Columns

Just last week Comrade Minister Viji and his crack team of tariff busters were walking down a plush plaza of Washington Square looking to buy a reduced-price cup of tea when who walks in the opposite direction but one of the main Trump price cutters and his third assistant.

“And who the hell is that?” he asks his junior tariff shaver.

“That,” says Junior, drawing a deep, proud breath, having been chosen to look after a foreign delegation, “is Comrade Minister Vijitha, Comrade President’s foreign policy expert adviser,” he said.

“How did they jump over the border?” the temporary chief with a loud snort asked, keeping going as though comrades are rejected as much as Mexican border jumpers.

There was a time not too long ago when Comrade Putin and his more powerful predecessors were greeted with a hug and a genuine welcome.

Recall, for instance, the WW-2 Potsdam meeting of August when Comrade Stalin sat with the UK’s Winston Churchill (and later Clement Attlee) and President Harry Truman of the US to carve out bits and pieces of Europe like India’s Modi and Jaishankar are now talking of Sri Lanka as though they are bringing all their Tamil Nadu sea sand to paste us together.

Anyway, there are lots of things going on in our neighbourhood and beyond that, our great so-called foreign university rubbish bins, which are producing expertise that would be enough to fill Mars and other parts of solar space, unless, of course, Rohitha Rajapaksa does it before with his exploding sky rockets and PhDs that still need to produce official certificates and are yet to need verification.

But what is still not well known, hidden from political secrecy or because the so-called knowledgeable people keep it hidden from the multitude, is that the old order is changing slowly into new.

As poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, the older order is yielding place to the new, and God fulfils himself in many ways.

If one goes back into history when those who believed in political integrity, principles, and ideology stood firm, we as young people were moved by what we felt was the political genuineness and the genuine charisma and political commitment of those who moved us to believe in ideology. We hung on iron gates, believing what we heard and what we were told was the gospel truth.

But they believed it would be the universal truth and believed they were being dragged to the political sunset. Others thought that politics was a necessary part of transition and would see socio-political change.

It is this that brings me to an integral of political change going through many parts of our region without being understood, accepted, and even realised by the people who had been an integral part of that change.

I remember as young students we loudly applauded the hardheaded and committed leftist Marxist-Leninist political leaders and their slogans, especially those of the LSSP, parading down the main road past the Udahamulla Railway station shouting all of the Marxist slogans to pick them up and repeat them.

That was not only true of the working class out on strike and state authoritarianism but also in political classes for more educated youth and even university students undergoing political science.

But over the years, as the Left political movement slowly departed from the political scene, the slogans themselves quietly retreated from the front street to the back.

These were from the smaller nations where left-wing political groups held some power and managed to find a place or two or a definite political position of power in the echelons of power.

While most of those internationally known political parties had established some presence, there were the small but hard and determined Marxist-Leninist groups like the JVP and NPP that clung to their ideological strongholds, believing that before long they would manage to eliminate the long-established, decrepit, corrupt, and outdated social class.

Well, in a sense it did, capturing political power through democratic means instead of the antidemocratic ways that it had previously pursued. In doing so, it pushed itself vigorously ahead of the people, presenting itself domestically and internationally as the only alternative and pressing ahead with its Marxist-Leninist cry.

But that cry was not essentially the ideological slogan that the NPP’s leader seemed to think was vital at the moment. Whether he realised this on his own or by seeing changes in the international scene of Marxist-Leninist movements, it is hard to say right now.

Perhaps he sensed that a more politically stable ruling party would be more propitious, but whether changes taking place in the world’s largest and most powerful Marxist party would prove more successful is difficult to say.

But what seems to have been ignored or not understood is that in China, as society became more economically advanced and rich, a socially divisive approach seems to be returning to the old social template where society was generally addressed as Comrade. Except in certain acceptable special socio-employed classes, there appears to be a tendency to return to the use of the old-time terminology of Comrade.

While NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake and some of his supporters in the NPP, as opposed to the old JVP, appear to be gently moving away from comradeship as the traditional way to address a relationship, the long-established practice in China, where we had known of Comrade Mao Zedong and Comrade Deng Xiao Ping, though long gone, seems to be attracting the former prefixes that won them national honours and prestige.

So where will our NPP leaders find themselves if Tariff Trump and his economic policy makers end up following the Chinese comrades to settle international issues?

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was assistant editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later, he was Deputy Chief of Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London.)