THE CAT LEAPS OUT OF THE BAG

Concluding response to HLD Mahindapala:

Mr HLD Mahindapala has a well deserved reputation for telling it as he sees it. While this may not always be the same as telling it like it is, this time his perception and the politico-ideological actuality coincide. He writes in the penultimate segment of his polemic as follows:

“The issue facing the nation — and, of course, the President — is whether to perpetuate the illegally imposed injustice on the nation or not. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has given the courageous lead in rejecting the 13th Amendment in toto...There isn’t a single vestige in the Indo-Lanka Agreement, whether in its origins, its imposition or in its legacy, that makes it a benign or acceptable formula for all the people of Sri Lanka to come together. It is an Indian solution to an Indian problem. It is divisive, corrosive and destructive. It has never been nor will it ever be the solution. The time has come to jump out of the box and re-imagine a new future. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has taken the first step decisive step in redrawing the road map to the future.” (‘Marxists are like Indians’, Daily News, July 5, 2013)

So, for HLD Mahindapala and his co-thinkers, while there is an issue facing the nation and the President, the lead is being given on this all-important political question by Mr Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. What is more striking is his assertion that “Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has taken the first decisive step in redrawing the road map to the future.”

Thus the lead is being given and what is more, the first step towards redrawing the road map to the future is being taken not by the elected executive President, a politician with four decades experience, but by a highly placed unelected official, however competent in his field of experience and expertise, namely military affairs and their management.

If “the road map to the future is being redrawn”, the question arises, who drew the original roadmap to the future which is being re-drawn by the highly competent official? Furthermore, from where and when did the mandate derive by which any unelected official can take the lead on a political and diplomatic question and go further to re-draw the roadmap to the future?

Indo-Lanka Accord

What, in Mr Mahindapala’s rendition is that lead that has been taken? It is “rejecting the 13th Amendment in toto”. Nowhere has the country’s elected President and Commander-in chief rejected the 13th Amendment in toto.

In fairness to Mr Mahindapala, it must be said that his rendition is given some credibility by the latest interview (Daily Mirror, July 4, 2013) given by the Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, in which devolution is rejected, there seems to be an preference for the national ethnic ratios to be reflected in the Northern province, the BBS is but a reaction to over-assertion by minorities, criminals are to be treated as terrorists, and the Sri Lankan Tamil issue is pretty much said to be none of our neighbour’s or any other country’s business.

It is a helpful discourse in that it is possible to discern the socio-political map of Sri Lanka after it has been ‘re-drawn’ as HLD Mahindapala puts it.

I do not wish to re-hash the arguments and counterarguments I have stated elsewhere, ‘many times and oft’. I do wish to point out though, that the hubris of having defeated the LTTE must not delude us into thinking that we won a war against the source of the Indo-Lanka Accord. We must recognise the limits of our victory. We must also recognise the limits of our power. We must understand that however excellent our Armed Forces are and in whatever way we seek to configure their presence in the North, while attempting to re-configure the North itself, in a worst case scenario, which is not purely imaginary but is an extrapolation of our 1987 experience, we cannot ensure supplies of ammunition, fuel and food, for our island which is highly vulnerable to naval embargo and a no-fly zone.

National security

We seem to be on a collision course with no brakes, while we would do well to avoid the dangerous phenomenon identified by the late Fred Halliday, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the London School of Economics and research professor at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies. He defined it as ‘The Miscalculations of Small Nations’. His case studies included Georgia and more classically Cyprus and he explores “the self-inflating nationalist ideology...with its heady mix of vanity, presumption and miscalculation...miscalculations about the capabilities of one’s own forces and the reactions of others”. (‘Political Journeys’ 2011, p 241-247)

I would also recommend the famous ‘Melian Dialogue’ (that between the leaders of the strategically placed island of Melos and the Athenian envoys) in Thucydides ‘History of the Peloponnesian Wars’.

Finally, since the emphasis is on the rejection of the foreign and the celebration of the national, and since a touch of retroactive intellectual nepotism will not be frowned upon, the volume ‘Crisis Commentaries: Selected Political Writings of Mervyn de Silva’, which contains his prophetic attempts to educate and caution National Security Minister Lalith Athulathmudali on the abiding geopolitical realities that should disabuse us of the notion that we can emulate Israel in our treatment of the Tamils of the North.

Mervyn remarks “...It was the presence of Tamil Nadu, the south Indian state, which forced us to broaden the discussion and our perspective...if the arrival of a 60,000 strong Indian peace keeping force did nothing else, it certainly did compel us to widen the range of inquiry further...a regional perspective is inescapable given the sub-continental cultural matrix and history. At a time when national borders are vanishing, the borders in our own minds need to be erased in the interest of serious inquiry and discussion”. (‘Crisis Commentaries’, 2001: P. 170)