THE DAY AFTER

International Women's Day yesterday was replete with the mouthing of the usual platitudes about women, the glass-ceiling and its impenetrability, and so forth. But, issues of real import to women continue to fly under the radar as usual, particularly because such matters are on delicate issues such as fertility and marriage, where Western societies do not take the lead in artificially keeping media campaigns alive in the collective public mind.

But International Women's Day did remind some of us at least of some real issues. For example, the fact that our gentler values in this country, compared to the West still means that the institution of marriage continues to be intact by and large, with the divorce rate not as high as it is in the United Kingdom for instance, where it is over 40 per cent ...

The misery of single mothers struggling to bring up their kids without support from the menfolk, is something rarely spotlighted in countries such as England on International Women's Day.

Yet, at a BBC forum in Galle some years ago, the London based moderator dared to infer that our values including those of arranged marriages, are primitive! Perhaps she wanted this country's women to wallow in the misery of single motherhood, but no thank you, they'd say.

The other day a group of so called civil society activists has raised the issue of the government's decision to desist from extend funding towards sterilization programmes which were established many years ago in pursuance of a strict state sponsored regimen of family planning.

These people were so retrograde as to express approval for the primitive authoritarian practice of government sponsored sterilization programmes.

Irreversible sterilization is not by any means vogue in any part of the world, but it is odious to advocate the practice in Sri Lanka for instance, where there is a literate population that can engage in more enlightened forms of downsizing the family.

In sum what can be said is that the sensitization to core issues with regard to fertility, marriage etc., are at an abysmal low. Anything and everything is seen through the prism of the possibility of 'regime change' these days perhaps.

All perspective is abandoned in the one task of attacking the elected regime, and we have the hilarious spectacle of so called liberals carrying the torch for the odious practice of irreversible sterilization, because it is rationalized that withdrawal of state sponsorship for such procedure is somehow anti-Muslim! A special prize will be awarded for anybody who can see the slightest basis to this tortuous logic.

It's the government's prerogative to withhold funds from any kind of family planning project. Sterilization is a procedure that has deep-going authoritarian connotations, even voluntary sterilization - because of social peer pressure to conform, for instance, by undergoing the surgical process.

People in this region particularly have not forgotten the Sanjay Gandhi sterilization campaign that hastened the downfall of the Indira Gandhi regime in the 70s. There is nothing liberal or enlightened about sterilization, and as for birth control, those who want to practice it will do so with or without state encouragement.

The Sinhalese majority want to see a shoring up of relative numbers. So what? Those who work in the particular area of expertise, anthropologists or social scientists, have already signaled that the Sinhalese are possibly among the world's many endangered races.

Shoring up majority numbers had nothing to do with Muslim bashing - but it has everything to do with protecting Buddhism in this essentially Buddhist country, and therefore, the accent is pro-Buddhist as absolutely distinct from anti anything else (anti-Muslim or Tamil as the case may be).

Meanwhile, it is hilarious that John Kerry the relatively new US Secretary of State sheds copious tears on International Women's Day for the young woman who was raped on a bus in Delhi and Malala the Pakistani woman who was shot at in Afghanistan by the Taliban. Nobody is condoning these acts which have to be condemned roundly, but where are Kerry's tears for the large number of women killed in US drone attacks for instance, or the women who are raped in the US in large numbers, and are killed in drive-by shootings including one young woman who sang in the choir at Obama's inauguration? Having dedicated days for demographic groups is not a bad thing - but, it's entirely another matter if one does not keep things sane in the process.