CONTRADICTIONS OF THE SLFP
Who is fooling whom? Who is making use of whom? Who is sending whom to the boutique? (Kavuru kava kade yavanavada? ). Though these questions have relevance in many fields it is in politics, that they are so evident that even the so-called common man becomes aware of them. There have been talks between the SLFP and the JVP while at the same time the SLFP was having talks with the UNP. The "government" of Sri Lanka has had negotiations with the LTTE while the latter was killing members of the intelligence unit. Now a Presidential Commission has determined that certain members of the police force and the armed forces have betrayed the country. It is clear that the "officers" had become traitors to the country in connivance with the UNP that is pretending to be governing the country.
Since about 1993, Ms. Chandrika Kumaratunga has been at the centre of politics and during the past decade it would be correct to say that she has been trying to fool the country more than anybody else. The country knows where Vickramabahu Karunaratne stands when it comes to the Tamil racist problem or any other problem for that matter. His politics is decided by his variety of Trotskyism and by the NGO policies and we could expect him to be fighting for the so-called rights of the Tamils more than even Prabhakaran. For number of years the cut off marks (or the z-score) for admission to the universities in many fields in respect of students in the districts of Colombo, Gampaha, Matara, and very often Kandy have been greater than that for the students applying from the Jaffna district. This implies that it is more difficult for a student from, say, the Gampaha district to enter the university than for a Jaffna student. However the myth is still being spread that there is discrimination against the Tamil students in respect of admission to the universities. Vickramabahu K., would argue on behalf of the Jaffna student, very often not getting his facts correct. Ranil Wickremesinghe wants to donate the northern and the eastern provinces of the country to the fascist LTTE, as if he has inherited the country and the state from his uncle. He may be thinking that he is a "sama doothaya" but he does not realise that he has no mandate from the Sinhala people to establish a confederation.
Now Ms. Chandrika Kumaratunga is a different kettle of fish. Even her close associates do not know how she would react to a particular situation. Before she came to power as the prime minister at the 1994elections she was very much concerned with the Suriyakanda graves and various torture camps including Batalanda in the Biyagama electorate. What happened after she became the prime minister, and subsequently the president, of the country? Was she able to find out who the culprits behind the torture camps were. What happened to the commissions appointed by her to look into the torture camps?
The commission appointed to inquire into the Millennium city, has handed over its report to the president. Now the whole country awaits to find out what action would be taken by the president following the report of the commission. It is true that the president on her own cannot punish the traitors to the country. There are some legal procedures that have to be followed. Would the president take the usual course of forgetting the issue after some time. As the general public, in a few months, would also have no idea on the presidential commission, the report of the commission could be forgotten without much difficulty. The traitors would then live another day to betray the country.
The Mahanayaka theros and some other nayaka theros want the "government" and the opposition to join together to save the country? If the nayaka theros are aware of what is happening in the country then they would not have made such a request. What would happen if the SLFP and the UNP form an alliance and come to power. Then they would command a two third majority in the parliament and would be in a position to amend the constitution to give a confederation to Tamil racism in the country. If anybody thinks that an alliance between the UNP and the SLFP is good for the country then, I am afraid, he is oblivion to the current political trends. The non national forces, that include the western countries and the local NGOs and other missions, would welcome such an alliance and the nayaka theros would have no option but to chant pirith when Prabhakaran establish a separate state in the eastern and the northern provinces.
The SLFP and in particular Ms. Chandrika Kumaratunga are responsible more than anybody else for the current state of affairs. The party from the very inception had no vision. Founded by Mr. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike as a liberal party in 1951, it became the party of the Sinhalathva around 1954. However, the nationalism had no ideology of its own at that time due to the western education that the so-called leaders had imbibed, and also because of the failure of the Sinhalas, and others in Asia and Africa, to evolve their own systems of knowledge. The leaders of the nationalist movements were "appointed" by the westerners themselves, very often from those who had received a western education, preferably in western universities, and were not in tune with the thinking of the rank and file. The ordinary people had no choice but to follow the leaders as the cultural colonialism had instilled in their minds that they were not in a position to grapple with the problems faced by them in the so-called modern world.
The SLFP as a political party reflected all the contradictions in the nationalist movement. To make it worse, soon the Marxists who had intuitively felt that there was no future for Marxist parties joined the SLFP. They brought with them the "Marxist theories and concepts" and the SLFP was drowned in a mixture of Liberalism and Marxism. There were no theories and concepts created in the Sinhala Buddhist tradition, though the party was to represent the nationalist forces. The SLFP has still not awakened to these problems, though the JVP is pretending to be borrowing from the nationalist tradition. The JVP has still not given up its Leninism (not the elitist Marxism of the Marxists - Trotskyites) and the hard core is only trying get a foothold in the nationalist movement.
The literature produced in the fifties and sixties portrayed the situation. In fact literature itself was used to propagate the myth that those who were brought up in the Sinhala Buddhist tradition were not able to cope up with the demands of the "modern world". Jinadasa in "Hevanella" published in the sixties is only a shadow and not a "character" with flesh and blood, as he was brought up in the Sinhala Buddhist tradition in the villages. The Sinhala literary criticism in this period was dominated by the "Peradeniya school" that merely copied English literary criticism. The so-called giants in literature during this period thought only of imitating various forms of the western novels and short stories and were slaves of western realism and other western trends. The most unfortunate tendency associated with Peradeniya, not necessarily the "Peradeniya school" was to reinterpret the Sinhala Buddhist tradition as realism and other kinds of models that had been created in the Christian west. Even Buddhism was given interpretations based on various currents that were fashionable in the western philosophical tradition. The most hilarious attempt was to reinterpret "catuskoti" in terms of Aristotelian logic. Perhaps these philosophers who imitated the west did not know then that Quantum Physics that had been created in the beginning of the twentieth century defied Aristotelian logic and was looking for new forms of logic. The present imitators of so called postmodern literary criticism found only in the Departments of English and outside the university system, are the inheritors of the "Peradeniya tradition". Fortunately the Sinhala Departments in the universities at present do not follow these western trends in so-called literary criticism theories (critical theory) where even the word theory is not properly understood. Perhaps they have a "postmodernist reading" of the word theory!
(To be continued)
Professor Nalin de Silva
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