LESSONS FROM SERENDIB - A model of social achievement, Sri Lanka still lacks pluralism

By Ananda-USA

June 29, 2011

While the author of this article describes some aspects of the achievements made since Sri Lanka regained her sovereignty, he neither recognizes, nor credits, the policies of governance that led to those achievements in Sri Lanka in contrast to policies implemented in India.

First of all, he takes exception to our honoring Lanka with the prefix 'Sri' to indicate its resplendence. We children of mother Lanka recognize and value the special beauty and astonishing bounty of our resplendent island home, more than any others. We honor our country, for it is anointed by the Lord Buddha himself as the permanent refuge of his compassionate teaching. We are also the protectors of the ancient heritage our forefathers created in Sri Lanka, and are committed to make this land shine again. Is it then a surprise that to our minds, Sri Lanka is an altogether proper and fitting name for this Resplendent Land?
  
He then suffers a major  relapse and joins the chorus of ignorant critics of "Sinhala majoritarianism" as if it were alien Martians who, in his own words, "made this country what India might have been if we had got things right." 

He fails to realize that the things he praises in Sri Lanka were created by successive Sinhala-dominated governments. Does he not realize that caste, sex and race discrimination were eliminated by them? Does he not realize that enlightened policies enacted by Sinhala-dominated governments created the highly literate citizenry of Sri Lanka, and opened up jobs in government and industry to all irrespective of community? Enlightened policies made universal healthcare, public transport, and electricity, available to every citizen in equal measure. It is also not by accident that the International Labor Organization (ILO) identified Sri Lanka as a model of fair and just labor relations for developing nations.

He should walk the streets of Sri Lanka, and experience the religious freedoms and cultural diversity enjoyed by Sri Lankans, and test their hearts and minds by speaking with them at depth, before implying wrongly that somehow "Sinhala majoritarianism" denied legitimate freedoms to any segment of Sri Lankan society. He should not confuse racist discriminatory demands by some groups  for special privileges unavailable to other citizens with lack of equity. Sri Lanka does not govern by devolving power on communal bases, as India often does; that is why Sri Lankans enjoy greater social equity than Indians.

Granting political, police and land rights to various groups based on communal considerations of race, religion, language, sex, caste or wealth, as India often does to its ultimate detriment, are not the policies that led to the high level of social equity in Sri Lanka that this author praises. On the contrary, it is the refusal to grant them on communal bases that underpins Sri Lanka's success. Policies geared to creating only ONE COMMUNITY of Sri Lankan citizens irrespective of communal attributes should be preserved, and extended, as the principal means of ensuring peace, harmony, social and economic progress in Sri Lanka.

National Integration through equal citizenship blind to communal considerations should be the path forward, not National Disintegration by allocating different privileges to different people, slicing and dicing the nation into communal fiefdoms.

The National Goal should be the creation of ONE Nation, of ONE People, sharing ONE Destiny. All Government Policies should be geared to achieving that goal.

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By Mukul Kesavan

TelegraphIndia.com
June 29, 2011

 I’ve spent my holiday in Sri Lanka trying to resist the conclusion that this country is what India might have been if we had got things right.

I know this is a lazy comparison, not least because India is so large and Sri Lanka so small. Delhi and its suburban satellite towns add up to 22 million people which is two million more than the entire population of Sri Lanka. On the other hand, if you were to compare India’s national capital region to Sri Lanka, the island nation would come out of that comparison very well indeed. I suppose the better comparison would be with Kerala, which is adjacent to Sri Lanka, roughly the same size, similarly literate and generally more evolved than the rest of India. But even here the Sri Lankans come out ahead: they have (or had) a world-conquering cricket team; Kerala has Sreesanth.

I’ve always known in a distant way Sri Lankans live longer than Indians do, are vastly better educated and that their country ranks nearly 30 places higher than India does on the United Nations Development Programme’s human development index. But this abstract superiority hadn’t prepared me for a) the general absence of squalor and wretchedness in Sri Lanka b) the all-round loveliness of the place and c) the civility and courtesy that marked my transactions as a tourist.

To start with, the immigration official at the airport gave me a visa and waved me through in less than a minute. The squinting plain-clothes policemen in Delhi who pretend to be immigration officers take a lot longer letting me back into my own country. Inside 15 minutes of landing, I was in Ceylon.

Yes, Ceylon. I was a teenager when this country changed its name and early socialization makes it hard for me to think of it as Sri Lanka. Radio Ceylon played Hindi film music non-stop at a time when All India Radio, in a hissy fit of high culture, banned its broadcast, so my memories of the discarded name are good. Besides, Sri Lanka doesn’t sound right. As the name of a slightly self-important person, yes. As the name of a nation, no. Why not just Lanka? Think of the Indian republic amending its Constitution to rename itself Mr India. Or Sriman Bharat. An honorific built into a country’s name? What were they thinking?

We travelled north from Colombo to Habarana to visit Anuradhapura and Sigiriya, two of the oldest sites of Sri Lankan Buddhism. In the course of a five-hour road journey, a few things stood out. First, the landscape was continuously lovely in a lush way that North Indians like me are unused to. Paddy-fields, palm trees, pineapple stalls, lagoons and little houses with tiled roofs and pillared porches, unspooled mile after mile, hour after hour. It was a little like Goa on a grand scale. The villages and little towns we passed through seemed to take the highway for granted, so they weren’t rimmed by dhabas and truck repair shops and rickety hoardings and assorted ugliness.

The non-stop prettiness of the journey became a kind of provocation. I began to look for the brokenness and poverty that I see as South Asia’s signature qualities. We stopped for lunch at Kurunegala, a little market town. The open-air restaurant overlooked Kurunegala Lake, one of the dozens of lakes that made the Sri Lankan landscape ridiculously beautiful. I walked around its edge, actually looking for plastic bags and the other detritus of tourism, but it was all perfectly clean. It was then that I realized that I didn’t have to selectively process the world around me to edit out squalor. The tourist route, at any rate, didn’t seem to do squalor.

The other remarkable thing about the world we drove through was the systematic and visible presence of the State… in a good way. In every other substantial village that we passed we saw solidly built, tended structures with clearly painted signs that indicated they were early learning centres or training institutions or small government hospitals and everywhere we saw boys and girls in the white uniforms common to all government schools in Sri Lanka. Tiny towns had substantial local assembly buildings. The welfare State in Sri Lanka, even to a casual tourist’s eye, isn’t an aspiration, it actually exists.

This Sri Lankan talent for not allowing the built world to crumble has some paradoxical results. Anuradhapura, the country’s ancient capital and home to its oldest and most venerable Buddhist sites, is at least 2,000 years old. Many of its stupas or dagobas, are so old that they make Banaras’s built heritage look recent. The Abhayagiri Dagoba, for example, was first built in the 2nd century BC. While it’s understandable that the toll of time, the vandalism of Indian invaders and the need for renovation have led to modifications of the original structures, the zealousness of the restoration is sometimes excessive.

For example, the Ruvanvelisaya Dagoba, like Abhayagiri, was built in the 2nd century BC. Except that it has been whitewashed with such municipal zeal that it looks as if it had been built yesterday.

To the tourist, Buddhism seems everywhere. There are splendid seated and standing statues of the Buddha on streetcorners, on lakesides, on hill-tops, generally painted a serene white. We passed through villages decked out with ribbons and banners for a Buddhist festival, our car crept behind Buddhist processions, the lifts in one magnificent seaside hotel, Mount Lavinia, announced special vegetarian meals for Poya, the full-moon day which is sacred to Buddhists and is marked every month as a public holiday.

It isn’t hard to empathize with Ceylon’s post-colonial impulse to invoke a Buddhist past as the foundation of the new nation. To the political leaders of a small island nation with an ancient and unbroken Theravada Buddhist tradition, off the southern tip of a sub-continent marked by the massive presence of both Hinduism and Islam, it must have seemed reasonable to consolidate a Sinhala Buddhist republic. Travelling through Sri Lanka I can see how attractive the idea of a culturally homogeneous nation can be, and how homogeneity can begin to seem to mean not uniformity, but a kind of harmony.

It doesn’t, though. The promise of the idyllic, organic homeland is always a lie, even in Serendib. I didn’t travel to the north of Sri Lanka so I can’t comment on the state of the Tamil country, but history has taught us that everywhere in South Asia, even in this island Eden, majoritarianism has always led to violence and pogrom and civil war.

If, after the end of the civil war, there has been any attempt to replace Sinhala majoritarianism with a more inclusive pluralism, it isn’t evident in the country’s newspapers. All the commentary about Channel 4’s documentary, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, denounced it as biased, fraudulent and intent on discrediting President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government. It’s possibly too early for the Sinhalese majority to rethink the nature of their State; the end of the civil war and their army’s victory over the monstrous Prabhakaran are too close to them. But it must happen and those of us who see in Sri Lanka’s social achievement a model for the rest of South Asia must hope it happens soon