‘Sinharaja haircut’ and truth in jest

Tuesday 30th March, 2021

The government is at the receiving end of a hostile social media campaign. This is something ruling party politicians who fail to make good on their promises and exude arrogance have to expect. We saw what befell Donald Trump when he was the US President, didn’t we?

People express their frustration at the political establishment in numerous ways. Some of them tend to be aggressive, but others use humour or satire as a medium to give expression to their pent-up anger, and thus witty political slogans and jokes come into being, as can be seen from a spate of social media posts and cartoons at present.

Political slogans can be described as differently distilled concoctions of humour, satire, cynicism and sarcasm with lampooning thrown in for good measure. In this country, sometimes, pasquinade is also added to the brew to boost its kick. Of them, the ones with more humour than bile or malice tend to have a greater appeal to the public across the political spectrum. They are of tremendous help to propaganda analysts who try to read the public mood.

Prof. Gananath Obeysekere, in his widely-read scholarly paper, ‘Sorcery, Premeditated Murder and Canalization of Aggression’, discusses how Sri Lankans canalise aggression through sorcery. He informs us that people use sorcery to canalise their murderous intentions, etc., into non-violent forms of aggression. Similarly, it looks as if Sri Lankans used humour to canalise their frustration at not being able to take on the high and mighty. They make fun of political leaders behind the latter’s back; some of them even resort to pasquinade, and, more often than not get into trouble. The emergence of the social media has stood these creative minds in good stead, as they can, without responsibility, ridicule those in positions of power.

Even the worst tyrants in the world have become victims of pasquinade, which in most cases border on insults and personal attacks. Hitler was one of them. He became a cult figure thanks to the power of his Nazi propaganda machine with Joseph Goebbels at the helm. The Nazis sought to deify him, but his enemies were equally determined to ridicule him as a weakling; they propagated numerous derogatory claims about him, one being that he had a serious congenital defect in the ‘nether regions’. This aspect of the propaganda war between the Nazis and the Allied Forces gets mentioned briefly in the Taika Waititi anti-hate satire, Jojo Rabbit, a super flick nominated for Oscars. The anti-Hitler propagandists succeeded in having the Nazi propaganda mill expend its time and energy on countering such claims.

In this country, too, powerful leaders who succumbed to the arrogance of powers became targets of creative members of the public and Opposition activists. The late Presidents, J. R. Jayewardene and R. Premadasa, had their opponents cracking many jokes at their expense. Most of them about the Old Fox cannot be repeated in a newspaper. Suffice it to mention one about President Premadasa and his housing programme. His critics said he did not have to build any more houses as every Sri Lankan was going to own more than one house if he continued to be in power; at the rate people were getting killed on his watch, the country would have more houses than people, his detractors kept on saying, much to his annoyance.

Dynastic politics got so entrenched during the previous Rajapaksa administration that someone coined the term, ‘Rajapakistan’, to describe Sri Lanka. Car races under that regime angered the people so much that a political commentator introduced the catchy slogan, ‘unta Lamborghini, apita badagini’—Lamborghinis for the rulers and hunger for the people.

Another pithy one-liner has highlighted the bungling of governance under the current dispensation much better than the Opposition’s entire anti-government propaganda campaign. Reminding the public of the government’s failure to ensure a steady supply of (safe) food items necessary for the New Year festival, and rein in its backers bent on destroying forests, it says, “No turmeric for kokis, no oil for kevun, no rice for kiribath and no trees for koha to perch on.”

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, at a public gathering, a few moons ago, told a group of public officials that his instructions took precedence over government circulars, and they had to follow them. His directives have since come to be dubbed ‘Sir-culars’. When a section of a historical building was demolished with a bulldozer, the Opposition activists carried placards that read ‘Do-Sir’ although the President had no hand in the demolition work.

Some one-liners can be more effective in delivering political messages than all other means of communication put together. Volumes have been written about the environmental degradation under the present regime, and a lot of airtime has been allocated for discussions thereon, but none of them are as effective as this two-word phrase, ‘Sinharaja haircut’, which someone witty introduced as a synonym for a ‘high fade’, or short-sides-and-long-top hairstyle. The head of a person with this particular haircut resembles the Sinharaja rainforest with its outer limits being denuded.

The powers that be had better realise that public resentment is welling up rapidly as evident from the creative anti-government slogans being coined almost on a daily basis, and an immediate course correction needs to be done if it is to avert an electoral setback.