A particular aspect of Sri Lankan politics is color. Those days, there were two: Greens and Blues. Greens were to the right of centre and Blues to the left. There were some Reds (of the NM and Colvin type), often saying sensible things. But we know there isn’t much space for sensible things in our politics, so those Reds joined the Blues, traded their principles for power and lost their character. Then we had the New Reds, re-discovering themselves many times over, and, together with the Saffrons, punching far above their weights, thanks to an undesirable side effect of the electoral counting system in our country.
In the late seventies, nobody judged the Blues and Greens better than the ordinary Jaffna farmers. For when the Blue Lady came to visit that town, they gave her a red-carpet welcome. The roads were decorated with red onions and red chilies — just to spice it all up. When the Blue Lady invited her friend, Big Beard from across the Globe, for that non-leaning meeting, a Jaffna tobacco farmer was reported to have made a huge cigar, 24 inches in length, and sent them as a gift — and you thought Bill had the idea first, huh!
On the other hand, when the Green Fox visited the same place, people who went to listen to him at the stadium mostly walked home bare-footed. Municipality trucks cleared a mountain of slippers from where the stage stood the previous evening.
There were also the Golden Yellows of two types – the bullet version and the ballot version. The bullet version of Golden Yellows did a lot of damage, leading a 30 year drama culminating in a horrific, yet predictable, end. The ballot type Golden Yellows remain as rudderless and confused as ever, their basic instinct being one of isolationism. “Preserve our fundamental right to be ignorant frogs in the well”, being the latent semantics of their many chants. Their blood group being confrontation and not cooperation, they never learn the first lesson any junior student of management gets in the MGT101 class – effective power is the power of persuasion. I will bet a fiver, they will back the losing horse. Golden Yellows fit well the joke they make about Arafat of the Mid-East – “he never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.
The Jaffnese, as noted above, had a lot of justifiable dislike for the Greens. They identify the Green Fox as the architect of much of their troubles. The Greens were in power for most of the period the Jaffnese were bombed and strafed from the air, and the gifts from above included a couple of barrels of human excrement. They were in charge when large scale organized rioting was unleashed against the Jaffnese, in 1977 and 1983. On both occasions the Green Fox came on radio and TV and said the most insensitive things — rubbing salt into open wounds. Some even accuse the Greens of sending the thugs to burn down my precious library.
Even then, the astute Jaffnese wanted to vote for the Green Nephew in 2005! Wow! They were willing to forget the past and make the point that they have had enough of the war. Those common folk were so enthusiastic about peace that the Golden Yellows brought out the bullets to stop these people exercising their ballots. Some even claim that those bullets were paid for by the Blues.
The Blues took over the game and finished off what the Greens started. A particularly rich way of life in parts of my country has been decimated in the cross-fire. People in those parts, my fellow countrymen, reduced to paupers. In agriculture, quality of education, richness of cultural values and freedom of thought and expression, what they have now is far less than what they had then. Some of those who were lucky enough to escape, waved colorful flags of hate from afar, and helped accelerate that process of destruction.
The (New-) Reds rebelled twice. First when the Blues were in charge and then for a second time when the Greens were in charge. On both occasions they were brutally put down. Readily unleashing brutality, without posing the fundamental question of WHY these kids might have rebelled, is the common factor uniting the Blues and the Greens across the political spectrum. Whatever said and done, the machinery we built to enact such brutality is still intact, and strengthened to stratospheric levels by the war on the Golden Yellows. This machinery shows its colors under some experimental conditions – the fate of that mentally retarded chap throwing stones at trains, is a fine example.
Of brutalities, “That was the only way to defeat the evil”, credible analysts articulate in this forum and elsewhere. Perhaps it is so. But then that was exactly the argument put to me by the Golden Yellows who came to beat me up at a 1977 election meeting. “Taking to guns is the only way to defeat evil”, they told me. So the Noble Goal is to defeat evil – it matters not how we achieve that.
Enter Khaki!
It is not just Khaki, but Khaki packaged in White. White is not a color in itself, just a mixture of other colors in the right proportions. So the choice of White is appropriate, for it is backed by the (New) Reds, Greens and (ex-) Blues, the primary colors of the cathode-ray tube.
What of the discourse about our immediate future?
Many writing here are alarmed by the distinct possibility of a Blue victory. They argue that we will have more of the same thing in the form of highly centralized concentration of power and its predictable consequences. They probably have a point and a change of color may well be good.
What about a White victory? Other observers are alarmed by this prospect, too. Reds, Greens, ex-Blues and other insignificant backers of White will start pulling in their respective directions, immediately after a White victory. That will be cultural alien to the man whose specialism is in command and control structures. His solution to such chaos is from the text book: Ditch the White and bring out the Khaki.
We do live in interesting – and colorful — times, no?