Getting a grip on ‘fear psychosis’
‘There is an atmosphere of fear and lack of freedom in Sri Lanka,’
Chandrika Kumaratunga is reported to have said in Kerala recently. She
says that even though ‘it is a government of (her) party in power,’ she
doesn’t feel safe. Implying of course that people who are not members or
supportive of the party in power would feel even less safe.
The war may be over but a country that has suffered for three decades
would be silly to let down its guard immediately after the tyrant has
been vanquished. There are also arms and ammunition, bombs and claymore
mines being unearthed. The need for vigilance has not disappeared. There
are still check-points in the city. There is no absolute freedom in Sri
Lanka, she is right.
She is also right about ‘fear’. ‘Angulana’ happened. An SSP’s son
turned thug and beat the living daylights out of a fellow-student. Other
‘unacceptables’ have taken place. So, no, Sri Lanka cannot be described
as a land without fear.
We live in times where the ruling party is so popular and the
opposition so weak that candidates running for office at the Southern
Provincial Council election have had to limit themselves to attacking
fellow-candidates.
Few among those who are in the fray can be tagged ‘blameless’. Many
are veterans at the rough-and-tumble of regional politics and not averse
to do the by-any-means-necessary to secure more preferential votes.
There have been clashes. Threats have been tossed around. I am pretty
sure that none of the candidates feel absolutely safe. Even though they
belong to the same part and this party happens to be in power.
Chandrika Kumaratunga is just another citizen. She used to be the
President of this country. She has been in politics for decades. She
comes from a well-known political family. She was the leader of one of
the two strongest parties in the country. She should know what she is
talking about. But does she, though?
She must remember the process through which common criminals ended up
as powerful members of the Presidential Security Service. She must
remember one Rohana Kumara. She must remember all kinds of limitations
knowingly imposed on basic freedoms. She would not, I am sure, have felt
that she was enveloped by an atmosphere of fear. She had too much
security to indulge in such ‘fantasies’, one can reasonably surmise.
There is a lot she can remember and consequently an equal quantity of
things she can forget, but there’s one thing that even if she chooses to
forget, the public cannot: the atmosphere of fear generated by the LTTE
and the limitations on freedom consequent to this. There was a real
threat (she knows this first-hand, thanks probably to over-confidence
regarding invincibility and horrendous lapses in security).
There was a time when you got into a bus or a train or walked into a
crowded street and could never say with any degree of conviction that
you will definitely go home at the end of the day.
That was a time of suicide-bombers blowing themselves up in crowded
places. That was a time of bombs exploding in your face, literally, in a
bus stand, a railway station; of terrorists descending on sleeping
villages and massacring innocent people in cold blood.
That, ladies and gentlemen, was most certainly a time of fear. Real
fear. BIG fear. And how did Chandrika Kumaratunga go about alleviating
this fear? She talked, shop with the source of this fear - the LTTE. She
went around telling her people that the LTTE could not be defeated;
essentially making a case for surrender.
That was also a time when national assets were being bartered in the
international market; a time of shady deals and an abject deference to
things ‘foreign’. It was a time when one could legitimately fear for the
sovereignty of the nation.
And so I am intrigued by the term ‘atmosphere of fear’. I think it is
airy. I don’t know which kinds of landscapes Chandrika Kumaratunga
prefers to visit in order to breathe, but I do know that quite a number
of people are relieved that the LTTE, as a fighting force, is no longer
a threat to worry about. For four full months, we have not had a single
suicide attack or any other attack on civilian targets. If anything,
what we are experiencing right now is the absence of such fear.
Chandrika cannot talk and this is not because there are processes
seriously compromising the freedom of expression. Fear, or driving fear
into heart and mind or facilitating the heightening of fear, happened to
be her preserve.
Given all this, I cannot conclude anything regarding her fears than
the anxiety of not having the power to generate or facilitate fear.
As for those other fears such as the ‘Angulana-fear’ or the ‘Fear
courtesy papa-power’ they are real and should be addressed. I wouldn’t
be surprised if last person anyone would go for help in this regard is
Chandrika Kumaratunga (now that Velupillai Prabhakaran is dead).
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