Thoughts from London

Where nothing's sacred anymore
Readers of the fifties vintage might remember Sri Lankan vocalist Bill Forbes who migrated to Britain. A song of his that somewhat inebriated revellers sang with great gusto was one in which he employed an exaggerated sub-continental accent (if there is such a thing) and began "Yohhh to be in Ying ger land, now that summer's here" and went on to praise the virtues of "Yorrrkshire pudding".

How much more truthful it would be to sing, if people still have a voice for it, "Oh to be still in Lanka where nothing's sacred any more." On Thursday The Guardian newspaper carried on the first page of its international section a headshot of President Chandrika Kumaratunga with the caption "Unmoved Sri Lanka's leader ignores protests and extends her term in office for an extra year", with a longer story inside.

What The Guardian missed or ignored, as President Kumaratunga protests, was a significant paragraph from her TV interview, "I can remain as president till the year 2006. But I have no intention to remain in this dirty politics so long," she reportedly told the interviewer.

Unfortunately the reports do not mention the name of the interviewer. But if that individual was not a party hack or a handy prop like the kind of chap who appears in the Milinda Moragoda TV show to pop a silly question or two and fade away, the obvious thing to have asked President Chandrika Kumaratunga when she discovered this- I mean "this dirty politics."

After all she was virtually born into politics. She is the only political leader in the world to have had both her parents as prime ministers of a sovereign country. That dates back to 1956. But her father was in politics long before that. Her mother first became prime minister in 1960 and she herself came to the helm in 1994, first as prime minister and later as president, not once but twice.

So when did she discover that politics was a dirty game? If she had known it all along or much earlier in her life, did she enter politics to cleanse it and has been found wanting?

If she discovered it only after becoming prime minister why on earth did she stay in office without washing her hands of this dirty game and retiring to the tranquillity of Attanagalla, the residential hub of Rosmead Place, or better still to a nice flat in central London, a villa in the suburbs of Paris or even a spacious country house in Portugal?

Surely, now that she controls the state media and can appear in print or any audio-visual media at the drop of a diphthong, it behoves to explain to the Sri Lankan people, not to mention the world at large, why she took her oaths of presidential office twice and decided to contaminate her personal purity by wallowing further in dirty politics.

Anyone else who could go on state television and say politics is a dirty game would have said a plague on all your politics and quit, or said when she was quitting, winning the admiration of the people and the plaudits of the democratic world. But President Kumaratunga, in her wisdom or on the advice of heaven only knows whom, actually says she can remain until 2006, one year more than the country thought she could stay.

In fact, she herself kept it a dark secret until The Sunday Times exposed the unpublicised second swearing-in. Why so, if it was all above board, another question that appears to have slipped the interviewer's mind. It does make one agree readily with the president that politics is a dirty business.

But then some of us discovered that years ago. It does not speak very much for the president's capacity for simple reasoning if it has taken her all this time to realise what everybody and his ayah amma knew.

So then what is she still doing in president's house? Of course there is the stereotyped answer of all politicians repeated like some incantation. They are in this dirty business to save the country from the other lot of scoundrels who wish to make it dirtier.

If the daughter of two prime ministers has, at long last, discovered that politics is dirty, not so the progeny of some politicians who seem to thrive in the business of politics and in the politics of business. Most of all they behave as though they are above the law and their minister- fathers are influential enough to save them from the rigours that ordinary Sri Lankans would be subject to should they behave like common thugs.

How many times have the sons of ministers been involved in intimidation, assault and other offences that would have seen the average person in police custody and probably beaten for it too. How often have brawls and assaults happened in 5-Star hotels and still the same young persons roam around as though these public places are their family fiefdoms or bequeathed to them by the people of this country.

On one occasion Fisheries Minister Mahinda Wijesekera was quoted as saying that "boys will be boys" after his son was involved in an incident. Now it appears that the police want to speak to the same "boy". How long is it to be before these "boys" will stop being boys and grow up into the realisation that being the son of a minister does not provide them with a special dispensation.

That goes for the sons of other politicians too. Minister S. B. Dissanayake's sons are mentioned in news reports in connection with the recent fracas-and this is not the first time either. It was not long ago that some sons of then deputy defence minister Anuruddha Ratwatte were behaving as though they were exempt from the law that applied to the rest of us.

Whether true or not, those holding public office and their families should, like Caesar's wife, be above suspicion. As a result of the ill-mannered and offensive behaviour of a few, all ministers and their families are being tainted and earning the wrath of the people.

Much of this rot started after 1977 when politicians were provided with official bodyguards and firearms. Some of these bodyguards, with the patronage of their political masters, later transformed themselves into the personal enforcers and thugs of the politicians and their families.

Corruption, intimidation, coercion and politicisation have become so endemic and entrenched in the body politic of Sri Lanka that institutions, once valued and revered, are treated today with contempt by an increasingly cynical public.

It came as no surprise when I discovered during my recent visit to Colombo how little respect people had for most politicians and their families, the judiciary, police and even lawyers. Law and order are deteriorating rapidly. The institutions of state are collapsing under the weight of corruption, inefficiency or political manoeuvring. Political hooliganism goes on unabated and is even tolerated. Could such a nation survive? Something is indeed rotten but not in the state of Denmark.

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