Lanka Citizen

By ‘Kathikā’ Study Circle

We interpret the Presidential election of 2005 in its essence as a crucial battle for hegemony, between the ideologies of neo-liberalism and Jathika Chinthanaya or the ‘national thought’ as its founders wish to call it, a battle against the modern liberal ethos with the expressed desire to revive a ‘national’ ethos.

We take the two candidates to be foremost the representatives of the respective ideologies, one a committed believer of neo-liberalism, while in the other case it is the unfolding of the recent events that made the movement of Jathika Chinthanaya select him as its leader, given that intuitively he seems to be closer to the tradition Jathika Chinthanaya represents than to the neo-liberal policies.

The two ideologies find themselves mutually exclusive. Neo-liberal agenda at this election proposes to enshrine liberal democracy and market economy in our society. The Jathika Chinthanaya proposes to free Sri Lanka from the grip of Western imperialism and establish a Jathika Arthikaya, a national economy based on Jathika Chinthanaya, which combines both the state and the private sector.

I Neo-Liberalism and Jathika Chinthanaya: Polar Opposites?

The neo-liberal agenda
The neo-liberal agenda strongly believes that its implementation will bring economic growth, and therefore freedom and prosperity to the people of the country; hence the agenda has to be implemented somehow ignoring its social consequences for the deprived sectors of society. What lies behind this belief is the modern faith in the discourse of modernity and therefore, in the belief that in progress, modernization and development will overcome all social ills. It follows that the freedom of the individual in the guaranteed through the human rights would generate economic growth the ripples of which will bring modernization and development. With the trickle down effect everyone will benefit at the end, and there will be freedom and prosperity all around. In this view, any resistance to the implementation of such an agenda has to be considered a politically misguided move that goes against the common interest and therefore warrants to be overcome at any cost. Hence, the authoritarianism of neo-liberalism, born out of the modern conviction of the possibility of knowing what is good for society and believing in one’s missionary role in implementing it against all resistance. In this version, politics is the vocation of the aristocracy brought up to rule the subjects. Hence the distance of political leaders from the ordinary public. The ruler depends on the technocrat and the bureaucrat to implement the political agenda conceived in the minds of the experts who being the students of the correct method that know the Truth of modernity, and therefore how to modernize and develop, ‘underdeveloped,’ ‘third world’ countries such as Sri Lanka.

Jathika Chinthanaya
Jathika Chinthanaya, as a discourse seeks to resist the impact of modernity on tradition in its present phase of globalization which (to borrow Marx’s famous metaphor) threatens to melt all solid identities based on tradition into thin air in its atomization of communities and homogenization of all cultures. Jathika Chinthanaya perceives the rejuvenation of a national polity and economy and a national culture based on a state driven, people oriented, agricultural and industrial development as the way out of the ill effects of the impact of the neo-liberal agenda backed by globalization on our society. Hence Jathika Chinthanaya’s portrayal of this election as a battle between the Jathika and Vijathika or the national and the alien forces identified as Western imperialism. The struggle then is a patriotic one to assert Sri Lanka’s national independence.

Jathika Chinthanaya theoretically understands Sinhala Buddhist culture as one based on Buddhist humanism whose chief characteristics are considered to be the middle path, rejection of hedonism, commitment to altruism in place of selfishness, non-acquisitive way of life, egalitarianism and placing humanity above riches.

In our view, this is in essence a notion of the good life for humans centered on our ability to cultivate a capacity for discerning judgment in the conduct of our lives. Contrary to attempts to equate liberalism with Buddhism, the ethos of liberal individualism which reduces the idea of judgment to making consumer choices in the marketplace, goes against the very essence of Buddhist ethos and seek to uproot it.

In our view, it is politically misleading to take the political base of Jathika Chinthanaya as formed merely by economically deprived sectors of society. It is neither simply a matter of chauvinism. What takes the form of a ‘nationalist’ sentiment is the sense of the loss of a strong identity previously provided by the tradition.

Individualism based on freedom in the marketplace breaks down all the traditional bonds of community that gives a strong sense of identity to people. The value of tradition lies in its ability to provide resources to cultivate a stable identity. In Sri Lanka this identity was traditionally given in the form of a combination of language and religion. Hence the natural inclination of people to express their loss of identity in the form of falling back on their traditional linguistic or religious sources of identity. From the perspective of Jathika Chinthanaya, if it seeks to build a national polity, economy and culture, it needs to preserve an integrated nation beyond existing linguistic and religious divisions. Hence, the Sinhala nationalism’s opposition to Tamil nationalism. It sees the rise of Sinhala nationalism as a result of an attempt to reassert the due place of the Sinhala community which was denied to them under the colonial rule, the community taken to be the repository of Sinhala Buddhist ethos.

The battle between neo-liberalism and Jathika Chinthanaya is not simply a battle between two discourses, but also between two ways of life and therefore belief systems based on the discourses, which make their own way of life true for the believers of each system making it possibly a battle between life and death for the strong believer. It seems to represent what appears to be the irreconcilable and intense conflictual nature of politics between modernity and tradition.

polarization leading to authoritarian tendencies
The danger of the political polarization between the forces of modernity and tradition in Sri Lanka is that it threatens to strengthen the authoritarian tendencies within society. In its resistance to the authoritarianism of neo-liberalism, sections within the Jathika Chinthanaya movement betray a tendency which is potentially authoritarian.

In our view, this is due to that the Jathika Chinthanaya as a political movement shares some of the modernist premises which it seeks to reject in its philosophical/theoretical attempts to revive a Buddhist humanist ethos. If neo-liberalism’s authoritarianism arises from its belief in having a blueprint to remedy the ills of modern society and therefore the urge to implement it at any cost in the face of all the resistance, Jathika Chinthanaya also seems to believe that it has a blueprint for nation building and feels the urgency to carry out its project of building a national polity, economy and culture in the face of any resistance to it. In this instrumentalist approach, politics, then is no more than a mere means to reaching for the end of nation building and, the end seems to be taken to justify the means. In its project of nation building through development, Jathika Chinthanaya also seems to share the belief that progress, modernization and development will enable us to remedy the ills of our society.

Jathika Chinthanaya has a strong point over the liberal notion of the freedom of the individual in the marketplace, in its idea that its only a strong sense of the community that can give a stable identity to human beings. It is this latter idea however, that brings Jathika Chinthanaya to the idea of giving priority to the notion of nation building on the basis of a national economy. The desire to build a strong sense of the community that resists the atomizing tendencies of modernity seems to bring us back to the fold of modernity itself in the form of the nation building. Ironically, the exercise of nation building under modernity on the basis of a ‘national economy’ undertaken by the state is fraught with the danger of becoming authoritarian so far as it may feel the need to suppress any political resistance to it in order to muster all the necessary resources to build the ‘national economy.’

In order to imagine a way out of this potential political impasse in the long term, it is necessary to begin by re-state the political conflict between modernity and tradition as essentially a one between the freedom of the individual in the marketplace, and the stable identity the community provides. Our challenge under modernity is to develop an idea of identity derived from a strong sense of community which nevertheless simultaneously assures us the freedom as individuals as well. It is our suggestion that herein lies the way forward for the Jathika Chinthanaya out of its present modernist dilemma.

II The Way Forward
We have already stated that the rise of the Jathika Chinthanaya itself is a sign of the negative impact of modernity on traditional identities. We live under the pervasive impact of modernity where the notion of the freedom of the individual in the marketplace has come to dominate as the basis of the liberal ethos adhered to by an increasingly considerable section of society, in urban centers in particular. On the other hand, due to the very atomization of the traditional society under neo-liberal notion of individualism a larger section of people in our society strongly feel that their very identity as individuals belonging to a community is severely threatened if not almost destroyed.

To revive a Jathika Chinthanaya then is to revive the ethos of Buddhist Humanism in the face of the competing ethos of liberal individualism. As we noted earlier, Buddhist humanism takes as the good life for humans a life that enables us to exercise discerning judgment in our conduct. Cultivating the capacity for discerning judgment among citizens as the good life, requires reviving the collective discourse on the good life, which in turn requires us to focus on the need to revive a vibrant public realm, the common space where citizens can actively participate in conversations on their understandings of what is the good life for humans, as the Jathika Chinthanaya, to its credit, has been doing so far, in general. Such a public realm can be revived only if we strive to keep our public life free of all authoritarian tendencies, whether they emanate from the Right or the Left, which requires citizens to sacrifice the freedom to seek an active public life, whether the sacrifice is for the sake of market economy or a state-centered national economy.

We cannot deny that there is a collective responsibility to help improve the living standards of the deprived sectors of society. However, bringing the economic issues to the foremost place in collective life pushes the discourse on the good life out of the public realm and together with that the possibility of reviving a truly national ethos, unless of course we believe that the good life is only the good economic life.

Hence our suggestion that if we are interested in reviving a truly a national ethos, our political focus ought to be on the discourse of the good life for humans rather than the economy.

III The challenge: to imagine a new citizens’ democracy
If we agree on the above premises, then, given that we live under a liberal democracy, the political challenge we Sri Lankans face today is to imagine a form of collective political organization that would assure the freedom of the individual derived from being an active member of the collective life, and not the freedom in the marketplace, thus restoring the possibility of a stable strong identity to people while making them free at the same time. It is such a political organization that could give us a common identity preserving the commonality of society above a plurality of fragmenting linguistic, religious or ethnic identities.

Historically, we know that imagining such a form of collective life was made possible in the West by the example of Athenians in the democracy of ancient Greece. The principle involved was that the state or the polity was the manifestation of the collective ethos and its public, political life, not taken to be the administrator or the management of the economic affairs of the citizens which truly belong in the private sphere. All those who qualified to be citizens (judging by the standards accepted then) had the opportunity to actively participate in the governance of the collective life and in acting as citizens they achieved their freedom and thereby a stable identity.

That we Sri Lankans are also heirs to our own traditions in this regard and that we have already begun to imagine the possibility of such an alternative form of political life to that of either aristocracy or the majoritarian representative democracy which is still based on a notion of ruler and subject, is evident from the political discourse associated with the current presidential elections, where concepts such as Jana Sabha or Grama Rajya are discussed as possibilities. It is encouraging to see that the ideas of developing a strong sense of citizen, of devolving power to the level of active citizen participation at the local level of the gama or the village have already entered our political discourse with the current Presidential election.

However, we need to go beyond treating such village level institutions merely as a means of devolving administrative powers to the level of gama. We need to begin to imagine them as the basis of a new form of genuine democracy where people become truly free individuals by actively participating in politically governing themselves and thereby having a stable strong identity as true citizens. Instead of a liberal democracy based on the freedom of the individual in the marketplace, however, while not denying that freedom to the individual, we could develop a stronger understanding of democracy and individual freedom achieved within the public realm of politics based on a collective sense found within our own traditions and the best in the Western tradition.

Promoting genuine citizen participation at the level of the gama and building an organization of self-government on that basis in the long run would require us to imagine the possibility of such a form of organization replacing a system based on political parties. Such a vision can emerge into success only from among a truly imaginative public. It is our belief that only by establishing a polity that would enable active participation of ordinary citizens in self-governance, among whom, if at all, a national ethos may have been preserved, that a truly national ethos nourished from the best in our traditions and courageous enough to look forward to build a long lasting common world and a stable future for the next generations, can be revived.

kathika@gmail.com
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Editorial, The Island, 31.10.2005

‘Comfort women’ of politicians

There is much hullabaloo over the abuse by the government of the state media. The Opposition is demanding that it be stopped forthwith and has sought the assistance of the Polls Chief for that purpose.

The state media has always been in the same predicament as a damsel trapped in a brothel run by thugs. Pimps and thugs may change or rotate from time to time but she is left with no alternative to forced prostitution. She has to do as she is asked to do, willy-nilly. The state media has always been the ‘comfort woman’ of the ruling party.

Fidelity for some people is said to be nothing but lack of opportunity. The same goes for honesty, integrity, justice and fair play etc., of most politicians. The are, irrespective of the parties they belong to, democratic and considerate and their love for the people and the media oozes from every pore of theirs, so long as they are in the political limbo. Put anyone behind a counter, Albert Camus has said, and he becomes all important in no time and develops contempt for others. Similarly, put any politician in power and see him or her for what he or she really is.

An interesting yarn spun by our local Castro (Vasu) while his bitter political enemy President Premadasa was reigning supreme, may be worth repetition as regards the abuse of the state media in the past. One of his (Vasu’s) friends, according to him, had a dog, which was known for a peculiar habit. Whenever the state television carried news, it would make at least hundred trips between the television set and the doorstep, where it used to lie in comfort. Puzzled, the bearded firebrand had inquired from his friend why the animal did so, only to be told that its name was Srimath. (To the uninitiated, President Premadasa was reverently called by his lackeys as ‘Srimath Ranasinghe Premadasa.’ And every time the word Srimath was mentioned, the poor animal responded, thinking that it was being summoned!)

All political leaders are notorious for their insatiable desire to hear their own voice like a donkey its braying and the state media has taken upon itself the task of harassing the public by relaying the shrill noises its masters make. This has happened in the past under the PA and the UNP, is happening under the UPFA and it will happen, whoever comes to power in the future.

Does this mean that the private media is perfect? Let’s not deceive ourselves! If it is truly independent, then how come some of those who work therein find El Dorado in the state media after an election? See how many free media tub-thumpers have ended up in politics and obtained tickets from the parties of their choice to contest elections. Those media pundits have in the process dropped their fig leaves and stand stark naked! Had they been independent and impartial during their ‘private media days’ would they have been rewarded in this manner by politicians? They have, just like their state media counterparts, reduced themselves to a set of ‘comfort women’ of their political masters.

Sri Lankan politicians are, on the other hand, no believers of free media. Free media to them are those which help them further their interests. They are true believers of Bushism–either you are with us or you are with them–and in their opinion a via media is not possible in the media.

Politicians are the same the world over. In the so-called advanced democracies, the only difference is that they have been put in the straitjacket of strong institutions and are therefore denied the freedom to act according to their whims and fancies. But they are making every effort to break themselves free. Look at Prime Minister Blair, who stands accused of trying to manipulate BBC. His government is said to be behind BBC’s decision to open an Arabic language television channel at the expense of several other language services, allegedly to counter Al Jazeera TV in view of the on going disastrous occupation of Iraq.

We are not short of politicians who advocate the divestiture of state media. But that promise doesn’t survive their forming a government. After being ensconced in power, they conveniently forget their pledges and do more of what their predecessors did.

Divestiture is no doubt salutary in that it is inimical to democracy for any government–especially the ones we are burdened with–to have, at its disposal, partisan media organisations maintained with public funds. But it is not the only condition that needs to be satisfied to ensure free media. It is a culture that cannot be evolved overnight through privatisation of the state media. The responsibility for enabling that culture to evolve lies with media owners and the journalistic community. For the media don’t necessarily have to be state owned for them to be controlled by governments or other interests, political or otherwise.

All what politicians should do to help achieve this goal is to leave the media alone! No amount of their crocodile tears is going to be of any help. They have for the media the same love that a fox has for pullets!