Mahinda Chintana thinking anew

A journalist colleague recently told me there is a terrible dearth in thinking in this country because everybody in the Government refers to ‘Mahinda Chintana’ as if they are incapable of thinking for themselves. Having given that sentiment some thought, it occurred to me that the sarcasm in that statement is only intended towards those Ministers who make a showcase of ‘Mahinda Chintana’ to flatter the President by being excessively obsequious and it is in no way intended to discount Mahinda Chintana from its position as the overall policy of the present Government.

The Ministers should use their initiative within their purview and that is precisely why the President has considered them worthy of being appointed as Ministers but such initiative and advocacy has to be guided by the overall policy document called the ‘Mahinda Chintana Idiridekma’.

However, despite all what is stated in the printed pages of this policy document, the essence of Mahinda Chintana lies in its characteristic open mindedness, especially when it comes to approaching crucial national issues.

Sunimal Fernando recently confessed that when the President requested him to take over the project ‘English as a Life skill’, he made his limited experience on the subject very clear to the President but the President saw that limited conditioning more as an asset than a disqualification.

That is not because the President preferred inexperience to experience but because he wanted a new approach to the problem from a non pre-conceived perspective.

Such is the openness of the Mahinda Chintana and it is because of that non pre-conceived approach to issues that it was able to overcome the most decapitating issue the nation faced for 34 years, terrorism. In overcoming terrorism, Mahinda Chintana in its own wisdom realized that terrorism was driven by certain myths and hence if one is to overcome terrorism, a new approach, devoid of preconceived notions, has to be adopted. It is for this reason that Mahinda Chintana was careful not to use terms like ‘Ethnic conflict’, ‘traditional grievances’ , ‘ political solution’ and ‘military solution’ in its terminology.

It was through the use of such terms that the NGO propagandist like National Peace Council pulled wool over the nation’s eyes to exacerbate the conflict.

For instance, at the time Mahinda Chintana was originally launched in August 2005, pseudo peace activists were vehemently advocating that ‘the only solution to the conflict has to be a political solution and it could never be a military solution’. Jehan Perera initiated tangible action on this and prompted all the Presidential candidates to sign a pledge to say that the ‘candidates do not believe in a military solution’, to prove their commitment to ‘peace’. All the candidates except Mahinda Rajapaksa signed that pledge and as a result Mahinda Rajapaksa came to be known as a ‘Sinhala hardliner’ and a ‘hawk’ in the putative peace jargon. Had Rajapaksa signed that pledge and countenanced that position we would still have been at the mercy of Prabhakaran to bring peace.

The power of a state can not be divided into ‘political’ and ‘military’ for the purpose of its exercise. When a Government acquires state powers it is automatically entrusted with military power in the defence of that state and how and when the Government uses that military power should be a discretionary matter for that Government.

The Government should use the military power to ward off all the armed threats, internal and external, directed towards the State and that is why traditionally the Defence Minister has always been the Head of State. But the NPC however were so subtle in their use of the terminology that they got all Presidential candidates including Ranil Wickremesinghe to promise that they would not use arms against the LTTE in the event of their victory at the 2005 election. Now it is more than one year since the Government was able to see through all that subterfuge and defeat the LTTE decisively and conclusively.

Rumblings are now beginning to be heard again from certain quarters on the need for a ‘political solution.

President Rajapaksa has made it clear that what the country needs is a ‘homegrown solution’ and the Mahinda Chintana has left this solution entirely in the hands of the public. The use of the term ‘political solution’ could be tricky since it could convey the idea that this country has hitherto denied its minorities their legitimate political rights.

Political rights were granted to all citizens in the country irrespective of race, creed and caste way back in 1935 and we were the first in Asia to do so. Hence we should be careful in the use of our terminology for if not we could end up propagating for the Tamil Diaspora.

Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) is now in progress and it is to identify the causes of this problem that the Government has convened this Commission.

Let us therefore be patient for the deliberations of this commission to know whether this problem is ‘political’, ‘racial’, ‘geographical,’ or ‘historical’. The irony of this conflict for the past so many years had been that everybody seemed to know the solution with only a few studying the real causes of the problem. We should not drag this country again back to that era of ‘mythical thinking’.

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