Columns

Randomly picking up founding father of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography ‘From Third World to First’ in a recent whistle-top work visit to that country was an unspoken nod to a more temperate assessment of decades long questioning of his democratically sacrilegious – and heavily critiqued – opinion that ‘disciplined governance’ should prevail over the ‘exuberance of democracy.’

The fate of a model nation-state

In the wake of the extraordinary collapse of ‘Western-style liberalism’ on the global stage and the miserable failure of post-colonial states such as Sri Lanka which perverted ‘inalienable’ democratic values, perhaps this change in the assessment of governance models is natural. That is so, even in the face of continuing affronts as we would know it, to those values.

That includes the recent ouster of Singapore’s leftist and Indian minority representative Leader of the Opposition by the ruling Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) Parliament on charges of what has euphemistically been termed as ‘lying to Parliament’ which had led to a ‘conviction.’ His predecessors had been controlled, not through violence a la Sri Lankan style but by using the civil law tool of civil defamation.

Extraordinarily high monetary penalties were slapped on critics of the ruling party, resulting in bankruptcies. The PAP has, of course, held the reins of power in this one-party system since the formation of the city-state. That being said, Sri Lanka, a post independent ‘model nation-state’ in South Asia cannot really brag about its ‘democratic achievements.’ Her slide into a hellhole of communalism has been laced with brutal ethnic and civil violence.

Real-time achievement of language rights

And the icing on that toxic cake has been the gross corruption of its rulers. True, Singapore’s gleamingly packaged deal for citizens is shorn of frills; a First World quality of life in exchange for bartering away rights. But even so, there is much to be learnt about Singapore’s ‘disciplined governance’ that should not be scoffed at.  To be clear, one is not talking of gleaming skyscrapers and the material benefits of a ‘First World’ culture as we know it.

Neither is this reference to futuristically imagined hotels eerily summoning up images of a perfectly poised deck of cards or the antiseptic nature of a ‘surveillance state. Rather, this is to do with basic guarantees of governance that is reflected not in Constitutional pontifications only worth the paper that they are printed on in which deceptive exercises Sri Lankans have excelled at for decades. Take one example; the implementation of language rights.

In Singapore, users of the mass rapid transit (MRT) system take for granted multilingual public announcements in four official languages, namely English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil as also reflected in signposts. These are not matters to be debated over or fought as if they are demonic measures aimed at undermining the ‘supremacy’ of one community over the other. In contrast, language race and religion have long been employed as toxic political weapons in Sri Lanka.

Divisive ethnic stress that crucified Sri Lanka

Commissions, committees and ministries proliferate on Language rights, bulky conference reports pile up with millions of donor funds being expended. But it is still impossible to secure observance of basic signposting in Tamil as well as in Sinhala, particularly in the South. Hundreds of complaints filed to bodies tasked with rectifying these gaps, even to (Tamil) Ministers holding the portfolios of language rights, have been to no avail.

Lack of interpretation facilities continues to be a fundamental hindrance to administration and in documentation of State offices. This has particularly impacted on the day to day judicial process; one of many reasons cited to explain endemic laws’ delays. But to proceed to a more general discussion, the objective here is not to discuss the merits and demerits of the Singaporean founder’s theory and practice of authoritarianism.

That theory may be defended by some and scorned by others, more than a decade after his death.  On the contrary, it is to point to at least one aspect of his caustic comments on why Sri Lanka failed in her post-independence struggle as a modern, functional State; that is, the observation that divisive ethnic policies were primarily to blame. There can be little quarrel with that conclusion regardless of what one may think of Mr Yew’s sunny hailing of the ‘authoritarian’ model.

The NPP Government must rethink its strategy

In the meantime, we have another ‘Peoples’ Party in Sri Lanka that is striving hard to emulate the one-party state but lacking the hard headed coherence and rationality in governance that characterised Singapore’s early leadership. In fact, what we are seeing on almost every aspect of the National Peoples’ Power (NPP) led administration is ‘chaos’ not ‘rationality’ whether this be education reforms or the appointment of an Auditor General.

One fact is however blindingly clear; if the NPP Government’s aim is to expose and meet the overtly racist and religious venom that drives Sri Lanka’s national political debate, it is going in quite the wrong way about it. First, let us be direct enough to acknowledge that xenophobia has largely framed the country’s post-independence narrative about rights, freedoms and liberties, effectively proving the bitter truth of Mr Yew’s predictions.

But the strategy to correct that trajectory is not for the President to hold forth, while speaking to audiences in Jaffna,  that, ‘travelling to a specific location in Jaffna to observe Sil on a Poya day, while passing the Sri Maha Bodhi, could not be considered an act of religious merit but one driven by hatred.’ These statements only lay the ground for Sri Lanka’s communalists to come crawling out the woodwork as it were.

Assaulting a priest for ‘simply being a priest’

In fact, we see this happening as an inevitable result. Members of the opposition Rajapaksa-led Sri Lanka Podujana Party (SLPP), unashamed purveyors of communalism and proponents of religious and racial hatred, vented on national television regarding the President’s remarks.   Neither is it for one of his Ministers to hold forth that the Government will retaliate with knockout punches against those who oppose what they wish to do.

His claim that ‘those wearing saffron  robes, a black coat or national dress should not think that their attire will protect them’ was a further fueling of exactly the religious tensions that the NPP Government should take care to avoid. Weeks following that asinine assertion, a Catholic priest innocuously traveling on his motorcycle in the Gampaha District was assaulted by police officers.

The victim alleged that the officers who had assaulted him had referred to the Minister’s words, saying that priests have ruined the country or words to that effect. In response, spokespersons of the Catholic Church strongly denounced the Ministerial utterances and roundly said that the ‘police version’ of the incident could not be accepted. The mere fact that the police officers implicated in the incident were remanded and subsequently given bail is beside the point.

Bizarre happenings and deep unease

The larger concern is that in all of our turbulent post-independent history, in no situation has a priest of any faith been attacked ‘simply for being a priest.’ The incident is simply surreal. Each Government has had its own Minister who behaves like the court jester. We had one character who declared that he would happily drink from a soup made of the shoes of the President.

But likening court jesters to the NPP’s Ministerial worthy who made that unwise (to be kind) claim about ‘black coats, saffron robes and national dress’ is not quite correct. There is a deeper meaning here accompanied by an undercurrent of force with the President and his Government not disassociating itself from these sentiments.

In sum, a feeling of considerable unease as to the political trajectory of this particular ‘Peoples’ Government persists.