No hostage to the past

Asanga Welikala's essay on above carried in the lead article on June 22 is more a thinly wielded attack against the Sinhala Buddhist ethos in Sri Lanka than a tribute to editor/ journalist Mervyn de Silva on his 11th death anniversary. Symptomatically, the writer concludes his 'tribute' by quoting evangelist Reginald Heber's epithet on Ceylon, as country 'where every prospect pleases and only the man is vile.'

This is a hackneyed comment attributed to evangelist missionaries who invaded Ceylon with the Bible in one hand and the gun in the other and it was evident that their purpose in invading this country was to comply with the Papal Bull issued on the King of Portugal to 'dominate and enslave all the inhabitants of the island of Ceylon in the name of Christ'. Hence it would not do any good to the memory of Mervyn de Silva to ruminate on a prejudicial and a revengeful epithet made about the people of Ceylon by an aggressor whose intention was to subjugate and plunder. Naturally when you wish to conquer and enslave another you would always commence that exercise by making your target as derogatory as possible.

Religious tolerance

In any case, in the evangelical perception, the people in India and Ceylon who did not believe in Christ were 'heathens and pagans'. Hence even today for those who wish to uphold the evangelical perspective, the majority in this country are not only 'vile' but also heathens and pagans. This alone goes to say volumes of the pluralism, modernity, religious tolerance and co-existence embedded in evangelical thinking.

The uprisings staged by Sinhala youths in this country in 1971 April and 1988 were spawned by purely economic considerations devoid of racial chauvinism. The vernacular educated youth in this country have undergone humiliation and economic deprivation for years, with no end still in cite, for the simple folly of educating themselves in their mother tongue. It is indeed a pity that genuine national issues of that nature do not receive the focus of elite discussions in this country to the extent that the so-called 'Black July' always does.

Grievance could never be the monopoly of Ceylon Tamils, 'one of the most advantageous communities anywhere in the world' (Mrs Bandaranaike), when the position of the Sinhalese had been discounted for 443 years, out of colonial necessity by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. Recidivism was common to the JVP in the same scale and manner as it was to the LTTE.

Urban voters

"The ghastly intolerance that is associated with the monks in politics requires no retelling" goes on the writer. Well, the monks coming in to politics is a comparatively recent phenomenon in the Sri Lankan scenario and that too was necessitated by the chaotic situation in the country in 2004.

The urban voters in this country too thought it fit to cast an unprecedented 600,000 votes for 60 days JHU campaign to rescue the people and the country that was on the brink of being devoured by the most ruthless terror outfit this world ever knew. The monks had to come forward because the secular rule had miserably failed to identify Prabhakaran for the criminal and demagogue he was. Even the former President Chandrika Kumaratunga called the monks in politics a 'horrible scenario' while accommodating Prabhakaran and his LTTE, in her elite inclinations, to do the maximum damage to the economy and people in this country. Hence even though the writer calls the monks coming to politics 'ghastly', from the national perspective it could not have been more 'timely'.

Cyril Mathew whom the writer dubs a 'Sinhala supremacist' continues to pay the penalty for airing his candid view on injustices perpetrated on Sinhala students by the Diaspora bound Tamil academia in tertiary education. His Parliamentary speeches were full of practical considerations on how even after 25 years of Independence, Tamil racism was working against the interest of poor students from Maha Vidylayas.

The statistics provided by him on the facilities available for students in the North as against the rest of the country is revealing. He presented test papers in which Tamil examiners had given inflated marks to Tamil students in the Parliament in support of his allegations. The irony here is that championing the cause of a disadvantaged Sinhala student is 'Sinhala supremacism' while favouritism entrenched in the colonial nurtured Tamil education establishment could be a 'Tamil grievance'.

Freedom of thought

However, it is a fact that the elite in post colonial Ceylon joined hands with the religious and communal vested interests in this country to demonize the Sinhala Buddhist to prevent the Juggernaut from re-claiming their rightful place in the independent Ceylon. Yet, but Judging Mervyn de Silva by the magnanimity and empathy reflected in his writings, it is unthinkable that he would share the imbalanced sentiments expressed so brazenly by Sinhala elite in the said essay. If we are to avoid becoming a hostage to the past, we should learn our history.

Mervyn de Silva was a class by himself and he could always hold himself against the wider population of this country and needed no communal or class identification to prove that. His hallmark was freedom of thought and intellectualism and he certainly would have resisted attempts by interest groups to hold him a hostage of just one line of thinking! [email protected]