News from Sri Lanka had been disquieting for the last several months with the escalation of conflict, the collapse of the rule of law and the protection of fundamental human rights. It was also becoming clear that the government was rapidly taking leave of its senses and losing sight of any moral compass that it may have possessed.
That, however, did not prevent widespread double-takes and sheer incredulity that greeted the Neanderthal antics reported today, of the expulsion of Tamil people of North-eastern origin from Colombo, enforced, SS-style, by the police. It is possible to cite chapter and verse the violation of international human rights and humanitarian law as well as Sri Lanka’s own constitutional rights that this kind of executive action entails. Basic expectations of the rule of law and citizenship such as equal treatment and non-discrimination, civil rights such as freedom of movement and the fundamental personal liberty not to be harassed by the State have been denuded.
But these legal niceties have no traction in a society suffering under the jackboot of a government whose insouciance, even sadistic pleasure, in contra-constitutional conduct requires no retelling. After all, the intentional violation of the constitution by the deliberate nullification of the Seventeenth Amendment would have attracted impeachment proceedings in any constitutional democracy. Likewise, the government’s relaxed complaisance with regard to a mounting epidemic of abductions and extra-legal executions would have elicited shock and revulsion elsewhere.
However, the crudeness and post facto self-righteousness of the herding and bussing of Tamils from Colombo – including in one farcical moment the assertion by Keheliya Rambukwella that only 250 Tamils were rounded up as opposed to upwards of 500 according to media reports – in the pursuit of the Final (military) Solution is in a deplorable class of its own. That a police spokesman defended the government’s action on the basis that these Tamil people ‘had no valid reason’ to be in Colombo is chilling proof of what has now become a Police State pure and simple.
This attempt at ethnic cleansing, for it cannot be called anything else – recalling such moments of infamy as when the government shipped Tamils in Colombo to the Northeast in the wake of the 1983 communal pogrom and when the LTTE evicted Muslims overnight from the Jaffna peninsular in 1990 – lays bare the moral perversion and degradation of humanity this government is capable of. The spittle-flecked ranting of such figures as Champika Ranawaka and their theories of supremacist racial eugenics could, until recently, be dismissed as the noxious vapours of the lunatic fringe of Southern politics.
Now, these people are in charge of the government and wield the power of the State, unconstrained by anything so inconvenient as the rule of law or an independent judiciary.
What is so bloodcurdling in the menace represented by Rajapakse, Weerawansa, Ranawaka and other high priests of pseudo-patriotism and ethnic antagonism is that they represent merely the more unsavoury (but now increasingly respectable) aspect of a more widely held majoritarian nationalism among Sinhala Buddhists, which is unable to contemplate the principle of equality of Tamils and minorities vis-à-vis membership in the polity. The wellsprings of this ingrained nationalism in the Sinhala Buddhist psyche are both historical and ideological – founded on a mythological hagiography and religion used as a means of political mobilisation. As with nationalisms elsewhere they involve economy with the truth, intolerance both of diversity and dissent, and a profoundly anti-democratic tendency to authoritarianism.
And as with nationalisms elsewhere, it eviscerates society of moral decency and vitality and when politically dominant in democratic settings, has a remarkable capacity to secure, sometimes without, but quite often with recourse to legal and violent enforcement, the suspension of the collective conscience of ordinary people. That is how national-socialism was possible in Germany and apartheid in South Africa, and how sheer evil and inhumane immorality rendered legal and acceptable over an entire generation. It is neither hysterical nor apocalyptic to state that this is what is happening in Sri Lanka today. And to pre-empt the usual argument about the LTTE’s record of human rights violations: what we are talking about is a democratically elected government of an ostensibly constitutional State, not an organisation branded as terrorists by the international community and whose evils the government reminds us on a daily basis, lest we forget.
The State has been hijacked and all its appurtenances are being liberally used in entrenching this ideology, including the rejection of inconvenient democratic values, bar the reification of majoritarianism. The violence done to our capacity to live peacefully and the prospects for reconciliation may not be repairable. It will reopen festering wounds and leave deep and abiding scars upon our polity, and aspirations to peace and prosperity cruelly mocked and retarded. The dehumanising of fellow Sri Lankans distinguished by ethnicity that the expulsion of North-eastern Tamils temporarily resident in Colombo reflects, and the casual and cavalier complacence of Sri Lankans in the face of this outrageous abuse of the authority, indeed the very purposes, of the State, reduces us to moral pygmies unable to overcome callous self-absorption. It tells us how thinly close to the surface the conditions that made July 1983 possible in our society are. Picking up the pieces after this government’s handiwork, quite literally because there is no better guarantor of the LTTE’s pursuit of secession than a government such as this (and indeed, the compelling validation by the expulsion of Tamils from Colombo of that central pillar of the Tamil nationalist project – the concept of the Tamil homeland), does not have to be the necessary destiny of Sri Lanka. But it is increasingly looking inexorable.
What this depraved government is doing thus is nothing less than defecating on the social conscience of Sri Lankan society and shredding apart its soul. The utter desecration in this process of the ethical precepts of the Buddhist philosophy is tragic, but merely incidental. How we emerge from the trauma of this rape of our social fabric and the pillage of our historical patrimony of rich diversity, one can only guess. In a dreadful realisation of the barbarian invasion described in Constantine Cavafy’s famous poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, Sri Lanka is now well and truly ruled by the barbarians, and Cavafy’s hope of deliverance from this terrible fate has been extinguished. Ensconced in ethereal Nirvana, what Siddhartha Gouthama thinks of what is being done in his name by self-appointed defenders of his dharma in an incendiary pursuit of the earthly ipse dixit of the Dharmadveepa, is a no-brainer. If this is what political Buddhism and nationalist exclusivism has done to ahimsa, mettha, muditha and karuna, what remains to be seen is whether we are at least capable of the shame – the lajja – that can be our redemption.