Mervyn de Silva’s 10th death anniversary falls today:
Mervyn de Silva and the Lankan condition
Dayan JAYATILLEKA
Father’s Day this year falls on the eve of the 10th death anniversary
of my father, Mervyn de Silva, journalist and editor, literary critic
and satirist, broadcaster and commentator on world affairs, or as
Godfrey Gunatilleke put it in a sixth anniversary revaluation, “literary
critic, intellectual, political analyst and media communicator all in
one”.
The founder editor of the Editor’s Guild of Sri Lanka, the award
instituted in his name by the industry is the pinnacle prize of the
annual Journalism Awards ceremony.
First memory
Mervyn de Silva |
My first memory of anything was the perspective from the playpen, of
my father alone at the dining table, in trousers and vest, typing, while
my maternal grandmother watches us with a smile.
My last memory of him was seeing him die, through a glass door,
clearly, at the Intensive Care Unit of a Colombo hospital. Hours or days
later I walked back into his study and saw his typewriter, stubbed out
cigars, well thumbed volumes of Walter Lippmann and I.F. Stone, the
empty chair.
“Aren’t you going to write anything on your father for the
anniversary? Why not say how he might have viewed this time, after the
war?” suggested Sanja, my wife, gently. So here I am 10 years after and
10,000 miles away, typing.
He died just before he turned 70 and the world moved into the new
century, millennium and (perhaps) paradigm. Had he been alive he would
have welcomed Barack Obama at least as enthusiastically as he did JFK.
What would he have said about the moment that Sri Lanka has arrived at
today? Is it possible for us to extrapolate what his insights might have
been from a recollection of what he wrote and said?
He would have written about the war, its aftermath and future
prospects; the Rajapaksa Presidency; Tamil politics; the serious
challenge to Sri Lanka’s external relations; the erosion or squandering
of her “soft power” resources; and the structure of the international
information order as revealed by the coverage of the closing stages of
the conflict.
He described himself as a liberal and a humanist. He was both these
things but not of a sort that shied away from the subject of warfare. He
would have been a shrewd observer of the epic endgame of the Eelam wars.
He would have done so with no trace of enthusiasm for either side but
empathy for both, as would a literary critic with a grasp of tragedy or
a masterful cricket commentator like John Arlott. Though his early
columns such — as the series of exposes on his boarding school — were
cathartic and savagely satirical, in his mature middle years Mervyn
(unlike his son) kept his passions restricted to the precincts of his
private life and outside the boundaries of his published writing.
As Neelan Tiruchelvam told me, someone who did not know Mervyn could
read his writings without once guessing which ethnicity, nationality or
religion he belonged to. That is the objectivity, maturity of attitude
and consummate journalistic professionalism he would have brought to
bear on his comments on the Rise and Fall of Prabhakaran and the Tamil
Tigers.
Influence
Mervyn de Silva, would, however had little patience for Colombo’s
critics of the Rajapaksa administration. It was Prof. Michael Roberts
who resurrected his three-part defense in the Ceylon Observer in 1967 of
the SWRD surge of 1956 and its successor project of a broad united front
of the centre-left (which crystallized the next year at Bogambara with
the inclusion of the Communist Party).
That essay contained a relentless critique of the effete “aesthetic”
aversion of the attitudinally almost indistinguishable Westernized Right
and orthodox Left, to the stirrings of the Sinhala rural masses couched
as they were in cultural and linguistic terms. My support for President
Rajapaksa flowed directly from the influence of my father.
As I told him in the days he became the Leader of the Opposition, at
a party at Galle Face Courts hosted by a young journalist Farah Mihlar
(now a London based, occasional Guardian blogger) at which Gen Sanath
Karunaratne was also present, I would support him fully, not least
because I had no emotional option but to do so since I knew that was
what my father would have wanted.
When Mervyn died many politicians had paid their respects, beginning
with Thondaman Sr, but three had actually committed their appreciation
to print that year: Sarath Amunugama, M.H.M. Ashraff and Mahinda
Rajapaksa.
The Rajapakse article appeared in the Daily News and recalled his
presence as youthful observer at political discussions between Mervyn
and his uncles George and Lakshman Rajapaksa, Mervyn’s friends and class
mates. He also recounted Mervyn’s and his convergence in solidarity with
Palestine and the PLO.
As his support for S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, which extended to Sirima
Bandaranaike, and his open uncritical sympathy for Premadasa (long
before my own association with the latter, whom I first met in our Ward
Place flat when I was a school-kid) demonstrated, Mervyn endorsed and
supported political leaders of both mainstream democratic parties who
were left of centre or progressive, in twin terms of sensitivity to mass
aspirations and the cause of the Third World.
In this he was hardly alone, though there were only a clutch of
Westernized Colombo based Sri Lankans with an elite liberal education,
to do so. Most either supported the UNP or the Trotskyist LSSP.
Supportive of the SLFP and broad center-left coalitions, he nonetheless
mourned the absence of a policy elite and coherent moderate ideology for
the SLFP.
The UNP and Left had their ideology and intellectuals, but he
observed that the centrist SLFP did not - a failure which made it
permanent prey to pressure groups of one or other illiberal persuasion.
A rare character
What made Mervyn rare within the liberal or progressive
intelligentsia, was that he was highly sensitive to both radical Sinhala
youth aspirations and Tamil and other minority sentiments and
aspirations.
What made him unique was that while he was prophetic about youth
rebellion and strongly sympathetic to the radicalism of the university
educated rural Sinhala youth, (“an angry young tiger at the gates”, was
the poetically allusive concluding line of a 1969 Royal College lecture
turned title of a Ceylon Observer series) he always kept his balance,
scorning those Westernized fellow travellers of the JVP as seeking to
regain their lost romantic youth, and dismissing as “grotesque”, the
description of post-1971 Ceylon by Amnesty International’s Lord Avebury
in the Guardian (London) as “an Island Behind Bars”.
Unique also was his combination of the defense of popular peasant
based nationalism and the sovereign State in Sri Lanka and the Third
World, with an explicit warning in his important Daily News debate of
November 1972 with Regi Siriwardena, of the dangers of disregarding or
derogating that of universal value within the Western literary and
artistic canon, in a striving for greater grounding and relevance.
Thus, he balanced an understanding and appreciation of majority
nationalism in Sri Lanka with a warning against too far a swing of the
pendulum. For Mervyn de Silva, the universality of the human condition
was the higher value and loyalty.
Perhaps the most striking evidence of his unique voice was that he
sounded the alarm and implicitly took a stand on the Tamil question long
before others, and after the Old Left, strident in its cautionary notes
of the 1950s, had ironically been in the very vanguard of generating
Tamil secessionism and youth militancy through its fashioning of the
1972 Constitution which it regarded as crowning achievement and acme of
progressivism. Mervyn’s explicit early warning (and it wasn’t his first)
came in a Ceylon Daily News editorial of July 1, 1972, titled “What’s up
in the North?”, several weeks after the new Constitution was promulgated
ignoring the six point letter sent to the framers and fathers by
Chelvanayagam and the Tamil parliamentary leadership, and Prabhakaran
had picked up the gun, commencing a cycle of carnage that lasted close
to four decades. Here are some salient extracts:
Mervyn at the Editor’s Desk |
“...The emergence, however hesitant or faint, of a militant youth
group in the peninsula is a phenomenon about which we have written
before. If the observation is correct, it is a factor of enormous
significance - especially to the Government. It is tempting these days
to make a fetish of youth movements and youth politics.
In Lanka, the temptation is almost irresistible after last year’s
holocaust. In any case, this is not only a young nation but a country of
young people, as the relevant statistics prove. The frustrations of the
educated young Tamil at a time when even science graduates cannot find
suitable jobs do not require much explication.
The fact that these frustrations are universal and that they are
shared by his Sinhala counterpart does not make the Tamil youth’s
psychological load lighter. And if he feels, in fact, that the
educational system and system of recruitment to the public sector have
been deliberately contrived to reduce his chances, he has more reason
for anger. An anger that reaches the limits of tolerance makes
inflammable material for a certain kind of politics. ...A movement of
militant youth rooted in the soil of Jaffna and nourished by material
frustration, a feeling of humiliation and bitterness could be another
kettle of fish.”
New venture
This 1972 editorial tells me very clearly that while Mervyn would
have warmly supported President Rajapaksa, brushed aside his
cosmopolitan and Western critics with some measure of derision, and
dispassionately recorded the dramatic fall and destruction of
Prabhakaran with his tragic flaws of hubris and cruelty which consumed
Mervyn’s friends and acquaintances A. Amirthalingam, Lakshman Kadirgamar,
Neelan Tiruchelvam, and Rajiv Gandhi, he would be posing today the
question of the Tamil condition as key to the Sri Lankan condition and
prospect.
In 1984, Mervyn committed his Lanka Guardian to a venture in
partnership with the South Asia Perspectives Project of the United
Nations University, which brought together some of Sri Lanka’s finest
minds in a search for a solution. The document that resulted, if
implemented, would have pre-empted the externally propelled Indo-Lanka
Accord of 1987. Exactly a quarter century later, its platform of broad
provincial autonomy remains valid and yet dormant and only partially
fulfilled.
To what extent do the causes and condition of collective Tamil angst
and alienation illumined in his 1972 editorial remain, after over three
and a half decades of armed conflict? How will these be addressed, who
by, and when? Mervyn had the knowledge and lucidity not to confuse war
with the issue of ethnic identity.
Unlike many affluent Tamil friends who sympathized with the Tigers,
Mervyn’s knowledge of history would tell him that war, whatever its
character and content, if fought relentlessly to its conclusion, has
winners and losers; that the “rejectionist” type of terrorist or
insurgent movement - such as one which could blow up Rajiv Gandhi and
Neelan Tiruchelvam—make negotiated settlement impossible; and that if
such a movement wagers all or nothing and loses, it ends up with
nothing.
He would know that history does not repeat itself in simple cyclical
terms and that the threat of a renewal of insurgent or terrorist
violence would hold no fears for a first rate, formidable and
ferociously successful Sri Lankan military which has destroyed a world
class irregular armed force on the latter’s own terrain, just as he knew
that no guerrilla or conventional war by any combination of actors could
militarily defeat the Israeli Defense Forces within its ‘67 borders (as
distinct from Lebanon, another country).
At the same time, Mervyn would stress that the issue of the
alienation of the Tamil people and the complex challenge of
accommodating Tamil ethnic identity within the Sri Lankan state and
society, reconciling it with historic Sinhala fears and ancient
memories, emphatically do not lend themselves to a military solution.
In his travels through the Middle East, Mervyn saw (and I was there
with him) how the scintillating Israeli military victories of 1967 and
to a lesser extent 1973 (Sharon’s counter attack) turned into an endless
quagmire because of the policies of permanent displacement,
settler-colonization of the lands of the displaced and the refugees,
increasingly fundamentalist religiosity, annexation masquerading as
antiquarian archeological exploration, and harsh military occupation
with its myriad daily humiliations and lacerating lived experience.
The widely travelled and enormously literate Mervyn was an admirer of
both the American social experiment of melting pot, meritocracy and
individual opportunity as well as of Russian and Chinese ethnic regional
autonomy, neither of which have been adopted or adapted by Sri Lanka.
His understanding of strategy was sufficiently broad and multifaceted
to spur a sustained critique of Lalith Athulathmudali’s narrower
National Security/”Total Defense” mindset, and the Lalith-Mervyn debate
of 1984 (at the YMCA forum I think) was a precursor of the recent
American debate on security between the neo-conservative Bush-Cheney
camp and the liberal Realists including Joseph Nye and Barack Obama.
In his last years Mervyn supplemented Henry Kissinger and (Russia’s)
Georgy Arbatov as staples of intellectual inspiration, with increasing
references in his columns to Prof Joe Nye. Mervyn would have cautioned
that designing the postwar order in Sri Lanka through purely or
primarily National Security lenses, and worse still, attempting to
impose Sinhala over-lordship on the overwhelmingly Tamil North, would
erode Sri Lanka’s standing and legitimacy even among its neighbours,
undermine the national interest and de-stabilize national security
itself.
Had he been around long enough, it would have been typically
Mervyn-ish to write, perhaps as columnist Kautilya in the Island, that
Sri Lanka’s problem is not an ancient, pervasive Sinhala Buddhism, but
an obsolescent, lingering Sinhala Bushism.
(These are the
purely personal views of the writer) |