Development challenges
Now that the war is over, the focus is on development.
Numerous have been the calls by the President to all political
parties and the citizenry to rally round to take up the
challenge of development.
Sri Lanka has still a long way to reach the level of a
developed state. Hence the development challenge has to be
addressed urgently and in earnest. We wish to raise certain
issues pertaining to our development challenges.
First of all we should understand what development is. Any
confusion on the matter would result in the country drifting
along aimless whatever plans and projects are implemented. In
fact, the question was never raised in the immediate aftermath
of independence. Then it was just carrying on the same colonial
type of economy with a few Ceylonizations.
The comprador bourgeois and the landed gentry were happy
enough serving the former colonial masters, allowing them to
plunder our wealth and importing even the essentials from
abroad. The policy of servility was seen not only in the sphere
of economics and politics, culturally too it was subjugation to
the culture of the colonial masters.
It was the upheaval of 1956 that ushered in an era of
cultural renaissance and a far greater measure of independence
that culminated in the Republican Constitution of 1972 when Sri
Lanka became fully sovereign.
In the fundamental relations that defined the character of
the economy and in turn its politics, it was still a case of
dependent capitalism. The congenital defects in the system
arising from the superimposition of capitalist relations on a
semi-feudal society and the supplanting of emigrant labour on a
plantation culture that heavily depended on pre-capitalist
relations ensured the dominance of foreign capital.
However, the opening of the country to the then existing
socialist world and the competition between the two systems made
it possible for the country to start off on the building of a
local industrial base and fortify the nascent national
bourgeoisie.
This spring was however, short-lived. With the failure of the
closed economic policies and the weakening of global socialism
the path was laid open for the aggressively developing
neo-liberal capitalism to embrace and engulf Sri Lanka
completely turning turtle many a victory achieved by the people
during years of struggle. The poor and marginalized were
deprived of the safety nets that were secure earlier and a
frenzied privatization process transferred the wealth from the
poor to the rich at an alarming rate.
Now 30 years after, the jubilant triumph of neo-liberalism in
Sri Lanka and elsewhere it has now suddenly crashed dragging
global industrial and financial giants like Ford Motors and
Lehman Bros into bankruptcy. It is an irony of history that the
first decade of the 21st Century which Western prophets
described as an era where Communism would have been laid to rest
for ever witnessed the decay of the Western empires and the
ascendance of Communist China as a super-power on the world
stage.
Sri Lanka, in the meantime was gripped with violent terrorism
and a civil war for three decades and it is just a few days ago
that it became really free. Not only was it freed from terror
but also it was freed from being vulnerable to external
intervention and threats to its sovereignty.
We have to develop a strategy for development in the context
of this geo-political and national reality. Besides, there is an
over-reaching concern in today's world on a much more universal
and much more critical issue, viz., climate change. If not
tackled in unison it is formidable enough to make life on Earth
extinct.
Incidentally it is the very development model followed by the
majority of the countries of the world, principally of the
so-called First World that has brought this calamity to the
doorstep of humanity. This development has never been
sustainable. Nor has it been equitable.
A handful of the rich countries have been consuming the
resources of the Earth in the most extravagant and selfish
manner, expropriating to themselves the riches of the majority
whom they have subjugated at the point of the bayonet and the
cannons.
It is in this context that development as measured hitherto
in economic indicators such as the Gross Domestic Product or the
per capita income has become meaningless. Any development, to be
meaningful should be sustainable and ensure equity in
distribution of wealth within countries as well as among
countries. |