Wimal Weerawansa -- a true patriot in everything

I always kind of thought Nalin de Silva and his Jathika Chinthana (national visionaries?) chaps were a bit nuts. Now that I'm reading their blog, I can confirm -- they are retarded. I mean, in a good way. the blog is actually kinda funny.

See this post for example, congratulating Wimal Weerawansa for the patriotic act of postponing a meeting. The prize is this comment from anonymous (It isn't me, honest.) :

Eveything Weerawansa does is patriotic, including having sex with his wife/mistress.

We salute you comrade. Now all your young cadre will follow you in your great example of bravery and sacrifice for the sake of our motherland. We as a nation stand greatly indebted to you and your penis.

Update : Couple of people have emailed me, including someone supposedly from the Jathika Chintana proper denying their involvement in this blog. Word is, it's a neoliberal conspiracy engineered by the C.I.A to disrespect our great patriots.

Explainations for Sunday Leader Burning..

Some unidentified masked men burned down the Sunday Leader printing press yesterday, the building was located in a high security zone.

So there can be only two explanations,

1. The security arrangements in HSZs suck so bad that the forces doesn't know until a bunch of goons burn down a building.
   
   
2. Or His Excellency, or one of his brothers gave instructions for (or otherwise blessed) the bonfire.

I'm willing to bet on the latter..

Be Lankan, Buy Lankan but don’t Be Stupid

The editorial of last week’s Sunday Times, was probably the worst socio-economic analysis I’ve read in a long time. The editor seems to be highly taken up by a JVP-inspired campaign which encourages Sri Lankans to buy locally manufactured goods over foreign ones via ‘awareness campaigns for students where they will be taught the importance of eating nutritious home-grown food’

Clearly a campaign only a JVPer, or an equally retarded Leftist could have come up with.

First the writer claims that we should learn from India, one of the biggest and fastest-growing economies. I’d agree, only if he didn’t say ‘Gandhian’ self-sufficiency principles and ‘buy Indian’ campaigns that laid the foundations for India’s growth.

Nothing can be further from the ‘truth’.

The roots of economic success in India’s lies not in any ‘Gandhian’ or even Nehruvian principle but rather in the economic reforms in the early 90’s which saw India’s middle class nearly quadruple and 1 percent of its poor cross the poverty line every year, given the speed at which the Indian economy is growing it would soon surpass Japan and become the third-largest economy in the world.

Sri Lanka was luckier than India, and came into it's senses much earlier and opened its economy as far back as the late 70’s which put us on a path towards prosperity. Ever since we have managed to do reasonably well, and even now Sri Lanka is ahead of India in almost all economic and social indicators, quite an achievement for a country which had to endure a chronic civil war throughout the reform period. What SL would have become without this war can only be left up to the imagination.

In any case, core argument of the article and the ‘buy lankan’ campaign seems to be that Sri Lankans tend to think foreign produce is better than local produce as a matter of principle. I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

Let’s take the insurance for example. Sri Lanka does have quite a reasonably open insurance sector, which allows for 100 percent foreign ownership of insurance companies, yet the leading players in the sector are two Sri Lankan companies. It’s similar in banking. The likes of Asian Alliance and HSBC haven’t been able to just swallow the domestic market because Sri Lankans are not infatuated with foreign goods or companies, they, like consumers all over the world like good products at competitive prices.

Some 3 million Sri Lankans use Dialog as their mobile service provider, not because it’s foreign, but because it provides a decent service, best coverage and good packages. If Tigo provided the same, perhaps people would shift there, as some did when Mobitel offered tempting deals.

The best thing Sri Lankan producers can do to make people ‘buy lankan’ is to make good products and sell them well, consumers would follow. Surely if someone can’t sell their produce without invoking the patriotic card, it must be a pretty awful product. Having said that, I’m fine with this so long they restrict their ‘campaign’ to advertising and ‘awareness raising’; but if they seek legal protection from the state, then that's a slippery slope to hell.

After all the basic premise of tariffs and import controls are quite illogical from a consumer’s point of view, the government (and possibly even the ST Editor!) would consider the consumers as completely rational beings so long as they buy local produce, but if they buy foreign goods, then some authority must step into advise them and say :

“Look here son, you have made an unwise choice here, haven’t you been watching JVP Buy Lanka Commercials? Don’t you read the Sunday times? So now that you have made this mistake we are going to help you to make the right decision by increasing tariffs and taxes, because you obviously don’t have the ability to make these kinds of important decisions.”

I’d say that’s rubbish.

The editorial is well intended, but they say even the Nazis meant well, and that the road to hell is paved in good intentions. If anybody really wants to make a strong Sri Lankan industry which produces competitive products which can compete against global companies then the real things to do are not these superficial campaigns, but to bring in real economic reforms which have been stalled for a while. Slash the red-tape, which makes an entrepreneur wait for 50 days to set up a business in Sri Lanka, bring in labor reform, slash taxes, downsize the enormous state-sector and provide for a good business and an investment climate.

When it comes to economics there are no competing ‘ideologies’. That was last century. The reality is based on market-economics and capitalism. The rest is just fantasy.

For a Sri Lankan Nationalism

Initally posted at Groundviews.

From time to time at various forums and speeches the idea of promoting a single Sri Lankan identity has been put forward as a factor in finding a solution to the conflict in Sri Lanka. Rarely though, these sometimes passionate pleas to build a common Sri Lankan identity have proven to be anything more than lip service, or speech enhancers. Given the historic context of the evolution of the post-colonial Sri Lankan state, and its monumental mistakes of the post-independent era, there is a need to institutionalize or at least put in place institutional enablers which could prosper a common identity.

For lessons in cultivating a common national identity we need not look much further than across the Palk Strait and into the multicultural India. The Indian freedom struggle led by Gandhi and the Indian Congress managed to induce a form of Indian nationalism it seems out of nothingness. India at the time was nothing but a country put together by the British, and therefore the primary source of agitation the congress cultivated was based on ant-colonialism, not religion, ethnicity or language. The congress managed to put together sort of a Noah’s Ark nationalism which glued together India’s diverse population. Unlike in Sri Lanka, where whatever pre-independence multicultural cooperation was soon replaced by Sinhalese chauvinism, the Indian congress went on to create pluralist constitution in India despite the partition and the creation of Pakistan.

Mukul Kesavan, the author of secular commonsense and an opinion writer for the Culcutta Telegraph goes on to great detail on the topic here. I would take the time to just post a relevant extract when he goes on to deduce what would happen had India taken the majoritarian route :

The violence that India as a majoritarian state would have generated can be estimated by looking at a south Asian parallel in miniature, the example of Sri Lanka. In terms of social indicators, Sri Lanka, like Kerala, represents the best of south Asia. Yet, even in this oasis of literacy, female emancipation and all-round loveliness, the absence of a pluralist nationalism led directly to Sinhala chauvinism, Tamil disaffection and chronic civil war. And this in a small island nation with just two substantial ethnic communities: the violence that majoritarian politics would have created in a country as diverse as India, even a divided India, is unimaginable. [link]

It’s worth exploring some of these pluralist characteristics as well as the fallacies of the Sri Lankan state both in its structure and its being which hinder the formulation of a pluralist Sri Lankan nationalism.

Unlike in India the ideological premise for nationhood in Sri Lanka is and has always been Sinhalese Buddhism; and therefore Sinhalese Buddhists are made to feel that they are the sole proprietors of the nation, something which almost naturally results in the alienation of all other minority communities. This supremacy is both constitutionally guaranteed and practiced in earnest by the state and its various branches. Government officers, police stations and most other state institutions operate (for all practical purposes) in Sinhala, the spirit of Vesak is enforced by law, and the most visible monument built for the 2004 tsunami is a Brahmin Buddha statue. This of course is to say nothing of the more violent expressions of the ideology displayed so nakedly in the ’83 riots.

If one thing is clear, the Sinhalese-Buddhist ideology to carve out a Sri Lankan statehood is a failed experiment; to repeat it means to aspire to fit the very definition of insanity. If Sri Lanka is to build a sustainable pluralist nationalism, the state must be made secular. The state should not give precedence to any particular religion or any other cultural, ethnic or linguistic identity.

Another necessary condition is of course, is devolution of power. The current steps in that direction is encouraging, but these efforts should be backed by solid political will which so far has not been forthcoming.

These may not necessarily be pre-conditions for building a true Sri Lankan identity but something which goes hand in hand to formation of such. What may be a pre-condition to induce a true Sri Lankan nationalism is perhaps a ‘national grievance’; almost all nationalist movements was based on such a common grievance; the Indians found it in British colonialism, the Tamils in Sinhalese majoritarianism, and the Nepalese in undemocratic monarchism.

What is then, the truest most universal Sri Lankan grievance? I have no obvious answer. I can only wonder, perhaps if the state can be more accommodative to the minority communities, especially the Tamils, then such a grievance could be borne out of the ‘war’ and the current conflict itself.

The minority communities of this country, especially the ethnic minorities need to see a change of attitudes and practices of the state, and its institutions. They need to see real steps in a direction which ultimately results in equal citizenship and institutional protection both in word and in deed. Only then can we perhaps even speak about creating a true and a sustainable Sri Lankan nationalism.

Without these things, I’m afraid all pleas for a Sri Lankan nationalism or an identity would merely be cosmetic.