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Dveshaya in the Dharmadveepa
By Carlton Samarajiwa
The Dharmadveepa is sick - like William Blake's 'The Sick Rose' - because "the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm has found out (the resplendent isle's) bed of crimson joy…" Dveshaya (hate) is the howling worm.

"Hate is a driving human emotion. Hate lingers. Hate is not about compromise, but victory or defeat. Hate can break a peace, wreck a government, and tear apart a party. Hate is the hidden something of politics, howling in the night," wrote Peter Preston in The Guardian.

There is, however, in our midst, much fear and loathing, rivalry and ambition, bitterness and hate, and malice. These base emotions have taken root in a country that was taught, "hatred ceaseth not by hatred but by love." The desire of the one who hates is that evil should befall the person towards whom the feeling is directed.

Posters that deface the city walls emit hate in their verbs - diyav, not denna, karapiyav, not karanna, hakulaaganiv, not hakulaanganna, visandum soyav, not soyanna, ganiv not ganna. Some of these posters are seen a few feet away from or facing Buddha statues, which epitomize serenity, maithree and karuna. We shall see more and more of such posters to "herald" the snap elections and later in celebration of victories.

TV talk shows pour out the hate in the minds of protagonist and antagonist into our drawing rooms. There are the hate-filled sentiments expressed by members of the mob assembled at the sacred Bo Tree in Pettah. Last week we saw an angry young man, inflamed with dislike and malice, sucked into the warped world of Sri Lankan politics talk of disembowelling one of the participants on the TV talk show. Hating take up a good deal of talk and action.

At public meetings and rallies, speaker after speaker emits hate through every pore and along every sinew. We shall hear more of them after the nominations have been handed in.

Their worship of power, their deep hatreds, their blindness to innocence are the hallmarks of the terrorist. They are also the hallmarks of some of today's politicians. Mercifully, there are still a few exceptions; there are genial human beings among both old and young politicians, "men for all seasons," whose soft answers even under grave provocation "turneth away wrath."

The depths to which the bestiality and brutality inherent in our nature can take us are unfathomable. But to use the word "bestiality" is to insult the beast.

We shall see more of hating as the dreaded parliamentary elections draw nigh. Let us prepare for more hate-filled eloquence from every platform and TV show where every politician fights for his political survival, never mind the country, the nation and the GCE (AL) examination candidate. Our politicians across the divide cannot stand each other because hate is the operative word. There is a lot of blood boiling in the veins of chauvinist political opponents, “spouting racist drivel or Marxist simplicities.” How can young, callow politicians, born after the last shower of rain, fill themselves with loathing for mature politicians, who have been in the political saddle for several decades?

Shall we not look for the hero and the saint and the "God spot" that still exist in our hearts, in our thrice-blessed land that is home to four great world religions?

Thomas Carper, a poet and for whom Sri Lanka is "the beautiful country, rising like a jewel, from a blue ocean," says it all in a sonnet he sent us from Maine, conveying "his feelings and sadness about Sri Lanka's troubles." He was making a poetic response in a sonnet to our prosaic remark about "warlessness" (a word we first read in the Rajpal Abeynayake column in this paper) in Sri Lanka:

Warlessness comes to Sri Lanka
After twenty years of it, the fear
Of thought-corroding conflict does not fade;
Beliefs that wished-for peace might reappear
Have, by repeated terrors, been betrayed.
How can one master angers from a past
Of wrenching desolations, thousands killed -
Then clear those mental vistas where at last
The spirit's aspirations are fulfilled?

The beautiful country, rising like a jewel,
From a blue ocean was so long resigned
To life under the hammerings of cruel
Hostilities that even a hopeful mind
Must speak, in better times now, with distress,
Of no more than "a kind of warlessness."

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