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Still Waters by Jayadeva Uyangoda

A tragedy occurred while I was contemplating of writing a rejoinder to my fellow columnist, Professor Rajiva Wijesinghe on university reforms. A student at Jayewardenapura University was brutally killed by a group of fellow students who belonged to a rival student organization. The universities are now subjected to intense public criticism and scrutiny.

Three days prior to the Jayewardenapura incident, there was a similar violent clash between two rival groups of students in the Faculty of Arts at Colombo University, where I teach. In this incident too, the perpetrators had hit the victims with blunt weapons on the head, with the apparent intent of either killing them or making terminal damage to their lives.

In an attempt at mediation, some of us of the teaching staff at Colombo's Arts Faculty managed to defuse the tension through dialogue and prepare conditions to re-open the Faculty. In his address to students when the Faculty was re-opened after three days of closure, the Vice-Chancellor warned of strong disciplinary consequences for those who engaged in violence. Many who thought that the University should not tolerate the position shared by all student political groups that they, students, can break the criminal law of the land and then claim indemnity, appreciated the VC's message. It appeared that the normality and peace was restored at least provisionally. But, we, the teachers, administrators and the large majority of students, resumed our normal work with our fingers crossed, in an atmosphere of uncertainty, not knowing whether clashes would occur again.

Even after re-opening there was a definite logic in favor of violence to break down again at Colombo University's Arts Faculty, The Jayewardenapura tragedy in a way prevented it from happening. In the peculiar culture of violence that has taken roots in the universities as well as outside, the group that was beaten to retreat had every reason to retaliate, to take revenge and restore its pride that was lost in a crucial battle for supremacy. The group in power, yet beaten back in the fight, had to recover and restore its hegemonic presence in the university. For rival student factions, violence is the most effective means to recover and maintain their control, leadership and power. For them, violence pays because they have been using it successfully to manage political affairs in the university. Even to negotiate with the legitimate opposition, they have been using intimidation and violence. At times, the university administration has also capitulated when student groups deployed violence to bully the Vice-Chancellors and Councils. On occasions when the University authorities stood their ground against such violent pressure from below, student groups have successfully short-circuited the system by approaching members of the Cabinet who see university politics linked to their agendas.

There is a particular logic of politics that determines collective violence not only in the universities, but also in our society at large. It is linked to the pervasive notion that politics is all about power, and power is about domination and supremacy. Politics and power understood as domination and supremacy require duress, coercion and violence, and even cruelty. That indeed is the logic we need to rupture, break up and make ineffective in the group relations among our students, social groups, political parties and ethnic communities.

While the blaming game is going on, in the aftermath of Jayewardenapura murder, inside the campuses as well as among national political actors, we need to seriously reflect on how to grapple with the tendencies for violence in individual as well as group relations in our society. Social reformers and political leaders may come out with various theories and approaches as to how to deal with violence. Judging by many that float around, they, if implemented, might lead to greater violence. For example, some policy makers appear to believe in the efficacy of greater control and repression of student political action in managing violence. Steps have now been taken in the university system for the administrations to get tough, without adequate dialogue with all those who have a stake in violence as well as non -violence. The tragedy at Jayewardenapura University as well as the context it occurred tells us many things about collective violence in our universities. Student communities are so polarized in adversarial terms that mutual demonization and de-humanization is a part of the university public culture. They are most creative and innovative in, to use the phraseology of an American scholar who wrote a book on Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict, inventing enmity. Among rival political groups in the universities, there is a political discourse of total exclusion, de-legitimization and animalization of those who do not agree with them.

Competitors for power in university student unions are treated as total and absolute enemies who deserve no sympathy or mercy. I have myself witnessed how university students have mercilessly beaten up their own batch-mates and class- mates.

Meanwhile, it is no secret that student unions in the universities are infiltrated into and manipulated by political parties. No amount of denial or claim to innocence can absolve the national political parties from the responsibility of brutalizing university student politics. Student unions in our universities are mini-editions, or mini incarnations, of what the PA, UNP, the JVP and the LTTE have been all about during elections, in parliament and at war.

When I visited the house of Samantha Vithanage, the slain student, some people gathered at the funeral house told me that the perpetrators had cheered loudly expressing their joy when Samantha fell unconscious after the blows to his head. Another story I heard was that when Samantha was lying unconscious on the ground, a student leader hit Samantha's head with a heavy computer monitor. A third story says that when the seriously injured and unconscious victim was being transported to the hospital, the perpetrators stopped the van at the university gate, cheered loudly and deliberately delayed him from being dispatched for treatment. The latest story going around is that 'Samantha himself was not all that innocent." There is a section of the public who seem to rationalize and justify the killing of Samantha Vithanage.

These stories reminded me of many incidents of violent killings I have heard in Sri Lanka in recent years. If I may refer to two representative and paradigmatic political killings in the recent history of Sinhalese society, they have a remarkable semblance with those stories about Samantha's killing. When Vijaya Kumaratunga was slain in March 1988, the killer, bursting with joy, reportedly opened fire at Vijaya's face. Vijaya by then was lying unconscious and probably dying after the first round of shots fired from a deadly automatic rifle at close range. When Rohana Wijeweera was killed on November 13, 1989, his death too, as I heard from informed sources, provided immense joy to the killers. Stories of Wijeweera's last moments are as horrendous as those of others whose tragic deaths he himself inspired. Meanwhile, the stories of political assassinations by the Tamil militant groups, particularly by the LTTE, also tell us a lot about a particular pathology of violence and death in violence, that appear to define who we are in Sri Lanka. As all these stories illustrate, killing for political reasons has become an elaborately ritualized enactment and re-affirmation of enmity. The joy of killing is a mere expression of that political pathology of violence.

Thus, the brutal killing of Samantha at the hand of his fellow undergraduates, his bothers from the same social class, has brought to surface one of the darkest sides of the political and social relations on contemporary Sri Lankan society. It tells us how the idea of politics and power has been brutalized at national as well as micro institutional levels. De-brutalization of politics, and not banning or outlawing of politics, is perhaps the answer.

Banning politics, as some smart policy makers might rush to embrace as a good policy measure, will further brutalize an already brutalized public culture of politics in our universities. What we need is an understanding of the whole idea of politics anew and afresh.

The other day, the day after Samantha Vithanage was buried, I was teaching Aristotle to a group of my undergraduate students at Colombo University. I was explaining to them the Aristotelian notion of virtue of the citizen and the Aristotelian commitment to active, alert and engaged politics in the public realm through word and deed. To illustrate the Aristotelian influence on the twentieth century political philosophy, as well as its relevance to our own life word, I introduced to them the writings of Hannah Arendt. I ended the class with a quotation from Hannah Arendt's 'The Human Condition': "To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence. In Greek self-understanding, to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people."

In Sri Lanka, at least for several decades, and particularly during the twenty year war, our society has internalized, naturalized and normalized 'prepolitical ways to deal with people," through force and violence and not through speech (lexis) and action (praxis). Brutalization of the political world has weakened the human capacity for collective action in the public realm, whether it is in the University Student Assembly or in the national legislature across the Diyawanna Lake. In Hannah Arendt's understanding, politics and the political realm rise directly out of acting together, the 'sharing of words and deeds.'

Politics is the space where people gather together, to act in concert and for a common purpose. It is where human plurality manifests itself, because the reality of the world is guaranteed only by the presence of others, in plurality. But plurality is what many of our political actors, from Presidency and Parliament to University Student Assembly, do not seem to comprehend.

In the universities as well as in national politics, we need to de-brutalize political relations among ethnic, social and group as well as personal relations. That requires a radically new and essentially humanistic conversation. A humanistic political conversation will in turn require new categories for thinking, a new language of political imagination and new images to understand, relate to, make sense of, and practice politics. This is where a new beginning has to begin.

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