Let’s Have Fun Today

By Kumar David

Life is depressing; the media perpetually serious; Lynn Ockersz solemn in “Impact of security on foreign policy” ( https://island.lk/impact-of-security-considerations-on-foreign-policy-crafting/. Inflation we are warned may rise to 60%. Come on, let’s take a day off, let’s have fun!

I admit to coveting a Jonathan Swift like glee to satirise for the delight of my readers, but my take is not that absurd. I am also a fan of Samuel Johnson’s quip that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” though in these parliamentary times we need to add politician to scoundrel. We carry passports to cross borders not because of nationalist zeal but practical reasons. If your parents copulated on the right bank of the Indus you are obliged to loathe Indians, if they took a ferry a few hundred yards across the river and satiated their lust on the other bank, you have to despise Pakistanis. What diabolical hypocrisy!

Here is my solution to all our nationalist ills and travails, and it’s not all tongue in cheek; I have Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift and Albert Einstein on my side. My thesis invokes donating, leasing, gifting or abandoning parts of our fair Isle as follows.

Lease the Northern and Eastern Provinces to Tamil Nadu for an agreed period. Imagine the relief! No more Thamil Eelam, LTTE talk or Sun God worship. For the Tamil Nadu situation see ‘Rajiv Gandhi Assassination’, New Dawn Press, ISBN 1 904910 04, by D.R. Kaarthikeyan who tracked the murder, prosecuted and secured convictions. (My comment is not to be confused with the deadly serious Leninist concept of the ‘Right of Nations to Self-Determination’)

In line with current practice grant the Chinese a 99-year lease on the whole Southern Province on condition they agree to drown all surviving Paksas far out to sea south of Hambantota.

Hand over the Central and Uva Provinces to Scotland for 50 years. The Scots not the English developed the tea plantations – remember upcountry names Dunsinane, Aberdeen, Caledonia, St Clair’s, Hatton, Dalhousie and dozens more. Older middle- and upper-class folk speak ever so fondly of colonial times (“We did not know who was Sinhalese, Tamil or Muslim; “We played as one and ran in and out of each other’s homes”; “The government was not so rotten”). They will, one and all, secretly or openly, welcome switching to Scotch, single-malt or blended.

The NCP and NWP can be leased to Switzerland on a commercial basis for 20 years so that the Cultural Triangle and the beaches from Kalpitiya via Puttalam to near Mannar can be made world class tourist resorts.

So far so good. This leaves only the restless Sinhala provinces, Western and Sabaragamuwa, which nobody in their senses wants to have anything to do with. I have a solution. Levy a tax on the other seven provinces as annual payment to any foolhardy foreigner who has the temerity. Japan may have a go if the occupying power is allowed use of unlimited force as during WW2.

You see the problems of a dysfunctional, broke and racial-religious strife-ridden island can be cured if Lankans can be coaxed out of their adolescent measles. My Editor, a man of courage and humour, may find my tongue in cheek proposal to solve our legendary ‘national question’ sailing rather too close to the wind. Is it rash to enrage saffron costumes and Burma-returned white poplin reddhas? But dear reader, please do give my proposals a little thought.

OK, I will get serious and change track to China, a giant where deification inextricably interweaves leader and nation; a condition not unfamiliar in Lanka. For nearly two decades Lanka has been a Rajapaksa fiefdom. At the 2005 election Prabhakaran ensured Mahinda’s victory over Ranil (with a mere 50.3% of the poll) by ordering Tamils not to vote for the latter. Then he had himself shot like a dog on the shores of Nandikadal. Mahinda as demigod is a Prabhakaran construct and the 69 lakhs who voted for Gota an outcome of this favour.

Deification in China destined the distinction between leader and nation to vanish. A constellation of fibs turned into gospel truth, fake science, grossly erroneous Lysenkoism (rejection of Darwin, Mendel and genetics), absurd notions of extending class-struggle to close crop-planting and deep-ploughing (plants, like the proletariat we were told, bond tightly and deeply!). Cross-breeding rabbits and pigs and farming half-melon half-papaya fruit as per Lysenko’s notion that environment not genetics is all pervasive was the game.

Such are the screw-ball theories that manifested themselves in Party factions. Reliable sources claim the Great Helmsman was suffering multiple personality disorder by the time of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962). I remember Prof. S. Mahalingam, one of Lanka’s finest old-school engineering researchers, teasing an ardent young Maoist lecturer in the corridors of the Peradeniya Faculty about backyard furnaces. With a rolling motion of his palms and a twinkle in his eye he inquired “Dr X do they make ball-bearings like this from cast iron in China?” Steel output in 1957 using conventional methods was 8 million tonnes but the ridiculous target set for 1960 using backyard furnaces was 22 million. Most of it crumbled like sundried animal dung.

Only two leaders consistently fought Mao’s extremism which led to 30 million famine deaths and cannibalism in a self-inflicted calamity. The great opponents were Marshal Peng Dehuai, Commander in Chief of Chinese Communist forces during the Long March and Defence Minister of the PRC after the revolution, the other was Liu Shaoqi. Both were murdered in prison by pro-Mao party cadres. The other leaders (Deng Xiaoping, Chou Enlai, Zhao Zemin, Hu Yaobang) ducked the pre-Great Leap forward struggle.

While millions died in the famine fake figures of bumper harvests were issued. The moral of the story is very pertinent to Sri Lanka; if you allow a leader to become a demigod the distinction between leader and nation disappears. The reflection of this is 69 lakhs of buffalos. The lesson for current times is do not allow Ranil to overstep democratic spaces, restrain him within constitutional legitimacy and prevent renewal of this unwarranted State of Emergency.

There is a second lesson and like the first the scale is 1000 to one. It is the abuse of science. Mao’s psychosis invaded scientific space. We see something similar though on a tiny scale in Gota’s hilarious fertiliser “policy”, ignorance of renewable electric energy and his dumbo treatment of medical experts on how to deal with Covid-19. As for witchcraft, amulets, ghosts, goblins and the likes of Gnanakka, he is the same as Mahinda. Neither has taken an elementary course in science, they are dumb about technology but these dolts made science, technology and environmental policy.

A third lesson from Maoist China with obvious overtones in Sri Lanka is that plans to modernise the nation, rationalise the economy, extend industries, build elevated railways and roads, simply to do things in a sensible and rational way, were undermined by political instability which undermines rational decision-making. Decision making in China went bonkers after Mao’s illness reached a clinical stage. On a smaller scale we see the same during the Mahinda-Basil-Gota regime. The overthrow of Gota by aragalaya, a great service to Lanka, has had a side effect. A few enthusiastic activists are encouraging instability now when the economy appears to be picking up and prospects of IMF and foreign financial support seem to be improving. They must reassess their theories.

[For a study of the Mao-famine, “Hungry Ghosts” by Jasper Becker, a British journalist who spent 17 years as Beijing Bureau Chief for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post is a good starting point for researchers willing to ignore Becker’s anti-communist, anti-Marxist biases and use the book cautiously as a study tool. That Becker is an anti-communist will be obvious to any reader and quotations without citation of sources should be handled with care unless the information is well known or backed by good references. The book includes a useful Bibliography, an Index and Biographical Sketches of all the important leaders of the period. Publisher Holt and Company, New York.