Lanka Citizen

Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

It must be fairly clear from my recent columns that I intend to vote for the Prime Minister in the forthcoming Presidential election. I make no apologies for this, indeed the contrary, in that I get the impression that most people who function mainly in English in their working lives are likely to do the opposite.

Interestingly, one of them told me the other day that I must be the only intelligent person – purportedly intelligent, he hastily added – who would be voting for Mahinda. I was not entirely surprised at the intensity of the denunciation, because I have long realized that this country was polarizing very sadly. But it worried me, because it suggests that, in their fear of what Mahinda, or rather his strong supporters, might do, the English speaking intelligentsia has abandoned the qualities of critical intelligence that some of its representatives at least used to display.

In the same conversation I was accused of being obsessively critical of Ranil as I had been about JR, while ignoring Chandrika’s faults. My defence was twofold. With regard to JR, I pointed out that certainly I had been almost totally isolated in the Colombo circles in which I moved, when I first became critical, in 1980. But, after the 1982 referendum and/or the 1983 attacks on Tamils, even the very interlocutors who were now so passionate in their defence of Ranil, had granted that I had a point.

With regard to Ranil, I had I pointed out supported the man in 2001, when I had been very critical of Chandrika. It was the deficiencies of Ranil’s government, along with his toleration of corruption and the continuing violence of the LTTE, that had led to my conviction that the country could not be entrusted to him. I may of course be wrong, but the refusal to recognize that I might have reasons for my beliefs, and not simply prejudice, seems to me evidence of prejudice that is beyond repair.

The same went for the person who told me Mahinda could not be trusted because he had first supported the P-Toms agreement, and now wanted to abrogate it. I asked the gentleman for whom he had voted, in 1988, and he told me that of course it had been for Premadasa. He had forgotten however that Premadasa, though initially he had had reservations about the Indo-Lankan Accord, had supported it in Parliament. As a loyal servant of the then Executive President, he had hardly any option. When however, as the Presidential candidate of his party, he could be very much his own man, he had expressed his opposition to the Accord and made it clear that he would ensure the withdrawal of the Indian army.

Now it is a legitimate point of view, if not entirely practical, to claim that Premadasa and Mahinda should have resigned when their leader embarked upon actions of which they disapproved. I might have done so, as might my friend who was so critical of Mahinda – and we would both doubtless have been accused of being quixotic. What I did not think acceptable was the criticism of Mahinda while blithely forgetting what had been condoned before.

But Colombo is in that sort of mood, the Tony Anghie type move that claims that Chandrika’s perfectly constitutional dismissal of cabinet ministers was a coup. It is the same mood that, having characterized her dissolving of parliament in 2004 as high-handed, is now waiting with bated breath for her to dissolve parliament and prove that she too is at heart a member of the English speaking elite.

So it is asserted now that Mahinda is all things to all men, and that he will give in completely to the JVP and the JHU. Now I too would like assurance that, while critical of the LTTE, he will make clear his commitment to pluralism and the rights of minorities, and that he will not attempt to close down the open economy. One clause in his agreement with the JVP worried me, the one about opposition to the ‘so-called liberal open economic policy’. The clarification of the JVP General Secretary, that the alliance was in favour of a mixed economy, could I believe be clarified further. But it was a step in the right direction, as was Mahinda’s assertion, while signing an agreement with the JHU, that he saw himself as duty bound to protect all religions, not just Buddhism as was enjoined in the Constitution.

Contrariwise, when Ranil signs an agreement with a group of Muslims, to the effect that he will introduce Tamil medium to all universities, that is not even noticed, let alone characterized as hypocrisy. On the contrary, it will be argued that this is a statesmanlike compromise. So too Ranil;s vehement opposition to English medium education while he was Prime Minister is now forgotten, by the same people who blame Bandaranaike for abolishing English medium education even though it was JR who first proposed this, and it was under Nugawela that a UNP government introduced the regulations that stopped it.

But people believe what they want to believe. I am sure I too am guilty of wishful thinking, though I hasten to add that I do not think a Rajapakse Presidency will be ideal, simply better for the country at large than Ranil. But I try at least to temper wishful thinking with some awareness of hard facts. That, as I pointed out when I began writing a column again, is something Sri Lankans in general do not think is essential. That, I fear, is one of the reasons we have declined so drastically in the last few decades, without any possibility of guarding against a repetition of the mistakes to which we seem doomed to succumb.

courtesy Lanka Academic