranatunga could have made a speech similar to that of Sangakkara and it would have been received quite differently; his presence alone which displays a certain carelessness and disregard for norms and conventions can make people uncomfortable. Ranatunga was not a ‘gentleman cricketer’ and he cultivated that image shrewdly to his own and Sri Lankan cricket’s advantage.  I suspect Sangakkara himself is intelligent enough to understand this which is why he dwelt at length on Ranatunga’s contribution to Sri Lankan cricket.

Let’s enjoy Sangakkara’s speech for what it was: an articulate and intelligent analysis of the history of Sri Lankan cricket and its current position.  In doing so, he identified very clearly who was responsible for its current malaise.  Beyond that, Sangakkara played it safe.  That does not diminish in any way from what he accomplished, but it does not make him a political hero.  I very much doubt if he intended it to be otherwise.

• KUMAR SANGAKKARA’S COWDREY LECTURE
• World Cup cricket aiding reconciliation in Sri Lanka: Fact or fiction?
• Sri Lankan cricket and social work: Interview with Kushil Gunasekera
• THE RANDIV-SEHWAG AFFAIR: MISTAKING THE WOOD FOR THE TREES
• The Spectre of Terrorism and Cricketing Fears

The former Cricket captain Kumar Sangakkara, in his great Sir Colin Cowdrey speech at Lord’s,  spoke of a shared fanatical fashion and collective joy and ambition of the Sri Lankans, when he  found something in common in the form of cricket.  He spoke of diversity of our society and how cricket brought together a divided nation during 1996 world cup victory. Nobody disputes the fact that Sangakkara played a celebrated captain’s inning at a crucial juncture of Sri Lanka at the Lord’s lecture. So much is spoken about this speech and much was written about it. This article attempts briefly to discuss seven governance points worth elaborating  in the backdrop of the contemporary governance realities of the country.

Firstly, the message was very clear and strong. Sangakkara referred to the decay of the Cricket Board and the individuals who run it, directly or by proxy. He says “to consolidate and perpetuate their power, they open their doors to of the administration to partisan cronies that would lead to corruption wanton waste of Cricket Board finances and resources”. This is the stark reality of  our administration in general in all public establishments. I cannot think of a single public institution, including regulatory bodies, public corporations, defense authorities, sports administrations, diplomatic positions   and state media institutions, which escaped this harsh truth. All those institutions have lost credibility and integrity due to cronies so appointed. Ultimately, the public and the country as a whole have to pay. Who is guilty? I believe both the appointer as well as the appointee – because both have vested interest in such ill appointments.  The Cricket Board too suffers from the same governance problem.  For a country to progress, public institutions need autonomy and independence form unfair and unwarranted interferences, particularly from partisan political interests.

Secondly, a sportsman can be a great whistleblower of a corrupt administration, not only on the sport where he/she is engaged but also beyond.  Sangakkara’s exposure of vested political and partisan interests and lack of transparency of cricket administration is not unknown.  But when he says it from within, it becomes an exposure in the caliber of whistle blowing, warranting actions both to address the issues and to protect the whistleblower himself. World over, the whistleblowers are given special protection by law in order to protect the institutional integrity, because not all individuals have capacity or courage to raise issues of corruption.  The gravity of this must be viewed with the Sports Minister’s response. The Minister is moving to inquire into Sanga’s speech, which seems to have embarrassed him. The Minister’s proposed action is not at all surprising to me.  This shows intolerance, indiscipline and quality of the Ministers himself.  If you closely analyze the backgrounds of most of the politicians, their criminal background is swept under the carpet thanks to the impunity exists today. But, they do not tolerate a speck of   criticism and this is the general attitude from top to bottom in the political hierarchy. Some of the whistleblowers have disappeared, some lost their positions/employments and some have ended up in trouble.  This reminds us of the need to have a whistle blower protection in our legal system.

Thirdly, the fact that the government in general was not at all happy with the speech is quite expected for many reasons. Beyond all, our politicians from top to bottom of the day suffer from a kind of megalomania. They do believe that they have the monopoly of good ideas. They believe that it is they who will bring in reputation to the country and they want to be thanked for all achievements, including the sports achievements. Sanga did not thank the any politician (the President or the Minister) except former Minister Gamini Dissanayaka for his contribution to achieve Test status for the country.  More than anything else, this would certainly have been the issue for them to get annoyed.  The politicians have not begun to think this way overnight. For many decades, Sri Lankan politicians were given much more recognition – far more than they deserve, in every aspect of life. Media dominates politicians; they become chief guests in all events in the country. Without them there cannot be even a petty school event, a public or religious gathering. They in fact demand their presence to exhibit their leadership and power. They have lost the basic value of being a representative or the servant of the voter; rather they manipulated the system to be the masters. Naturally they are upset when a great speaker does not thank the political masters of the day. For the establishment of governance in this country, it is imperative that the politicians are recognized only to the extent they deserve and nothing more.

Fourthly, what is the role of the Minister of Sports? All decent constitutional democracies recognize that the Minister is only involved in policy issues and not in administration.  To the contrary, we see, for several decades, the Ministers getting involved in every phase of the activities of a ministry, from policy to administration & contracting, recruitment to disciplinary matters. Why do the Ministers get involved in administration? My conclusion is that direct administration is where they get opportunities, directly or indirectly,   to come within reach of the coffer. This is where they could use their power over the voter and the officials and to demand public respect, without earning them. The purported argument of many politicians is that the Minister is responsible to Parliament and thus he/she should have control over everything. This statement is not accurate in Sri Lanka. Unlike many other democracies, the Ministers are not called upon before the finance committees such as the Committee of Public Enterprises or the Public Accounts Committee. It is the Secretary to the Ministry, who is called upon before the committees, in his/her capacity as the Chief Accounting Officer of the Ministry. Unlike the Sangakkara’s view on collective passion, a collective joy or ambition to mark a foot print in cricketing history, there is no collective passion on the part of the Cabinet (or even parliamentarians for that matter)  to be more accountable,  transparent or discipline,  let alone being intolerant of criticism.

Fifthly, the power of the Minister to dissolve the Cricket Board has always been abused in Sri Lanka, like many other powers vested in Ministers and the President.  Sports Law No. 25 of 1973 was introduced during a period where the  politicians wanted to control everything including the judiciary. Sports became yet another victim of this capture.  There is no independent body, which cannot be manipulated by the government in power, through the minister. We have seen in the past the best players in different games were dropped arbitrarily. School teams were changed due to interference and talented players gave up their passionate sports.  All governments have abused the law to such an extent that elected bodies were all dissolved and handpicked henchmen were then appointed to interim committees by the Minister under Section 33 of the Law.  Everyone knows how elections are conducted for the sports bodies. As Sangakkara described, “vote buying, rigging, brandishing of weapons and ugly fist fights have characterized Cricket Board elections”. In my view, this is possible only if this is the acceptable norm at main elections in the country. Certainly, almost all our elections for many years have been marred by violence, malpractices and abuses of state resources. Whether it is Parliamentary Elections, Presidential Elections, cooperative society elections or sports body elections, we have lost integrity of electoral process.  Abuse of power is the core issue here.  In governance terminology, when power is abused for personal gain (or for their group, party or clan) it becomes corruption.  Sports Law to all laws governing elections and how the law is put in practice  perpetuated this corrupt business.

Sixthly, as Sangakkara points out, there is uniqueness of Sri Lankan cricket and in its achievements. It was introduced from the West but had its success after we found our own identity. This extremely vital observation speaks volumes of many other values.  Parliamentary Democracy, English language, modern technology are among few diverse values that were introduced from the West. There is a blend of our own with them later, for the benefit of the public. An organized judicial system and a legal system to protect public resources were also introduced by the West, though it was modified later form time to time. The point I am making is that despite the modifications, the core values of the game did not change. Like the game of cricket, in the guise of changes, we did not make “an out” a “not out” or did not get rid of umpires.  We brought additional values to uplift the spirit of the game. Sanga has correctly suggested that, though we have the strength to find the answers ourselves, the International Cricket Council (ICC) should take action to “suspend member boards with any direct detrimental political interference and allegations of corruption and mismanagement.”.  A practical suggestion, which is not contrary to democratic values or the spirit of the game.  It is time now to reflect on this reality for many other areas such as governance, democracy and human rights. In a democracy, we have a collective duty to protect the essence of those values and uplift them rather than introducing self-saving changes to undermine the core values of those principles.  In every working democracy changes to a system come not to benefit the rulers (or their advisers) but to the public, in whose benefit the power is vested in the rulers.  Sanga spoke about the need to have transparency in sports administration; despite the government’s opposition to right to information, the core values of the democracy demands recognition of transparency in administration in general.

Finally, Sangakkara displayed his vision for the game and beyond; leaving before us unquestionable truth that a person of captain material can be a self-made great visionary.  This country is full of self- proclaim pseudo-visionaries, due to their political power, connection to a family or  securing an electoral victory.  For a country to progress, in sports and in all other fields, we need more and more free thinkers.   After all Sanga’s speech has enough and more for the young and uncorrupt to learn and improve their thinking – because he “spoke”.  Free speech is a core principle in a democracy, which we have unfortunately failed to protect up to its expectations in recent times. The speech is the seed for thinking and change that this country needs to re-establish even the right to speak.  It is a basic tool to fight corruption and establish good governance. It is now for others to speak up to make it a signal for the masses  to achieve  shared fashion of democracy, even at great personal risks. By this, the country can think of a collective joy and ambition – a representative society and true democracy.

• Misguided cultural policing in Sri Lanka: Where’s the morality amongst politicians?
• KUMAR SANGAKKARA’S COWDREY LECTURE
• Cricketing controversies
• World Cup cricket aiding reconciliation in Sri Lanka: Fact or fiction?
• On Democratic Innings

Kumar Sangakkara’s Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture for the MCC this summer was the antithesis of that presented within the same portals in 2006 by Martin Crowe.[i] Where Crowe returned to the medieval archaic within the field of cricket and displayed the sentiments of a caveman, Sangakkara was forward-looking and stepped boldly beyond the confines of cricket to the socio-political dispensation in Sri Lanka.

In doing so Sangakkara broke the code of conduct enjoined on him by his contract with Sri Lanka Cricket. He was therefore intrepid. This was boldness in a good cause, the greater cause of the cricketing order in Sri Lanka (and beyond) on the one hand and, on the other, the vital cause of reconciliation across the fractured political formation in Sri Lanka.

There are missing dimensions and some sweeping comments in his survey of Sri Lanka’s cricketing history in the last twenty years that call for caveats, issues that I will address separately elsewhere. The focus here is directed towards his erudite and passionate venture into the field of Sri Lankan politics and his insistence that the cricketing arena provides one path towards ethnic reconciliation.

He and his wife Yehali had already ventured on this path: first, when they joined Muralitharan and others in the work of tsunami relief across the breadth of the island in early 2005; and, more recently, in April immediately after the World Cup, when both of them visited St. Patrick’s College in Jaffna town and were feted there. The latter event was not widely publicized as far as I know. It was pure fortune that I received a set of photographs illustrating the visit from an old Trinitian, Sangakkara’s alma mater.[ii] This felicitous and symbolic move towards ethnic amity gains in significance from two little facts: (1) the visit was not to Trinity’s ‘natural partner’, the Anglican venture, St. John’s College, but to a Catholic school; and (2) Kumar was accompanied by Yehali (though, for obvious reasons, their twins did not join them at the school).

Peter Roebuck has gone so far as to assert that Sangakkara’s presentation was “the most important speech in cricket history.” Deploying his awareness of the Sangakkara visit to Jaffna, he then went on to state that “only those with empires to protect will resent his words. Only those blighted with the curse of nationalism will deny him his voice. He spoke as a patriot, a higher calling altogether.”[iii]

Thus, Roebuck drew a distinction between the concepts of “nationalism” and “patriotism.” I welcome the direction he is pointing towards, but have grave doubts whether this differentiation will be understood by many readers. It is a difficult distinction to sustain when the two concepts overlap and when ultra-patriots can be much as much a virus as ultra-nationalists. After all, the Sinhala ultras include those who bear the badge of dēsa prēmi (those who love their country, namely “patriots”) boldly on their foreheads.

For this reason I prefer to move in the same direction and laud Sangakkara’s speech as the profound expression of an ecumenical nationalist. What can be more ecumenical than the stirring lines with which he concluded his classic peroration: “Fans of different races, castes, ethnicities and religions who together celebrate their diversity by uniting for a common national cause. They are my foundation, they are my family. I will play my cricket for them. Their spirit is the true spirit of cricket. With me are all my people. I am Tamil, Sinhalese, Muslim and Burgher. I am a Buddhist, a Hindu, a follower of Islam and Christianity. I am today, and always, proudly Sri Lankan.”[iv]

In this presentation of self, Sangakkara subsumed his being as a Trinitian, a radala Govigama, a Kandyan and a Sinhalese within the encompassing identity of being a Sri Lankan, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious collective being. This sentiment, this understanding, I call an ecumenical being, the ecumenical Lankan.

Forerunners and Pathfinders

Some 160 years before, at the point when the British colonial dispensation was bustling forward in capitalist growth, a small group of young “Ceylonese” (as they were known then) stepped forward in the same erudite and ecumenical spirit as young Sangakkara. Inspired by the literary currents of European romanticism as well as the political currents of nationalism,[v] these men – and at least one woman, Eleanor Lorenz (nee Nell) – started a journal called Young Ceylon in 1850 and sustained it till September 1852.

These young men were mostly educated at the Colombo Academy, which later transformed into the prestigious Royal College. The key personnel were Charles Ambrose Lorenz, Frederick Nell and Louis Nell, all from the Burgher middle class in the emerging town of Colombo. They were assisted by Charles Ferdinands, John Prins, Dandris de Silva Gooneratne, James de Alwis, T. A. Pierez, Edward Kelaart and others. Their choice of title was obviously drawn from the “Young Italy” movement associated with Mazzini and the Italian Risorgimento as well as the Young England movement associated with the young Benjamin Disraeli.[vi]

Young Ceylon dedicated itself “to the spirit of inquiry which [it regarded] as the distinguishing feature of the present age.” Its editors chose as its motto the lines from the German Romantic Ludwig Tieck’s dedication to a fellow man-of-letters, Schlegel: “Wir für Kunst und Wissenschaft vereignigt lebten, und une in mannigfalten Bestrebungen begegneten” – We live united for Art and Knowledge, and emulate one another in various competitions (emphasis theirs).

As critically, some few years later, some of these personnel mustered the capital to purchase the Examiner, one of the existing bi-weekly English newspapers owned by an Englishman, the lawyer John Selby. They formed a syndicate for the purpose and it is of some consequence that three Sinhalese lawyer friends, James A. Dunuwille, James de Alwis and Harry Dias were among those who invested money in the enterprise.[vii]

It would be wrong to treat this little circle as an elitist cluster with no links with the lower strata of society and the indigenous vernacular. In 1862 they offered guidance to the Sinhalese personnel who launched the Lakminipahana, the first newspaper printed in the Sinhala language.[viii]  CA Lorenz himself was something of a folk-hero in the Colombo locality so that at least one or two working-class families christened their young boys with his name.

Set thus in their context, it is of central implication for the thesis voiced here on ecumenical nationalism that the raison d’etre of the Young Ceylon circle was a sturdy resistance to the colonial airs of superiority displayed by the dominant British ruling class. This was quite clear in the anti-colonial motifs inscribed within a pamphlet penned in 1853 by the pseudonymous “Henry Candidus” (probably Lorenz) under the title A Desultory Conversation between Two Young Aristocratic Ceylonese (Colombo, The Examiner Press).[ix] These leanings were then embodied and disseminated in the subsequent outpourings in the Examiner newspaper from 1859 onwards.[x] In a private letter Lorenz clarified the goals of this early act of Ceylonese nationalism through reportage: “we shall prove that Ceylon after all has arrived at a position when her children can speak for themselves; and that in doing so they can exercise the moderation which even English journalists have failed to observe” (letter to Richard Morgan, 14 March 1859).[xi]

Here, then, were the first Ceylonese nationalists standing tall in questioning aspects of British rule, albeit constrained from calling for the eviction of the British because of the pragmatic limits arising from the circumstances of their time. It was from within this context and from the nomenclature adopted for the island peoples that, in my conjecture, a new adjective was introduced into the Sinhala lexicon as a translation of the adjectival “Ceylonese,” namely, the term “lānkika” – denoting a person of and from Ceylon.[xii]

Charles Ambrose Lorenz and Kumar Sangakkara, therefore, straddle several centuries in standing forth as ecumenical Ceylonese/Lankan nationalists. The term “ecumenical,” of course, has a Christian ring to it and refers to forms of Christian worship that are interfaith and non-denominational. It is a word that has such synonyms as “comprehensive,” “inclusive” and “cosmopolitan.” To broaden its import for those unfamiliar with this Christianized vocabulary, let me bring in an Asian figure who sustains the same image. I refer to the Mauryan Emperor of the third century BCE, Asoka. He may be widely known to Sri Lankans as the cakravarti figure who introduced the Buddha Dhamma to Siri Laka or Heladiv. However, in my understanding, with all the limitations of one who is a not a historian of ancient times, I believe that Asoka’s religious philosophy was a tolerant one that allowed for diversity and embraced all forms of religiosity under one parasol.[xiii] He became the epitome of the Asian ecumene.

Note, however, that he moved to such a position only after the cataclysmic and gory War of Kalinga. It was a perspective born out of suffering. Since Sri Lanka has been through several horrendous wars in recent times, the story of Asoka and his new-found compassion and tolerant encompassing political philosophy is a good moral to link with the ecumenical sentiments in which Kumar Sangakkara was nurtured from his childhood.

I conclude, therefore, with an emphasis on the worth of an ecumenical Asokan nationalism for Sri Lanka as it stands today. This is the approach and the foundation required for the massive tasks of re-building and reconciliation we Sri Lankans face in the immediate future. It is not retribution, “truth” or “justice,” nor the thamil-wolf of retribution posing in the sheep’s clothing of truth & justice that is the need of the hour. It is, to repeat, the spirit and substance of an ecumenical Asokan Lankan that is the paramount requirement NOW.

• World Cup cricket aiding reconciliation in Sri Lanka: Fact or fiction?
• KUMAR SANGAKKARA’S COWDREY LECTURE
• Cricketing controversies
• Ancestry and Ethnic Identity in the Australian Census… and thus to Sri Lanka
• Looking at Sangakkara’s speech from governance perspective

When Kumar Chokshanada Sangakkara, Trinity Lion, Ryde Gold Medallist, and former captain of Sri Lanka, delivered what can only be called a magisterial oration at the 2011 MCC Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture at Lord’s on Monday night, he not only rapidly exhausted the stock of superlatives of his audience, reviewers and fans, but also became the first Cowdrey lecturer to receive a standing ovation since Desmond Tutu in 2008. As The Guardian observed, “August company indeed.” In many ways, it is difficult to imagine someone better than Kumar Sangakkara to deliver a lecture memorialising Lord Cowdrey, who was in his time the personification of the thinking man’s cricketer, and Sangakkara has repaid MCC President Christopher Martin-Jenkins’ confidence in full. From the organisation of his argument, its learned substance, the eloquence of its delivery, and above all, its acute self-awareness of which fights to pick and which to avoid, it is abundantly clear that cricket’s gain was the law’s loss. Here is an individual who would have shone as brilliantly as he has on the cricket pitch at the Bar, the appellate Bench, or in the highest reaches of legal scholarship.

In what is, to date, this elegant southpaw’s highest Test innings of 287 against South Africa at the SSC in 2006, it is interesting to note that he played 35 fours but not a single six. That is a measure of the classicism of his top of the order batting technique, enlivened by the stylishness that comes naturally to some left-handed batsmen, and I have in mind here Lara, Sobers, Gower and Saeed Anwar, rather than Ranatunga or Gurusinha or Gilchrist. It is a measure too, it seems, of this thoughtful man’s approach to and philosophy of life. “Choice words, and measured phrase; above the reach / Of ordinary men; a stately speech!” said Wordsworth, and timeously in view of Sangakkara’s imminent arrival in Edinburgh next week, “Such as grave Livers do in Scotland use.”

I will freely admit to a case of the goose bumps as I listened to the speech, not only because of the willing thrall to which one succumbs in the vocabulary and diction of this cricketing Demosthenes, but also because of the sentiments he expressed in his masterly portrait of what it means to be Sri Lankan in our time. In order to properly appreciate this latter aspect in particular, it is necessary to set the speech in context.

The immediate context is what has been a lacklustre tour of England, in which the absence of captivating cricket has drawn more attention than would otherwise have been the case to some of the more discomfiting aspects of Sri Lankan cricket, such as the absurd recall of Sanath Jayasuriya, M.P., and the farcical spectacle enacted by Dinesh Chandimal and Angelo Mathews at the death of the Lord’s ODI in which they sailed very close to the wind in regard to the spirit of both cricket and their team, and captain Dilshan lost both his cool and his dignity from the impotence of the dressing room. This latter episode is symptomatic, not merely of the lack of judgement – Chandimal’s pursuit of personal glory and Mathews’ misplaced loyalty – of two wonderfully talented but still manifestly immature players, but also of an attitude increasingly becoming the norm in Sri Lanka, that ends justify the means, that sense, judgement, conscience and individual responsibility have no role in the choice and legitimacy if not the legality of actions, and ultimately, of the acceptability of impunity. Sangakkara’s splendid account of the spirit of Sri Lankan cricket in its historical and social setting did more than adequately to show that the game we play and love in our country is much more than the uncouthness implicit in the behaviour of Chandimal and Mathews. The political dimensions of the speech also showed, in graceful contrast to Jayasuriya, how a thinking, questioning and informed citizen can be political in a democracy without also becoming a politician.

For no fault or responsibility of the Sri Lankan cricketers, the present tour also coincided with Channel 4’s documentary on war crimes, and the ensuing bad publicity and controversy that has cast such a miserable pall over our country. I do not want to get into the details of this here, but whichever polarised end of this febrile controversy one stands on, it is clear this is a ghost of war that will not stop rattling its chains until and unless a radically different approach – one that respects the credulity and goodwill of Sri Lankan citizens and the wider world – is adopted by the government in Colombo. It is of course neither Sangakkara’s role nor responsibility to undertake this task, but in showing that sanity, moderation, and the ideal of unity in diversity has not yet died in Sri Lanka, he has given succour to a silent majority of his countrymen who are relieved that the war is over, but are increasingly apprehensive about the disquieting reality of the intolerant peace that has replaced it.

The media have mainly picked up, as has the Sports Minister Mahindananda Aluthgamage – who is for all his Royalist pretensions and exhibitionist shenanigans in the Mustangs, a very ordinary man in the Wordsworthian sense – on Sangakkara’s critical observations on the vapidity, venality and violence of cricket administration in Sri Lanka today; which is understandable, but hardly fair to a lecture that was in substantive weight much more than that.

In setting out the nature of Sri Lankan cricket, its history, spirit and institutions, in the context of the social and political challenges that have confronted it, Sangakkara also articulated a worldview of Sri Lankan identity. In doing so, he was reasserting the democratic concept of civil society, and the point that articulations of the national condition are not the exclusive preserve of the ruling regime, or of politicians more generally. Informed, sceptical, critical citizens, especially those that play the role of social role models in the way that Sri Lankan cricketers do, and even more so those who like Sangakkara have contributions of quality to make, have a voice that deserves to be heard in the democratic marketplace of ideas. The risible rodomontade, dominated by populist nationalism, simplistic majoritarianism and authoritarian intolerance, that passes for political debate in our country today is not only seriously harmful to the future of our democracy, but also utterly unmerited, indeed preposterous, in a country that has formally been a democracy since 1931. So Sangakkara’s integrity and the courage of convictions that enabled him to say what he did is salutary in a broader democratic sense. The Sports Minister’s ominous announcement calling for a report on Sangakkara’s comments is a puerile, but sadly predictable, response from the ruling regime, which one hopes for all that is good and great about Sri Lanka, is not pursued with.

In substance, the vision of national identity and sense of contextualised individualism that form the subliminal undercurrent of Sangakkara’s speech hardly constitute a radical manifesto. It is a sensible, centrist, modern, pluralist worldview of unity in diversity that once used to be the stuff of mainstream, albeit high politics in Sri Lanka, and which was first enunciated by the Donoughmore Commissioners. As a society that has historically been exceptionally open to intercourse with the wider world, and within its Sinhala-Buddhist heritage, intrinsic but almost entirely unutilised resources with which to both tolerate and accommodate pluralism, Sangakkara’s views are nothing but the expression of common sense. In reaffirming this self-aware self-esteem, and in rejecting the kind of Orientalist caricature (exemplified in the famous Hargreaves cartoon of the princely Indian cricketer) he pointedly made mention of to his MCC audience, he was setting out a vision of what Kwame Anthony Appiah called ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’. In cricketing terms, the cosmopolitan patriot is one who subscribes to the universalism of the laws and spirit of cricket, but one who defends, with pride and principle, the unique ways in which different cultures and dispositions can enrich the shared game. Sangakkara spoke with affection and pride of many Sri Lankans who have contributed to this tradition in very different ways, including Arjuna Ranatunga, Muttiah Muralidaran and Mahadeva Sathasivam. But it is a tradition that goes back to Ranjitsinghji, and it is not difficult to extrapolate from this cricketing analogy a more general worldview about self and space, society and state.

To the extent this is seen as a departure from the current mainstream, then it is really a comment on how extreme and non-inclusive that mainstream has become. It is possible of course to quibble with the details, including as one friend asked me, how could he take such a critical attitude only to cricket administration but ignore the absence of a post-war constitutional settlement and the frenetic militarisation of the North? There are other issues; including in methodological and ideological terms, his reconstruction of history, his observations on socio-economic class, and especially, the stridently unitary ideal of national identity (i.e., that Sri Lankan unity is synonymous with one nation) that I find is neither necessary nor desirable for the telos of unity he so passionately defends. But I think it is both churlish and beside the point to nitpick. He has articulated a positive worldview of political moderation, and he has used that as a backdrop for his critique of cricket administration, which as an element of the broader panoply of issues relating to democratic governance we encounter in Sri Lanka, is important in its own right.

Taken within its own terms thus, the 2011 Cowdrey Lecture was a consummate piece of work that has raised a voice of integrity and decency in a post-war democratic debate that was going stale. In doing so, Kumar Sangakkara, Sri Lankan patriot and rooted cosmopolitan, has become something more than a cricketer, but quite what that is, remains to be seen. I hope in this that his ideal is C.L.R. James, not Imran Khan.

• Looking at Sangakkara’s speech from governance perspective
• Kumar Sangakkara steps forth like Young Ceylon
• Our Sri Lankan Identity: Another Case of ‘Being Nobody, Going Nowhere’?
• World Cup cricket aiding reconciliation in Sri Lanka: Fact or fiction?
• I Am NOT Sri Lankan

In the world of international governance and law, where definitions of human rights, sovereignty, and even war are hotly contested, one rulebook is quite definite in denotation and rather absolute in punishment. An athlete has either been using performance-enhancing drugs, or he has not; he can compete and retain the titles he has won, or he cannot. The punishment for infraction usually entails a stripping of awards and banishment from international competition, while a clean test means business as usual. And Sri Lanka is no stranger to the world of international sport scandal.

Enter the accused: boxer Manju Wanniarachchi; weightlifter Chinthana Vidanage; rugby players S Swarnathilaka, Keith Gurusinghe and Saliya Kumara; and cricket player Upul Tharanga – all Sri Lankan and all found to have been using banned substances during international competition. This series of scandals and the subsequent rulings by international sporting bodies has set in motion a Ministry of Sports investigation that plans to roam the country administering doping tests at the primary school level in an attempt to root out the problem. The question then becomes: why have allegations of rule breaking in international sports prompted a strong response from the Government, while allegations of human rights violations have not?

Strange Bedfellows: The Nexus of International Sports and Politics
The idea that international sports are wholly divorced from international politics has been both hotly debated and largely discredited. Not only do sporting events provide an occasion for the display of athletic prowess, but they can also serve as a rallying cry for national pride as well as an opportunity for international relationship-building and cultural dialogue.

On rare occasions, events surrounding and even directly involving international athletic competitions have had great political and social impact—even influencing the bad behaviour of certain rogue states. For instance, the banning of apartheid-era teams from international sporting events helped to cement the pariah status of South Africa and contribute to its eventual fall. And, the four gold medals awarded to Jessie Owen, a black American, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics helped to discredit belief in the Aryan-superiority language of the Nazi regime.

Nevertheless, sports and politics make an odd couple and many fans chafe at the thought of government behaviour preventing hard-working athletes from competing. For this reason, loud denunciations by human rights organizations calling for the boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing failed to influence countries to keep their athletes at home. Amnesty International’s campaign—Sri Lanka: Play by the Rules—that was launched during the 2007 Cricket World Cup was heavily criticized within Sri Lanka and failed to produce any positive results. Similarly, as pointed out by Guardian journalist Andy Bull, the political decision to send MP Sanath Jayasuriya to play in a Test series six days after the release of the Channel 4 Killing Field Documentary and two months after the release of the UN Panel report, ruffled few feathers. Besides protests by Tamil expatriates in London, the move caused little stir.

So when can happenings around international sporting events alter the behaviour of states? Since the end of the war, the Government of Sri Lanka has fiercely invoked the notion of sovereignty when accused of breaking international law and has maintained a policy of non-interference in internal affairs by external actors. As such, why has the Government reacted so boldly and quickly to the doping scandal brought by international sporting regimes on Sri Lankan citizens?

Three aspects of the specific case of Sri Lanka can provide some insight into this apparent paradox. First, the question of guilt is both easier to determine as well as assign in cases of doping. Science provides the answer to the first part of the equation, while the individual athlete himself assumes sole accountability for any rule breaking. Second, the rigid and, more importantly, enforceable rulebook of the international doping regime contrasts sharply to the limited enforceability of international human rights law. Third, the notion of sovereignty has limited relevance to international sports.

Innocent until Proven Guilty
First, propelled by the rash of doping scandals in the 1990’s including the infamous affair involving Chinese swimmers, the world’s anti-doping regime has steadily strengthened its abilities to investigate infractions including the establishment of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) and the development of more sophisticated testing methods. A transparent list of banned substances as well as newly designed methods of testing both urine and blood means that players are acutely aware of both the illegal substances and the testing procedures.

While players can claim ignorance – and there have indeed been cases of trainers or coaches forcing their athletes unknowingly to take illegal substances – according to WADA the athlete is ultimately responsible, no matter the circumstances. To be sure, there is a system of appeal for certain extreme cases, but no matter what the final outcome the athlete must abide by WADA’s ruling if they want to continue to play at the international level.

There is, of course, the inevitable disputed listing of certain drugs, such as caffeine—which was removed from the list in 2004—and the nasal-decongestant Pseudoephedrine, but the rules have generally been maintained since WADA’s inception. Unlike the anti-doping rules of international sport, international human rights law is not so sharply defined, agreed upon or easily proven.

Sri Lanka is party to numerous international humanitarian and human rights treaties, including the four 1949 Geneva Conventions, that are designed to protect the rights of all by painstakingly outlining the obligations of signatories. Despite its commitments to such treaties, the Government of Sri Lanka simply claims to not have violated any of the laws to which it is a signatory. In this instance, it is not an argument over the definition of human rights or to whom they apply, but rather of the ability of the Government to claim that no infractions occurred and the inability of the international community to prove otherwise.

Unfortunately, no international body can test or measure truth in a lab and must instead enter the murky world of contradicting narratives that relies on the findings of independent investigations, witness accounts, and physical evidence. The Government of Sri Lanka called the final report of the Accountability Panel established by the United Nations to investigate allegations of human rights abuse during the final phase of the war ‘flawed’ and denies the report’s findings of credible allegations. Without critical backing by strong states, there is little the United Nations can do to compel the Government to seriously investigate potential infractions.

What Happens After? Wrongdoings and Punishments
Allegations of cheating in sports can damage the reputation of athletes and their home countries as well as preclude them from participation in international events. Guilty athletes are banned for a set amount of time and their countries lose the prestige gained from being holders of gold medals or world titles. If found guilty, there is no middle ground; one cannot play “half” a game.

For a country, as in the case of China in the 90’s, multiple doping infractions can raise questions as to a country’s willingness to play by and respect international rules and regulations. As Sri Lanka is currently launching a high-profile bid for the 2018 Commonwealth Games to be held in President Rajapaska’s hometown of Hambatota, for which incidentally Tharanga was to be a spokesperson, a clean record and faith in its ability to hold a respectable international sporting event is key for winning international recognition—and the bid. Not only does the Government want Sri Lanka to be seen as a major player in South Asia, but also a place where investments and tourists are welcome and safe. For these reason, the Government has taken the allegations of doping quite seriously and wishes to be seen as actively responding in order to clean up its act.

The history of international human rights law, on the other hand, is full of half-heartedly imposed sanctions routinely violated by regular offenders. If one country strongly imposes sanctions against another, a third just might as well provide what was needed from the first. With Russia and China routinely voting against stronger sanctions for proven human rights violators in the Security Council, punishments are difficult to approve and even more difficult to enforce.

In the case of Sri Lanka, the most vocal critics of the Government’s unenthusiastic response of allegations of abuse, including the United States and members of the European Union, have not been strong in their condemnation—urging only that the UN Panel’s recommendations are implemented. Perhaps this attitude is changing in the UK with the release of the Channel 4 documentary, but that is still unclear. As it is, lacking a final authority capable of enforcing humanitarian law: Sri Lanka is still being allowed to play the game.

Sovereignty and Sports
To be fair, the comparison between alleged violations of human rights law and breaking the rules of international sporting events is not quite equitable, given that one involves accusations against sovereign governments and the other against individuals. Nevertheless, both do show to what degree a country or a government is willing to adapt its behavior, and that of its citizens, to international norms.

In that sense, international sporting bodies in and of themselves rarely become involved in political happens within a country. For instance, notorious international pariah North Korea sent a team unimpeded to compete in the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The International Cricket Council does not care about the degree of political freedom in a country or of the fairness of its elections, but rather only about the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. If an athlete is found guilty, all he will be forced to do is stay home—regardless of any draconian laws or repressive conditions within that home. Importantly, the baring of South African athletes from international competition during apartheid is a critical exception to this unspoken rule.

Nonetheless, international rules are still international rules and Sri Lanka’s response to the rash of doping scandals, while controversial in and of itself as it involves the testing of school children, does shows a degree of respect for international bodies and their rulings; something not currently being shown to organizations such as the United Nations. That said, the Government needs to remember that winning only counts when you do it fairly and with respect for the rules, whether if playing at sports or waging a war—you are just gambling with different stakes.

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A prominent English newspaper recently reported that the government has paid US$ 2.4 million to a British PR firm to promote its candidacy to host the 2018 Comonwealth Games in Hambanthota. This news item would definitely raise the eye brows of many Sri Lankans who constantly get beaten by the scourge of cost of living. For those who are not aware of international currency rates; 2.4 million US dollars means 264 million Rupees. The minimum salary of a state sector worker in Sri Lanka is Rs. 11000. The average monthly income of a middle class family in Sri Lanka is Rs. 20,000. But, the average monthly expenditure of an ordinary middle class family is way higher than that. As we all know, almost every one of us can feel the excessive pressure, generated by the soaring cost of living. Everyone in this country, including the government of Sri Lanka, has adopted a “hand to mouth” policy when it comes to the ‘income’ and ‘expenditure’. In this context; the government has paid 264 million rupees to a British PR firm in order to promote its bid to host Commonwealth Games in HAMBANTHOTA.

It is not a hidden fact that the government is engaged in a secret love affair with British PR firms over the past several months. The British PR company named “Bell Potinger” was its most trusted partner when it comes to international relations with United Kingdom and European Union. Millions and billions of tax payers’ money has been paid for this PR firm in order to enhance Sri Lankan government’s image and strengthen its relationship with aforesaid countries. In other words, the Foreign Ministry and this particular PR firm exchanged their duties with pleasure and from there onwards Foreign Ministry was operated as a PR firm and this company was harnessed with the duties of Foreign Ministry.

But unfortunately, this PR firm could not provide desired results. They were not able to strengthen the relationships and interactions between the government and EU parliamentarians and on many occasions Sri Lanka was bruised and battered by the European Union. GSP Plus tax concession was removed and all the secret missions which the government carried out in order to get it restored were failed. President Mahinda Rajapakshe’s Oxford visit was another fiasco which ended up with nothing but humour. At the same time, the relationships between Sri Lanka and European Union countries were strained due to many reasons. But ‘Bell Potinger’, the company which was tasked to make these ruptures fixed, did not come out with any good results. So, quite obviously, all the money which was spent on this company was an utter waste.

There are some allegations that a powerful UPFA MP, who represents Southern Province, is the hidden hand behind all these deals with British PR companies. The notorious politician, who’s closely linked with the top leaders of the government, is considered as the person who is responsible for the staggering losses generated by the budget air line ‘Mihin Lanka’. But, as we all know, this sort of huge deals cannot be taken place without the endorsement of the very top people in the government. Therefore, none of them can wash their hands off and claim “I am clean”.

This, I believe, lays the foundation to discuss about the ‘unprecedented’ international policies carried out by the present government. These policies have already created a diplomatic muddle and Sri Lanka is still struggling to come out of it. These inefficacious PR deals are merely a small part of this huge muddle. This kind of deals finally produces nothing but a heavy damage to the exchequer. The exchequer, on the other hand, is not made of cash that has been harvested from trees in Medamulana. It belongs to the poor and innocent tax payers in the country and the government is answerable to the public about the way this money is being spent.In this context; we, as citizens, can ask some important questions from the government. Can a government develop its international relations by wasting millions of tax payers’ money in an imprudent manner? Is this the way they expect to implement Sri Lanka’s foreign policy in the future?

Policies and strategies related to external affairs of a country are nothing but a sheer reflection of its internal policies. If a country has poor internal policies within its own territory it is impossible to expect better external policies or strategies in the international domain. This reality is common to Sri Lanka as well. No one can deny the fact that Sri Lanka was trapped in a diplomatic muddle over the past 36 months and it caused a heavy damage to the country in many ways. They might say that Sri Lanka was ill-treated in International domain since President Rajapakse refused to follow the advices and instructions given by the international community, during the battle against Tamil Tigers. This is partly true. But beyond this, the government was not able to handle the delicate diplomatic issues about Sri Lanka in the international domain plus the leaders of the government were happily lost in political rhetoric. They did not worry about the factor called “International Community”. And, that is why the problems got deteriorated and the government was trapped in many troubles. ‘Way-out’ diplomatic policies and friends did not help President Rajapakse to get rid of this situation. That’s how they lost the support of many influential elements in the international community. No one can put each and every fault, in the account named ” War Against Terrorism”.

It is apparent that the government is eager to host the Commonwealth Games in Hambanthota as an international level image building programme about post-war Sri Lanka. (Regardless of large scale money deals connected to it) This is not the first image building campaign of that caliber. When they hosted IIFA – the Indian Film Festival last year, they came up with the same slogans about “image building” and “tourism”. But what was the outcome? IIFA ended up as another Tamasha which caused a huge loss to the country’s economy. There are many allegations about several dirty money deals linked to Cricket World Cup 2011 in which Sri Lanka took part as a co-host nation. No investigation has been made into these allegations so far. Therefore, we are not permitted by the history to forget this past about the “International Level Image Building Programmes” carried out by the government in recent times. On the other hand, there is a big question mark about the efficacy and productivity of those large scale development projects which took place in Hambanthota such as “Maagampura Harbour”. Therefore, it gives a clear-cut answer about the ‘innocence’ of such deals.

However, the common public must be aware of these developments. Because, at the end of the day, they will have to pay the price for everything from their wallets. In simple words, people are the victims of this jugglery; not the politicians.If the people are happy to be victimized in this manner, that is the most tragic part of the entire story.

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breathe and the crack of bat
on ball sing like a memory
of toffee I recall, outside

the tuck shop, the day
Josephians played St. Peter’s
in the wet air off Beira Lake

and all the boys, let off early
from class, rang the ropes
with cheers: St Joseph’s

victory, St. Peter’s parippu;
now forty years later,
accused still of immaturity,

I have dressed in whites,
a sun hat, am padded
up and ready to go out

again into the middle
to knock four fours
and a couple of sixers

in half a dozen balls,
to save the side
from infamy.

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Photo credits: 888 Sport Zone and Daily Info Picks

I know absolutely nothing about cricket and honestly would not have paid attention to the Cricket World Cup, had I not been in Sri Lanka the week its team made it to the final. Although the Sri Lankan team lost in the end, it was an electrifying moment to live, even as a foreigner. World Cup fever is universal, whatever the game, whatever the continent. The tension was so palpable, emotion and excitement at its highest on Galle Face Green where I went to watch the game amid a crowd of 8000 cricket fans. People seemed proud to be Sri Lankan, waving the flag, faces painted and broad smiles. An entire country behind its team.

This was particularly interesting, as Sri Lanka will be soon celebrating two years since the end of the war and mostly reconciliation between the different ethnicities remains a theory. Being Sri Lankan still largely means belonging to the dominant Sinhala/Buddhist culture. However supporting a national team implies that one feels part of a nation and the fervour following the semi-final that Sri Lanka won against New Zealand prompted many to wonder if a victory could help foster reconciliation.

I could not help but think about 1998 and the football world cup that France won against Brazil and our own delirious state of French nationalism. I was 12 at the time, on a holiday with my family in Rochefort for a cousin’s wedding. Because we were all staying in a hotel, some twenty of us decided to watch the match in one of the room, in front of a ridiculously small TV screen. My cousins and I had painted our faces blue, white and red, the colours of the French flag, matched our outfits and even tinted our hair with blue, white and red hair spray. I barely knew the rules of the game, but men, I was into it. We were all. The whole of France was stuck behind its TV screen, in the streets, all over Paris, the suburbs, the province. We were all « black, blanc, beurre ».

This formula coined by the media was derived from the flag’s colours (bleu, blanc, rouge) and replaced them with skin colours representing the different ethnicities in the French team and France as a whole. « Black » for people of sub-Saharan origins, « blanc/white » for boring people like me and « beurre /butter» for people of Maghreb origins whose skin is the colour of melted golden butter. I remember the euphoria, singing «Et 1, et 2, et 3 – 0 !!!!» as Zinedine Zidane head-butted the ball in the Brazilian goal, twice, on two corner kicks, taking the French team to a total and triumphal victory. What a sublime game it was. I remember going in the street with my cousins, overwhelmed by the number of people out partying together, carrying flags and dancing on the pavement, on walls, in fountains. We felt like one people.

Fast-forward 7 years later, I am 19 studying in London and once again I find myself glued to a tiny screen -a computer this time- watching the news coming out from France with my good friend Pierre. Cars burning, riots, the suburbs of Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Nantes on fire because a disenchanted youth has decided to voice its anger for being relegated to second class citizens. From afar it looks like France has gone to war with itself. The young people in the streets are sons and daughters of 2^nd, sometime 3^rd generation immigrants, parked in the ghettos that are the state housing estates located in the suburbs around big cities – la cité, immortalised in Mathieu Kassowitz’s film La Haine. That France « black, blanc, beurre » that we so eagerly celebrated in 1998 seems to have never existed and I watch in disbelief. What did I miss?

What I missed is simple. When we watch a football game or a cricket game, we watch it with our friends, with people similar to us. The feeling of unity, comradeship is real, but what we celebrate is different from one group to another. Zidane the Algerian, like Murali the Tamil, are idolized by entire countries yet what the majority and the minority project on them is fundamentally different. While for the minority they are a source of pride and the proof that they deserve the respect of the majority, for the majority they are the proof that integration is possible without compromise, that those in the minority who complain really are just nuisance. Unfortunately for the racist and scared majority, “National identity is not only a football team winning when it is blue, white, red. It is a multicolour society; and that you have to deal with it in difficult times as well as in success”, as Tariq Ramadan, an European academic, pointed out.

Leaders like to do just that, hijack sport events like the cricket world cup, ride the wave of nationalist enthusiasm and proclaim heroes the players of minority origins, heroes they will be able to shake like scarecrows against the trouble makers who ask for equal rights. They appropriate to themselves the symbol of national victory, something as trivial as a football game, to create an easy discourse of unity. Perhaps I should stop here before I put Foucault and football in one sentence, but you get the idea.

France never really recovered from the riots in 2005. Since then the « identity » issue has grown, engulfing immigration, the « banlieues », “Islamism”, extreme right, populism and political opportunism. For sometime the Sarkozy administration has even tried to create a controversial debate on national identity, i.e. what it means to be French.

What does it mean to be French or Sri Lankan? I have absolutely no clue.

My point is flags, national anthems and national sport teams are all nice symbols meant to consolidate the Nation-State, an old 19^th century concept that we struggle with in the global age. But the truth is nation-building is a bloody and insensitive process that wipes out minorities, forcing them to adapt to the majority’s culture and values to survive. It is a process at odd with increasingly universal values of human rights and democracy, but we cling to it because it reassures us. Football and cricket world cups and other international competitions are rituals in which we can reassert our belonging to the nation. Games are ersatz of battles and the mirror offered to us by multi-ethnic sport teams, champions duelling for their country’s honour, is infinitely more pleasant than the one where we kill, oppress and exclude to ensure that only our idea of what our country is prevails.

But of course, it’s just a game.

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Citizenship, as I know it, is a means by which citizens of a particular country are recognized as entities of that country. I feel that citizenship gives each of us a sense of “belonging” and “responsibility” towards our motherland, and also a sense of “security,” that as holders of this particular citizenship, we’re ensured of our protection and wellbeing. At least, that’s what one would hope a citizen of a country is entitled to.

I guess we were called a “Land like no other” for a reason. That being, that we truly are like no other. The concept of “citizenship” as I mentioned above, is nothing but an illusion in our fair land. As citizens of one country, we hold no sense of camaraderie with one another. We’re told that a “good citizen of the State” obeys the State. That they should not question the State. That they should accept that the State only acts with their wellbeing at heart, and thus, all acts done by the State are always just. Our notion of “citizenship” is dictated to us by the powers that be, and we quite contently lap it up, like faithful little puppy dogs!

If the State tells us that a part of its “citizenship” must be harassed, ridiculed and stripped off of their rights, for the safety and wellbeing of the other part, we accept it. If the State tell us that a part of its citizenship must register with the Police and carry around a document with them at all times, to verify their reasons for residing in a different part of the country, to where they were born, in order to ensure the security of the other part of their citizenship, we think it’s fair enough. Now, approaching the 2 year mark since the end of the war, people, mostly in the Vanni, are still being registered door-to-door by the military. Part and parcel of the registration process is of course, that each house is given a registration number which is made mandatory to have marked on both your front door and you’re the outside of our gate. In addition, a group picture is taken of the entire family, and one member of the family (usually the head of the household) is required to hold up a piece of paper with their respective registration number on it, for yet another photograph to be taken (much like a prisoner would). The worst part though, is that these people think it’s “normal.” They think that if this is what needs be done for them to live their day to day life in peace, then, so be it. All this rings okay with the rest of us citizens. It is for the greater good after all. That too is only the few who know that such humiliating, undignified “processes” are even being carried out.

The State can randomly arrest parts of our “citizenship” on the faintest hint of suspicion, under a law that has been specifically designed to justify any unlawful acts conducted by the State, in order to uphold National Security, we see rationality in it. A part of our citizenship is still not permitted to return to their homes located within High Security Zones (HSZs) in the North, however, visitors to the North are permitted to go “sightseeing” inside those very HSZs. The rest of the citizenship sees the justice in this.

The State spends over one billion rupees on the Indian International Film Academy (IIFA) awards held in Colombo last year, but claim they have inadequate funds to house and feed their internally displaced citizenship around the country. It’s fine by the rest of the citizenship, because they got to see their favourite Bollywood Stars perform Live. Of course let’s not forget that a Star or two were taken on a goodwill mission “behind the wires” too, so it’s not all bad.

Similarly, the State has incurred hundreds of millions of dollars on a Port in the Incumbent’s hometown, Hambantota, which has been allegedly refused maritime insurance by Lloyds, London. Furthermore, the State imported 3 power train sets (each of which costing 3.5 million US$), of a fleet of 20 from India, one of which was tried out and failed on it’s first run due to complications including inadequate power supply. Irrespective of this rather pricey “hitch” though, it seems like the Government is planning to go ahead with the entire purchase without as much as a trial period to see if these trains are conducive to our railway system In yet another display of waste, our dear incumbent has successfully managed to garner a 300 million US$ arms loan from Russia, to safeguard ‘Post-War’ Sri Lanka, pushing us as a country, further and further into debt. How though could we even consider questioning such a “victorious” State as this? What ingrates we would be!

The State told us that until such time that they were able to “weed out” the terrorists from the non-terrorists, 300,000 of its citizenship (inclusive of new-born infants) had to be kept behind barbed wire, in deplorable conditions indefinitely, the rest of the citizenship nodded along as it did seem like the only sensible thing to do. Although most of this 300,000 have been released now, they are far from being free. Those not under arrest or being held in detention, are regularly questioned and harassed, have no proper homes, no jobs, no money and no access to basic amenities o facilities. In short, one part our citizenship is deemed ‘guilty until proven innocent.’ That too though is acceptable by the rest of the citizenship. Taking into consideration the current context of course.

The last stages of our war in 2009 which is said to have claimed over 40,000 innocent lives, although the UN estimates were lower and of course the States maintained its “miraculous” Zero Civilian Casualty rate As it was the most “comfortable” option for both ourselves and our conscience to believe that no innocents were killed in the last days of battle, we believed the State wholly and without question. However, let’s “assume” that having had access to eye witness accounts and footage, and having seen the UN figures, at least a seed of doubt in the State figures, started to grow in our minds? Say, we began to realize that maybe, just maybe, the State had decided to dispose of segment of our citizenship, so as to safeguard the rest of us. (The State being at the helm of such a glorious victory, which as a result has made both the State and the incumbent almost invincible and enabled him to rule over us for the rest of his days, having nothing to do with it of course.) This very State has the audacity to “condemn” another country doing the exact same thing it did? Is this State under the delusion that by it condemning another country’s atrocities, it by some twist of karma erases all the wrong it has committed? Does this State truly believe that it could be so easy to ‘pull the wool over (its citizen’s) eyes?’ Or is it? Maybe that’s yet another question for the citizenship.

Recently also on a post on GV, I actually had to argue the point on whether it was right to destroy a cemetery (Maveerar Thuyilum Illams) that did not in fact have actual bodies buried there. The post was about the desecration of LTTE cemeteries in the North, and building army camps in their stead. We’re not talking good guys vs. bad guys here (whoever they might be). We’re talking basic human decency and respect to the dead. A place where families come to bemoan their dead. A final resting place after a bitter battle. A memorial to those who fought a long, hard fight for something they and a part of our citizenship believed in. How can we call ourselves citizens of one country, if we deny a part of our citizenship such a basic human right?

And finally the icing on the cake. Everyone speaks of how cricket unites and how the entire country comes together to cheer our team on etc., etc., etc., Being so “united” though, were we even aware that many parts of this country did not even have electricity to watch the Final of this ‘so called’ “unifying” game! I was actually sending SMS updates to some friends in the North who not only did not have TV, but electricity also. I guess nobody found it to be an ideal commercial venture to set up giant screens in these neighbourhoods! How also is it possible for the same game that ‘supposedly’ unites its citizens, also wind up instigating violence against each other. Many youth have openly ‘liked’ this article on Facebook! To what depths have our humanity sunk to, if we’re able to justify attacks against fellow citizens over a mere Cricket match?

Where is that sense of “belonging” and “security” citizens are entitled to? If one part of a citizenship is made to feel abandoned and neglected, both by the rest of its citizenship and the State, is it any surprise at all that they should look to find that sense of belonging and security elsewhere?

One sided you might think. How else would the majority of a citizenship be kept safe, unless a State is to make a few unpopular (or in the case of SL, popular) decisions, for the sake of the greater good? Even IF the citizenship as a whole, is able to justify all of the above scenarios during a time of war, now almost two years since the end of the war, what’s our collective excuse? If we, as so called “citizens” are still able to stand by and watch other citizens undergo such levels of discrimination that it’s not only rendered at the hands of the State, but also endorsed by it, then perhaps it’s time we questioned the nature of this “citizenship” we claim to belong to. And we might also want think twice about what exactly we’re so proud about, when we beamingly proclaim to the world that we’re so “Proud to be Sri Lankan!”

Originally written for Options Magazine, a Biannual publication by Women and Media Collective, and updated for Groundviews.

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Image courtesy Business Live

There was a truly remarkable moment at the start of the World Cup Final between India and Sri Lanka. Amidst a deafening cacophony of noise Match Referee Jeff Crowe, TV Compere Ravi Shastri and the two captains assembled at the centre of the ground to make the toss, or kaasi vaasi (the advantage or leanings of the toss) as they call it so appropriately in Sinhala.

Dhoni tossed the coin and Sangakkara called “Heads” (in a rather indistinct fashion it is said). But as the Referee picked up the coin it transpired that neither he, Shastri or Dhoni had heard the call because of the background cacophony. Worse still, it appears that Dhoni misheard the call as “tails” and Michael Vaughan in the commentary position heard it the same way and therefore contends that Sangakkara indulged in some skullduggery by allowing Dhoni to spin the coin again.

So, the procedure was repeated. Sangakkara called – or maybe shouted – “Heads.” Heads it was. So battle commenced and we know the outcome.

Vaughan’s accusation is a serious matter. Let me place it on hold in the too-difficult-basket till Shastri, Crowe, Sangakkara and others, including audio specialists, resolve the issue. Assume for the moment that Sangakkara had called “heads” initially. Then, I ask, what if the coin ended up “Tails” and Dhoni took the decision to field or bat? Would Sangakkara and Sri Lanka then have been aggrieved and raised a complaint?

If such an outcome had occurred, it would not have been the first time that Crowe was party to a decision-making controversy (since he and the Umpires blundered badly at the Final of the last World Cup). I raise this issue not as some academic stunt, but as a warning to the ICC to take steps to prevent such confusion at future cricket events.

The captain making the call could have a microphone attached so that the call reverberates through the stadium. The ritual of the toss is theatre. Why not enhance it with the blast-power of voice? Given that there has been deafening electronic music blasting one’s senses intermittently at the World Cup matches, and a superb Yani theme tune serving as prelude to the national anthems, a dramatic toss-up is far better than a right mess of a toss-up.

Epilogue and End-Note

It was a good toss to lose. Dhoni must now be mighty pleased that he did not win the toss and bat as intended. In my assessment this was one of the turning points. Misled by the experience of the same ground in the match against the Kiwis a week earlier, the Sri Lankans must have been surprised by the amount of dew that emerged late in their bowling stint. They suffered the same fate as the Aussies in March 1996.

This is an ONLY IF argument, with all the reservations that one must attach to such contentions. If Sri Lanka had to field first, there is no guarantee that Malinga would have nailed Sehwag and Tendulkar early as he did when Sri Lanka bowled second. India has a powerful batting line-up and could well have mustered 325 to 350 runs. But I am sure Randiv, a good choice by the selectors in my view (in opposition to Nasser Hussain’s ignorant pontifications), would have derived more bounce. I’m equally attached to my conjecture that both Murali and Kulasekera would have bowled better than they did in the evening-night.

If the toss was one turning point, so too was Sangakkara’s fatal mistake as batsman off a terrible ball which should have been dispatched to the boundary. A blossoming partnership with the potential to build a bigger platform for a late order assault was thus curtailed.

And, then, of course, there were the two critical fielding lapses that reprieved Gambhir relatively early in his innings, namely, Kulasekera’s failure to take a difficult half-chance and Sangakkara’s fluffing of a run-out from a tough throw.

All credit, though, to the quality of the batting provided by Tendulkar, Gambhi, Kohli and Dhoni; and, last but not least, the quality bowling by that forgotten man, Zaheer Khan. The manner in which he constrained Tharanga (aided by some super fielding in the cover region) and then dismissed him, and the manner in which he diddled Kapugedera, were both critical contributions towards India’s march to victory.

###

Editors note: Sent to Groundviews by the author and published on Critiquing Cricket.

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This was a big match.

Akin to a curfew, Colombo’s streets were deserted on Saturday afternoon, but Galle Face was not. Over 7,000 people had congregated there to watch the cricket world cup final between Sri Lanka and India on a big screen erected on the grounds. Nearly all the electronics showrooms with TV’s on display had tuned in to the cricket as well, resulting in small crowds who had settled in front to watch the match sometimes with deck chairs and stools. Traffic was chaotic in the morning in Colombo and its suburbs, with people thronging to stores to buy both genuine and imitations of Sri Lankan cricket sporting garb and other memorabilia. As we tweeted:

“Never seen so many Sri Lankan flags on vehicles after the end of war.”

Nationalism and over the top displays of patriotism were on a crescendo, leading up to and on Saturday. There was tweeted:

“Dialog keeps referring to Sri Lanka as ‘Lion nation’. Revolting & racist. We support #cricket as Sri Lankans.”

Semi-erected structures around Colombo suggested the foundations of a mega, multi-day victory party and parades that were never to be. Given significant increases in petrol, diesel and gas announced on Friday night and Saturday, it was clear the government was hoping a victory to at least temporarily hide the burden of rising inflation. As the Editorial of the Daily Mirror noted,

Even before the winner of today’s match is known, the politicians in true Sri Lankan style will be sharpening their spurs to ride on the Sri Lankan team. Some may by now be preparing statements or speeches for gullible audiences in the island while the rest would be rehearsing how best to pose for pictures with the team, just in case India end up on the losing side.

We didn’t go on to win the match, but for a few hours last Saturday, glued to projections of a game played miles away, everything else was forgotten. Such is the power of cricket.

These photos were taken around Galle Face and Colombo during the first half of the game. All images by Iromi Perera.

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Groundviews is running a poll on its Facebook page (direct link to poll here) on whether its readers feel that the current interest in cricket can help reconciliation in Sri Lanka over the long-term. The visit of the Sri Lankan cricket captain, our beloved spin-bowler Murali and Ian Botham to areas most ravaged by the North was heavily covered by the media. Kumar Sangakkara’s statement after visiting the North resonated with many and was very widely featured across Facebook and Twitter,

“[The people of the north] have been deprived for 30 years of everything that we’ve taken for granted in Colombo. Sometimes Colombo seemed a world away from the war. We’ve never felt it as much as the communities in the North and East did. And sometimes we have to understand that we owe them our very lives and all the comforts we enjoy,” said Sangakkara.”

As was noted at the last World Cup, Sri Lanka’s cricket team is “…is a microcosm of what we should be and ought to be – a multi ethnic and religious group based on merit and performance and working together successfully as a team. It is something of which we can be justifiably proud of as a country.” Indeed, the Sri Lankan team’s performance in the 2011 World Cup has rekindled interest in the sport as a powerful unifying force in what, even post-war, remains a country with deep ethnic and political divisions.

Our poll, which readers can feature on their Facebook profiles, share via  Twitter or just email around is not meant to question the team’s current popularity or performance, of which there can be no doubt. It seeks to interrogate what is often an unquestioned belief in the ability of the sport itself, long after the euphoria of the World Cup is over, to foster reconciliation in Sri Lanka. The problems of reconciliation are systemic. Cricket offers a happy, episodic escape, yet may not address these underlying problems. Cricket has little or no presence in some parts of the country, especially in the North and East. If you don’t have grounds to play or facilities to train and practice, you won’t see cricket, or any national sport for that matter, as a healing or inspirational.

But what do you think? Can a sport that will bring a country to a standstill during the final match on Saturday be leveraged over the long-term to push for the real political and social reforms that we need for meaningful reconciliation?

Please cast a vote and drop us a note on Facebook.

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Vimasuma is a five minute post-news segment scripted by a party hack by the name of Mahinda Abeysundara, which is usually used to heap innuendo, calumny, smears, slurs and sundry abuse on anyone or anything perceived as critical of the regime. Favourite targets in the past have included the international community, independent journalists, civil society activists, and of course the political and civic opposition. It is variously snide, spiteful or just plainly malicious in its tone. Guided by the unerring compass of servility to the regime, the tools of Abeysundara’s trade are fear, hatred, prejudice, paranoia, conspiracy theories, economy with the truth, terminological inexactitude, and a hefty chip on the shoulder. It is a caricature of agitprop that is at one level unintentionally hilarious (humour is not one of Abeysundara’s strong points), but more often, watching Vimasuma is one of the best of ways of ensuring the loss of one’s faith in human nature and possibly, the will to live.

Abeysundara is of course entitled to his sclerotic opinions, however ill-informed or ignorant, and the fact that he is employed by a media institution that is substantially owned by the Treasury, meaning that his salary is paid by the tax payer, and meaning further that he is a servant of the public, not the regime, presents no problem these days. (The distinction between the state and the government or the values of public service broadcasting, are all Western abstractions of no relevance or use to us.) There seems to be in Sri Lanka an enormous appetite for venomous journalism, and so Abeysundara continues injecting his daily drip of poison into the public discourse, shielded by the regime, the populist prejudices of public opinion, and a dysfunctional legal system in which even those with a prima facie defamation case hesitate to sue because of the costs, time and bother involved.

Until of course, last Monday, when he overstepped the mark. On the day after Sri Lanka lost to Pakistan, he produced a typically malevolent script, suggesting that Jayawardene and Samaraweera had thrown the match. A reference to some unspecified monetary transaction involving unnamed businessmen was used to strengthen the suggestion. As usual, there was no proof, nothing solid; only vague insinuations designed to inflame paranoia and vicious speculation.

Emboldened by impunity, he forgot that those who live by stoking populist passions usually die by the same method. Attacking the LTTE, the opposition, foreigners or peaceniks is not the same thing as accusing two hugely popular cricketers of dishonesty, in the middle of a national World Cup campaign. Mahela Jayawardene was reported as contemplating legal action against ITN, the cricket board issued a public statement of condemnation and complained to ITN, and as must happen with everything – from building roundabouts in Colombo to bringing peace and development and possibly the supreme bliss of nirvana to Sri Lanka – the cricket team were reported as requesting a meeting with the President to discuss the issue.

More importantly, Abeysundara’s piece raised a hornet’s nest of outrage among the cricket loving public. The massive number of comments on You Tube and elsewhere is unanimous in their condemnation of Abeysundara and his contemptible scandal mongering. Many are in the nature of what was once, before the era of Internet message boards, described as ‘unprintable’. Insofar as what is objected to here is not the legitimate right of the media to criticise the cricket team, but the making of slanderous and unsubstantiated allegations, and given also that Abeysundara’s preferred métier is mob appeal, the use of expletive-ridden abuse is par for the course. In this sense, comeuppance can never be sweeter, but the fact that this is the manner in which we conduct disagreement says much about how incipiently violent our society is.

But it is not in Abeysundara’s nature to be chastened that easily. Adding insult to injury, the Vimasuma broadcast of the following day was a complete reinterpretation of everything that had been said the day before, replete with implausible denials, platitudinous declarations of love for our boys (‘apey kollo’), and an assertion that (unnamed) third parties were responsible for insidiously interpreting the original broadcast as anything other than the staunchest expression of support for the national cricketers. The last one is a predictable device, regularly trotted out in constructing imagined conspiracies against Sri Lanka, but which is more than usually ridiculous in this context. Admittedly, it also included a cack-handed and grudging expression of regret for hurting the feelings of Mahela and Thilan, but overall, it was not the unconditional apology that reasonable people expected. This was left to ITN to offer.

I suspect that this will be the end of the matter. There will be no sacking; no litigation; no accountability. After all, Mervyn Silva has got away with worse, more than once. Episodic as they may seem, these are nonetheless the occasions in which we glimpse the extent of the erosion of democratic values, and worse, how far away we are from the ideal of the decent society in the sense that Avishai Margalit understood it. The focus of political philosophy from Plato to Rawls has been the ideal of the just society that secures human dignity. Margalit argues that the more tangible object is the decent society, defined as one in which its members do not humiliate one another.

When the freedom to hold and express opinions becomes an exercise in ritual humiliation and abuse, not only is it a misuse of that fundamental democratic freedom, but we also lose our claim to being a decent society, just as much as excessive partisanship and the lack of respect for rules regulating fairness undermine our democracy. The political structures that sustain the necessity for services of the kind Mahinda Abeysundara currently performs at ITN, and, as we have seen with the cricket contretemps, the emotive and perhaps violent reactions those structures generate, corrode the very fabric of the decent society. It is something we should all take seriously if we do not want to go the way of the Maghreb countries.

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Sri Lankan cricket fans look for villains who (almost) ruined their national game

By Banyan News Reporters

The crisis may be over, but Sri Lankan cricket fans are still fervently debating who very nearly stole their most cherished cultural heritage: the island’s own version of the quaint English game of cricket.

They are trying to discern sinister motives behind the short-lived ban on all fun and merry-making at ICC World Cup cricket matches currently being played in Sri Lanka. The most ardent fans have even launched a nationwide search to identify the originators of ‘Dharmista Cricket’ — a heavily sanitised version of the game that was very nearly forced on 20 million cricket crazy fans.

“We are hugely relieved that diabolical attempts to ruin our cricket have been defeated,” said L B W Bolawardana, spokesman for Save Sri Lanka Cricket (SSLC), a people’s protest movement that sprang overnight via Facebook and Twitter.

“But we have to remain vigilant. We believe there are forces working to ruin the people’s game – the one thing that unites the whole of Sri Lanka no matter what,” Bolawardana added. The period from 18 to 21 February 2011 was probably the longest four days that Sri Lankan cricket fans have known.

On February 18, on the eve of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 tournament’s commencement, the Sri Lankan police chief threw a huge wet blanket over the entire island. He announced strict rules of conduct for all cricket fans watching the 12 matches to be played in Sri Lanka, which is co-hosting the World Cup along with Bangladesh and India.

The spoil-sport police chief prohibited a long list of items from being carried into the three World Cup venues in Sri Lanka: banners, placards, musical instruments, alcohol, glass bottles, fire crackers, laser lights, sharp instruments and knives.

These were excluded supposedly to ensure player and spectator safety. Meanwhile, carrying out a request from the International Cricket Council (ICC), the global ruling body for the game, professional photographic and video cameras were prohibited inside all venues.

Irate cricket fans reacted to this wet-blanket ban with loud protests. While some lobbied with Sri Lanka Cricket and the government for a change of heart, others organised an online petition.

Part of the petition read: “The whole point of a fan opting to attend the match instead of watching it at home on TV, where they can easily and more comfortably follow the game, is to experience the atmosphere and energy and share the sheer excitement of other fans firsthand, where there is noise, song, dance, street food and drink.”

The petition was scathing about the over-zealous police. “It is not the job of The Police to ban harmless fun and violate our fundamental rights… Instead of making their lot easier by disappointing the public they are supposed to serve, they should be doing a better job by being alert, coordinating, apprehending and ensuring justice in case something does go wrong.”

A national tragedy was finally avoided on February 22, when the Minister of Sports announced the unfair ban has been revoked.

“The match without bands is like going to a hotel without the most favourite dish,” the minister was quoted as saying. “I had a discussion with the Inspector General of Police, and we have removed the ban on bands and musical instruments.”

Earlier, Sri Lanka Cricket also dropped the ban on banners and placards. But Save Sri Lanka Cricket (SSLC) urged ‘eternal vigilance’ to ward off any future attempts to reintroduce what it called ‘Dharmista Cricket’.

‘Dharmista’ is a Sinhala term for pious or sanctimonious, used to describe actions of self-appointed guardians of (their narrow interpretation of) local culture and public morals.

Meanwhile, the heavily foreign-funded and completely unregulated the Sri Lanka Institute of Conspiracy Theories (SLICT) has solicited possible explanations for the short-lived attempts at ‘Dharmista Cricket’. It has already received a number of conspiracy theories, which have been leaked to Banyan News Reporters by an insider who loves spilling beans.

• ‘Dharmista Cricket’ was the latest attempt to undermine the Sri Lanka Cricket Team, which would have been energised by the good cheer and harmless merry-making of Sri Lanka fans during the home matches they play during the tournament. Those anti-Lanka elements who in the past resorted to name-calling, rule-throwing and other misdemeanours have somehow infiltrated into the highest echelons of Sri Lanka Cricket and Sri Lanka Police. How else can anyone explain papare bands being banned? This is part of the global conspiracy against everything Sri Lankan. Sadly, some traitors within are supporting these attempts wittingly or unwittingly.

• Current police chief Balasuriya, armed with his doctorate from Russia, is probably not Sri Lankan, which may explain why he does not share the Sri Lankan passion for cricket. He has either been switched at birth with a national without a single cricketing bone in his body (Azerbaijan to Zambia, make your pick!). Or better still, he is not human at all, but an alien in human form who has infiltrated the highest levels of our government (just as some disguised aliens are believed to be close to the top in the US government).

• The unfortunate coincidence of Cricket World Cup and the schools Big Match season had all the top Colombo and outstation schools rather worried. They just could not compete with the international ODIs, and feared that their faithful old boys (and even current boys) might stay away. So they hatched a plan: make the World Cup watching so dull that no self-respecting Sri Lankan male would want to turn up at those. Schools Big Matches saved!

• It is perhaps little known that papare bands originated from church festivities in Negombo. A group of Sinhala Oorumiyas, well informed about their proud history, wanted to cleanse the very Sinhala-Buddhist activity of cricket watching of any foreign influence. (They are not easily persuaded by purists pointing out that cricket itself is a very English game, introduced by British colonial rulers. Revisionist historian Dr Susan Agunathilaka, a co-founder of the Vidyartha Patriots’ Institute for Science and Society, V-PISS, claims cricket was modeled on an ancient ball game played in the East for at least a millennium before the first Englishman ever dreamed of it.)

Well, what do YOU think? Join the BNR competition to Save Sri Lanka Cricket while laughing all the way to….the next cricket match.

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Dr. Indrajit Coomaraswamy is a Former Director, Economic Affairs Division at the Commonwealth Secretariat. Indrajit was also a staff officer at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. As Wikipedia notes, From 1981 t 1989 he was seconded to the Ministry of Finance and Planning. Thereafter he worked for the Commonwealth Secretariat from 1990–2008, holding the posts of Director, Economic Affairs Division and Deputy-Director, Secretary-General’s Office and was brought back to the Commonwealth Secretariat to head the Social Transformation Programme Division, as Interim Director.

Given Indrajit’s sporting background, we began by talking about his achievements in rugger and cricket at the University of Peradeniya in the early 70s and afterwards at Cambridge University, which to this day he said irked his mother who was of the opinion that he had spent far too much of time playing sport and far too little studying! I then asked Indrajit, an economist by training, about the global financial crisis and how, at the time, no one could really explain it, much less predict it but now, how many say they saw it coming.

We then talked about the role and relevance of the Commonwealth Secretariat before I asked him a crucial question pegged to what Prof. Sumanasiri Liyanage – also an economist and political analyst – told me a few weeks ago, that there was absolutely no correlation between development and democracy. My follow-up question was on how corruption influenced development. Indrajit’s informed responses to both are extremely revealing.

Our conversation then focussed on the nature of post-war economic development in Sri Lanka, and whether it would be urban centres like Colombo in the Western Province, or a more decentralised, regional blueprint anchored to local entrepreneurship that would drive growth.

To the question as to whether he was optimistic about economic development post-war, Indrajit’s response was one of great optimism, noting that he sees massive potential and “arguably… the most propitious set of circumstances since 1958′. He also looked at macro-economic policies Sri Lanka should be concentrating on, with a strong regional focus.

The conversation ended with the observation that though Indrajit went to the wrong school, he perhaps left early enough to turn out alright!

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No one disagrees with the proposition that the practice, not confined to the Australians or the South Africans, of making sustained appeals by a fielding side with the intention of pressuring umpires into wrong decisions is an awful distortion of the spirit of the game. We can also agree that the mixture of verbal intimidation against opponents and ingratiating badinage with officials that so often characterises the on field behaviour of its practitioners is particularly pernicious. It is only made worse by the disingenuous defence of these transgressions by sections of the cricketing commentariat, based on such cultural idioms as ‘a bit of banter’, competitiveness, ‘mateship’ and, unconvincingly, even sportsmanship. How this kind of borstal behaviour can be squared with the conception of mateship, at least in the sense it was articulated by the poet Les Murray and considered for inclusion in the preamble to the Australian Constitution in the referendum of 1999, remains to be seen.

However, to suggest, as Michael does, that this is a question of which wrong is worse is to ask the wrong question. In his letter as well as in private correspondence with this columnist, Michael has made clear his condemnation of the behaviour of Randiv and Dilshan and his endorsement of the swift disciplinary action taken by the Board. But he laments that similar outrage has not been directed at the practice of cheating by abuse of appeals. This is not only irrelevant to the matter at hand (how can two wrongs make a right?); it is also groundless.

Michael clearly posits that the practice of vexatious appeals is a more serious transgression (inter alia, ‘downright cheating’), than the gratuitous no ball deliberately bowled by Randiv at the instigation of Dilshan (a mere case of ‘tweaking the rules’). How can this be? Both are clear violations of the spirit of cricket, and had his condemnation been of a general nature accepting the approximate moral equivalence of the two violations, we might have gone along with him. Purely for the sake of letting the matter rest, that is the position I would take.

But Michael goes further in making a normative distinction between the two wrongs which, I would argue, is based on an arbitrary and untenable differentiation. In the determination of fault in this ethical conundrum, the key factor is intentionality. That the no ball bowled at Sehwag was intentional and by common design has been established. Randiv has apologised to Sehwag and both he and Dilshan have been punished. With regard to vexatious appeals, let us narrow the cases down to those not involving genuine doubt, but those in which the fielding side knows reasonably well that the batsman is not out, but makes a loud and sustained appeal regardless, with the intention of applying pressure on the umpire. In both cases, therefore, there is a clear intention to cheat. If like Michael, one must express a preference for which case represents the worse offence, it would appear that the act that executes the intention which may be carried out independently of an intervention by a third party would be the one deserving of more censure. Randiv formed the intention to commit an a priori wrong, at the instigation of or with the connivance of Dilshan, and then in fact carried it out by deliberately overstepping the popping crease. In the case of a vexatious appeal, all that the potential cheaters can do is to apply pressure on the umpire (too much of which also exposes them to penalty), who is these days a professional trained and qualified to handle such situations. Moreover, unlike a no ball which is an a priori wrong established by the Laws of Cricket, appeals per se are very much a legal part of the game, indeed a right available to both sides. It is only the abuse of this legal right that attracts legal penalties and ethical censure. Thus on the basis of intentionality, it would seem that a rational position apropos the relative gravity of the two cases would lead to the conclusion that Randiv’s violation is the graver.

Michael’s present position is consistent with a critique he has repeatedly made in his cricket writing with regard to on field aggression, and he has done so by reference to the different cultural idioms and constructs that are implicit in the behaviours and attitudes of white players on the one hand, and those from South Asia on the other. He has argued that the culturally specific assumptions about what is acceptable in the blokeish dressing rooms of Australia, England, New Zealand and South Africa is completely at odds with those of the South Asian nations. If I recall correctly, an example Michael has given is of the use of a particularly unedifying English swearword, which is not only offensive generally, but because of its invocation of motherhood in conjunction with sexual intercourse, is particularly violative of Asian cultural mores (this is at one level is a touchingly innocent argument: during his childhood among the Galle ramparts, Michael seems not to have encountered the infinitely more creative uses of this motif in the Sinhalese argot of the Southern coastal belt). The result, Michael says, is a level of mental intimidation and distraction that materially and unfairly affects performance.

This is unpersuasive. Native cricketers of South Asia during the colonial and immediately post-colonial period were mostly anglicised pukka sahibs who were more at home in a county cricket club than anything to do with their socially subaltern compatriots. It was not only the Indian princelings among colonial cricketers who were socially and intellectually superior to working or middle class white players, which thus inverted imperial political structures upon the cricket field at least. In the kind of cricketer of that era exemplified in F.C. de Saram, for example, it is difficult to imagine a wilting flower, and even more difficult to imagine any inherent ethno-cultural or linguistic disadvantage in an exchange of colourful contumely.

To be sure, in the Sri Lankan case at least, there has been a class transformation in the cricketing establishment in line with the democratisation of culture and politics we have seen since 1956. The national cricket team is more representative of our society nowadays, and this means that, notwithstanding such fluent exponents of stylistic elocution as the present captain, English is not the mother tongue of the majority. It may also mean that their cultural reference points are less westernised than their predecessors. I do not think, however, it follows from this that these players are babes in the wood of international cricket.

The professionalisation of cricket especially after 1996 makes it a path of instant socioeconomic upward mobility, with all the cultural transformations that that brings to the individual. Sri Lankan cricket has mirrored the transformation of political power in the country with the exit or relegation of the ancien regime of old schools and clubs and its replacement with a new power elite that emerged after 1956. This has been an intensely political process, and the regime change within cricket was something wrought by the deliberate and capable exercise of power by people like Arjuna Ranatunga, who is in more ways than one an exemplar of the post-1956 elite. In their approach to power relations, therefore, modern players are not so much noble savage or innocent villager as politically literate free agents, who understand the value of power and know how to use it. It is this that makes them equal players in the parallel power game of sledging and brinkmanship that characterises an international cricket match these days, and Sri Lankan players are second to none in the business of vociferous appeals and sharp practice.

Moreover, there is an unappealing subtext of small island jingoism in Michael’s position, which in many ways echoes the prevailing political zeitgeist of Sri Lanka in the Chintana era. The reference to vexatious appeals by the Australians and South Africans implies that this is an unacceptable practice indulged in mostly by white players, and furthermore, the complaint that those transgressions are not met with the same extent or depth of condemnation as one committed by a poor Asian. I would not go so far as to draw an analogy here, but there is a conspicuous comparison between this and how the Sri Lankan State reacts to international criticism, but that is another conversation.

More to the point, we cannot achieve respect either for the positive rules nor the more amorphous spirit of cricket, by complaining about the conduct of others and glossing over our own. No individual country has a monopoly in the determination of how cricket should be played, but it is worth pointing out that the Sri Lankan cricket team has won the ICC Award for the Spirit of Cricket twice. The Board acted correctly in swiftly disciplining Randiv and Dilshan, and Michael Roberts was right in endorsing those actions. I wish, however, that he resisted the urge to ethical judgement in the pursuit of some notion of misplaced, if sincere, paternalist patriotism. Kant, not Carlyle, should guide us here.

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Photo credit: Associated Press, published in Sydney Morning Herald

Savouring the richly deserved cascades of press coverage last week of Muttiah Muralidaran’s retirement from Test cricket on the magnificent record of 800 wickets, it is difficult to resist a surge of heart-warming patriotism. It was not only the doosra-like sequence of events in the last day of the Galle Test against India – wholly implausible had it been a fictional plot – that precipitated this onrush of Sri Lankan pride in your columnist. For once, international media coverage was depicting Sri Lanka, due to the achievement of a man who epitomises the best in it, as it always should be: for world-conquering talent, effervescent spirit, generosity and humility in public, ebullient camaraderie in private, and unflappable good manners throughout.

In the field of Test cricket, we shall never experience again that delightful frisson of pregnant expectation in the images of Murali’s impish smile and devious, quizzical glances, disconcerting last minute field adjustments followed by devilish deliveries, nor the anarchic pleasures of his agricultural cameos with the bat. To be sure, we shall continue to see him in the shorter version, and also perhaps in that ultimate expression of vulgar populism in cricket, Twenty-20. But Test cricket is how cricket should be played, and it is the template that enabled the dazzling displays of stratagem and stamina, attack and attrition, subterfuge and intelligence that characterised his spin bowling.

The brilliant and controversial career of Muttiah Muralidaran has from the outset been underlined by an intensely political theme of identity. In the international contretemps over his bowling action, an argument that was frequently advanced by his supporters was the political one of latent racial prejudice; or in its more refined variation, that a Western individualist ideological bias informed the interpretation of the imprecisely drafted Law 24:2, which resulted in manifest injustice in Murali’s case. This was notwithstanding the fact that Murali’s most abiding (and graceless) detractor is Bishan Singh Bedi, an Indian, and one of his most ardent defenders has been the Englishman Peter Roebuck (Millfield, Cambridge, Somerset and England), who seems to exemplify the values of positivist liberal individualism given his Cambridge law degree (and that too, given his erstwhile advocacy of corporal punishment, of a veritably Edwardian variety).

The trauma of the chucking controversy was tangible, especially in Australia, where even Prime Minister John Howard joined the lynch mob with ill-informed comments patently designed for political mileage. He has since been suitably chastened, with his ambitions for ICC office peremptorily curbed.

Despite this, Murali underwent strenuous biomechanical tests which demonstrated the appearance of throwing as an optical illusion caused by a congenital deformity of his elbow. Perhaps as satisfyingly, this also showed that many other bowlers whose action had never been questioned were in fact bowling illegal deliveries, which led to a reform of the rules. The accomplishment of this ‘game-changer’ in the rules, in turn, has generated another kind of prejudice argument, viz., that if he were a white player, he would not have benefitted from such solicitous sympathy, or at least the fear of allegations of racism and neo-colonialism from Asian and African cricketing establishments, as to have had the rules changed. It would all have been, in Bedi’s words, a case of ‘tough luck.’ I think we were all rather lucky, if only for the sheer pleasure and entertainment Murali subsequently provided, that counsel saner than Bedi’s prevailed.

However, it is the symbolism of Murali being the first Indian Tamil in the Sri Lankan side that is of the much greater import in the politics of pluralism within the country. Of immediate cause for gratification is that he has ruled out a post-cricket political career, an irritating sub-continental tradition, and perhaps in this he drew a salutary lesson from the hero-to-zero metamorphosis of his fellow icon, Sanath Jayasuriya, if not from his former captain, the Schmittian Arjuna Ranatunga. To the extent he has made any public comments of a political nature, Murali has been at pains to make them as colourlessly unobjectionable as possible. That may be because he is uninterested in politics, but it may also be that he has the innate sense of pragmatism and survival that ethnic minorities develop in some types of majoritarian society, instilled through the baptism of fire his family experienced in the race riots of 1977. I suspect it is the latter. When a colleague of mine approached Murali to do a television spot in the 2008 campaign to commemorate the twenty fifth anniversary of Black July 1983, he declined, with disarming frankness, on the ground that his involvement would be perceived by the government as the espousal of an unacceptable political viewpoint, which would in turn harm his cricketing career.

It is this virtue of public ethnic neutrality that has made Murali a poster-boy for a widespread notion of ethnic harmony and general wellbeing, as some of the embarrassingly inept, if well-intentioned, commentary in the local press has shown over the years. The basic idea here is to interpolate from Muralidaran’s success in a national sporting endeavour, and his universal popularity among all Sri Lankans, a certain model of national identity as well as national success. If the minorities plight their troth with the majority as unequivocally as Murali seems to have done, the argument goes, what is there to stop us achieving great things, as we have shown the world in the field of cricket?

Without a doubt, in societies such as ours, the representation of diversity in national sporting teams is of enormous symbolic value. But to stretch the analogy too far is not only absurd, but also dangerous, for a cricket team is neither a country nor a democracy. The presence of Tamils, Moors, Malays, Burghers, and Hindus, Muslims and Christians together with Sinhalese and Buddhists in the national cricket team is a welcome symptom of the potential for inclusiveness and pluralism we retain in our society despite generations of discord and conflict, but it cannot serve as a model of national identity and statehood. It is as ridiculous as arguing that our cross-communal enthusiasm for arrack and baila, or love of political melodrama – between Thileepan and Weerawansa, demonstrably a shared weakness – can be contrived somehow into a basis of ethnic cohesion.

It should also be remembered that for those in the chauvinistic end of the political spectrum who subscribe to this model of unity in diversity, Murali’s apolitical tact in public utterances as a professional cricketer also denotes exactly how a Tamil should behave: recognised and even venerated for his talent, as long as he knows his place within the firmament and desists from making impertinent and awkward claims. That is, after all, the conclusion to be drawn from the mentoring relationship with Arjuna Ranatunga that gained so much for Murali in his formative years on the national side.

For the moment though, it is perhaps far more agreeable to just indulge in a bit of forgivable nostalgia on that footage from The Oval in August 1998 when Muttiah Muralidaran arrived upon the world stage, taking sixteen England wickets in the match (seven of them on the last day), and raise a glass to The Smiling Assassin, not only for the immeasurable joy he gave us for eighteen years, but also for the fact that, as the London Sunday Telegraph pointed out, throughout the vicissitudes of his career he ‘has always shown himself a pukka gent.’

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It was seen in a flag being celebrated equally by all races. Don’t be mistaken. A black and an Afrikaner were not spotted hugging each other, but the unity can be felt. Not pumped up, not voiced through news conferences and loud mouths in august assemblies.  The feeling gives you gut assurance that we are seeing the real thing. Imperfect, but it is open not incognito. It is recognizable and touchable. In the country where some of the most hideous crimes were committed, both in the name of racial purity and in the name of the emancipation of the oppressed, the human spirit is on the mend.

With the pessimist it can be agreed that it is not perfect. The extremist voices are there; the voices of hatred are not totally stilled as evidenced in the violent killing of Eugene Terreblanche the avid white supremacist.  Some even tried to make this a declaration of war by  blacks against whites. In the days prior to the world cup South African Police said white supremacists planned bombs in black areas. The president condemned the killing. From our own experience we know that such condemnation could mean something or nothing at all.

Presidential statements are immaterial when a process is on the roll. A process, which has caught the imagination of different strata’s of South African society. The word reconciliation is so perverted theses days. It is used as a means to obtaining funding nationally and organizationally. It is used to keep the prince in the palace and the poor man at the gate provided they are not throwing obscenities or hand grenades at each other.

Despite years since the end of conflict, the process of healing is in the kindergarten stage in South Africa, maybe because there is a ring of authenticity to it. The hope cannot be missed however even by the most skeptical. It might be best captured by the words of the song that was reverberating through the airwaves during the world cup.

“When I get older, I will be stronger
. They’ll call me freedom, just like a Waving Flag”

And I sat on my couch, got drawn into the crowds watching the enthralling soccer, but I cried. Tears of envy pouring down as I saw what I would love to see happening closer home.

Joanna, is their any hope and inspiration that you could give Colombo?

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Today, most members of the Earth’s dominant species – the nearly 7 billion humans – will be preoccupied with 22 able-bodied men chasing a little hollow sphere. It’s only a game, really, but what a game: the whole world holds its breath as the ‘titans of kick’ clash in the FIFA World Cup Final.

Played across 10 venues in South Africa, this was much more than a sporting tournament. It’s the ultimate celebration of the world’s most popular sport, held once every four years. More popular than the Olympics, it demonstrates the sheer power of sports and media to bring together – momentarily, at least – the usually fragmented and squabbling humanity.

Indeed, the exuberant and vuvuzela-blaring spectators flocking to South African stadiums make up only a small part of the global audience following these games. Far more are following it on big or small screens all over the world. When a game is underway, it’s not just the fans of two participating nations who cheer or despair. For 90 scintillating minutes, human divisions like race, skin colour and literacy are blurred and forgotten.

At that moment, we are all citizens of Planet Football.

To be honest, I’m not an ardent football fan. But I’ve gladly allowed myself to be caught up in the current frenzy. I just love to watch people who watch the game…

On June 24 evening, standing at a street-side pub in the charming little Swiss town of Nyon, on the bank of Lake Geneva, I watched Japan play Denmark. The small crowd around the large flat-screen TV was like a miniature global family. It included Europeans, some bemused American and Chinese tourists, and a solitary Japanese. Evening light was still fading in Europe when Japan won 3-1 to enter the final 16. Seven hours ahead in time, and well past their midnight, the land of the rising sun erupted in jubilation. Distances and time zones didn’t matter.

Such scenes were being repeated as various teams advanced or dropped out in the tournament. This sporting event is tipped to be the most-watched television event in history. Hundreds of broadcasters are transmitting the World Cup to a cumulative TV audience that FIFA estimates to reach more than 26 billion people. Some TV channels offer high definition (HD) or 3-D quality images to enhance the mass viewing experience.

‘Live’ from the Earth

The operative word here is ‘live’ – kick by kick, goal by goal, as it happens. Arthur C Clarke, who in 1945 first envisaged the use of geostationary satellites for global broadcasting, once suggested a neat phrase to sum up this remarkable phenomenon: How the World was One.

For the past month, the winning formula for unifying the Global Family seemed to be: international football + live broadcasts + live coverage via the web and mobile phones.

And it’s by no means a passive family of couch potatoes. Media and telecom companies have launched mobile applications, most of which offer live scores, news updates or interactive features. Some integrated with social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. As Associated Press reported when the tournament kicked off: “With games airing live on cell phones and computers, the World Cup will get more online coverage than any major sporting event yet”.

Online or offline, the result is the same: people from all walks of life are endlessly debating individual games and speculating on the eventual outcomes. How refreshing it is that, for once, we are arguing about a game, and not politics, economics or religion.

If only we could continue to live on Planet Football…

These myriad conversations were unfolding to the upbeat tune of the FIFA World Cup Anthem, “Wavin’ Flag” (The Celebration Mix). Sung by Somali-Canadian artist K’naan, it might as well be our planetary anthem — an idea that some social activists and artistes have dreamed about for decades.

And what better place can anchor this phenomenon than South Africa, the Rainbow Nation?

Mandela Magic

They’ve been here before. Fifteen years ago, the country hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Shortly after his election in 1994, President Nelson Mandela realized how his nation was still racially and economically divided in the wake of apartheid. Running up to the championship, he hatched a little plan with the captain of South Africa’s rugby team. The game became more than a game (it always does!). The nation with 11 official languages and many dialects was soon speaking the universal language of sport.

This intriguing story is recounted in Clint Eastwood’s remarkable 2009 film Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela. It’s also a strong reminder of the power of live television. That’s what an astute Mandela harnessed to bring all South Africans under the new flag of his resurgent nation.

He didn’t issue any decrees to the country’s pluralistic media. There were no lofty speeches, slogans or ‘infomercials’ extolling the virtues of national unity. Instead, Mandela reached out to the Rugby team, and let real life images do the talking. Images showing blacks, whites and others across the vast country cheering a (mostly white and initially unpopular) South African team were poignant — and wholly effective. (Leaders of other post-conflict nations, please note.)

The football and TV screen both have an addictive effect over our minds. Add live broadcasts to the mix, and that power is suddenly multiplied. The world football federation FIFA, with its 208 member associations, is probably more influential — and certainly better known — than the United Nations, with its 192 member states. The difference is in media outreach. It signifies the rise of soft power in our always-connected information society.

On second thoughts, those invading aliens don’t need to worry too much about the Earth’s political leaders or their armies. Without firing a single shot, the globalised media have quietly taken over our Global Village — and now it’s too late to resist! We can argue on its merits and demerits, but the facts are indisputable.

If the ETs want to meet the real sources of global power, they must look for the Emperors of Eyeballs, and wizards of web and mobile. Whoever wins on July 11, these are the guys who will be laughing all the way to their banks.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene blogs on media, culture and development at http://movingimages.wordpress.com.  Suspicions of him being an alien spy have never been proven.

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