Geneva jazz, SLFP blues and Sinhala rage

Only the socially blind cannot read the signs of Sinhala angst; only the politically deaf do not hear the rumblings of Sinhala rage.

I had a great time at the Colombo Jazz and Blues Festival and a bad one reading about the Consultational Task Force of NGO types to “enforce” the intrusive, US-driven Geneva resolution under the monitoring of a UN expert.

“An eleven-member Consultation Task Force will enforce provisions of the US-backed resolution…Its work will be carried out with the help of a UN expert who will arrive in Colombo next week. He is Pablo de Greiff, Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence. This will be part of an Action Plan formulated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as stated in a confidential document circulated to Western countries and India as part of the implementation of the UNHRC (UN Human Rights Council) Resolution…

The 11-member Committee named by the Government comprises Manouri Muttetuwegama (Chairperson), Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuththu (Secretary), Gamini Viyangoda, Prof. Chitralekha Maunaguru, Visakha Dharmadasa, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, Dr. Farzana Haniffa, Shantha Abhimanasingham PC, Mirak Raheem, Prof. Daya Somasunderam and Gameela Samarasinghe…The Task Force…will report to a Steering Committee on Reconciliation and the Prime Ministerial Action Group (PMAG)…”

(sundaytimes.lk/160207/news/geneva-issue-govt-earmarks-11-member-task-force) 
There are no former state officials among these “enforcers”. Though belonging to a (religious) minority I am appalled that G.G. Ponnambalam’s 50:50 seems to have been acceded to and exceeded in the composition of this Kangany (i.e. overseer) Task Force, which approximates DS Senanayaka’s reported counter-offer of 60:40, but the other way around. Posthumously, Ponnambalam has won in power-sharing in Colombo, while Chelvanayakam is about to win in the North, through federalist ‘Constitutional reform’.

The Jazz and Blues Festival was superb, with gut-bucket blues musicians and excellent sustained keyboards work by Danny McCormack. Jerome Speldewinde should play Montreux. 

The Festival brought back memories of the first Duke Ellington concert in Ceylon, at the Racecourse. I recall the solos by Paul Gonsalves on sax and Sam Woodyard on drums (With all other players leaving the stage), and ‘Sir Duke’ closing, waving to the crowd, saying “we love you madly!” I was six years old. A ‘long and winding road’ took me via Geneva and Montreux to UNESCO, Paris, the co-sponsorship of International Jazz Day and a mention by Herbie Hancock in the LA Times.

In contemporary Sri Lanka my trajectory makes me something of a misfit, torn between my culture and my politics, where I’m coming from and where I’m at. But I am the product of the Colombo, Ceylon I was born into and the Sri Lanka I grew up in. 

Colombo was the scene of a postcolonial ‘new wave’, a modernist cultural avant-garde which rebelled against the comfortable pro-Western conformism of the UNP Establishment, skewering Western hypocrisy and scorning any role as local intermediaries of the Western patronage. 

The Colombo intelligentsia was multicultural, not minoritarian or federalist.

That consciousness is almost extinct. Contemporary Colombo’s civil society cosmopolitans identify more with Ivor Jennings than DS Senanayake or SWRD. They conflate multi-ethnic multiculturalism with minoritarianism, thereby delegitimising the former.

The National Anthem with several verses in Tamil and a multiethnic choir may have been a more sensible symbol of pluralist integration than the ‘culture shock’ of linguistic semi-separatism; of an Anthem sung apart.

Things have polarised between the UNP’s Uncle Tom posture and the angry nativism of the ‘organic’ opposition. 

The former defends accountability with foreign participation. The latter’s activists hurl every polemical rock they can, including at the spectacular soprano (of Sinhalese ethnicity) singing ‘Danno Budunge’ at the vibrant cultural show on Independence Day.

The SLFP is in the throes of an organic crisis because it is quintessentially a party of moderate Sinhala nationalism but has traded in that role for a subaltern function vis-à-vis the UNP. It will be utilised to provide a two-thirds majority for Constitutional quasi-federalism that negates everything it has historically stood for, causing its nationalist base to revolt while a pro-Chandrika splinter of SLFP voters goes green.

The official SLFP is moderate but no longer nationalist, whereas even during CBK’s tenure it was Nationalist insofar as she wrested Jaffna from the LTTE. Today the ethnic minorities have influential moderate nationalist political and electoral options -the TNA and SLMC-while the SLFP’s subaltern incorporation with the UNP has deprived the ethnic majority of its main moderate, democratic-nationalist option.

Minority (Tamil) nationalism has been manipulatively installed (Not elected as in 1977) as the main Parliamentary Opposition. 

Evangelistic “liberal fundamentalists” (John Gray) drive sensitive policy agendas. Majority (Sinhala) nationalism is being politically disenfranchised.

While ex-nationalists are peripherally represented in Government, the nationalism of the Sinhala majority is neither represented by Government nor recognised as the Opposition. 

In the global South, it is infinitely safer and more sustainable to have the identity politics of the majority community inside the system looking out, than outside looking in.

Meanwhile, the most impressive young civil society personality I have heard in years, Dr. Anuruddha Padeniya of the GMOA, is in danger of a visit from (or to) the CID.

An ethnic reconciliation and reform agenda, which fails to accommodate majority (Sinhala) nationalism as a stakeholder if not a strategic partner, is a recipe for “self-destabilisation” (Mervyn de Silva), even systemic suicide. 

Imagine Northern Ireland without the Protestant Paisleyite buy-in. How can stability and sustainability be achieved, while majority nationalism feels alienated? What is the incentive for Sinhala nationalism to come on board?

Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s UNP leadership, a throwback to pre-’56, is ideologically and socio-culturally far more Kotelawala than Senanayaka 
or Jayewardene. 

Constitutional federalisation, the Geneva resolution, ECTA, Hanuman Bridge and IMF cutbacks will erode the vote base of an SLFP auxiliary, though it would multiply an oppositional SLFP’s popular support. 

Five types of classic anti-UNP backlashes can be expected: Hartal ’53, Buddhist Commission Report ’55 (‘Sinhala Only’), post–Bandung ’55 avalanche of April ’56, student upsurges of the’60s and ’80s, anti-Indo Lanka Accord/IPKF agitation of ’87. This time there may be fusion. The downside will be the besieging and overrunning of the broadened cosmopolitan civic space.

Sampanthan ‘tearing up’ in joy over the National Anthem in Tamil while Mahinda Rajapaksa ‘tears up’ in sorrow over his young son, a naval officer, being jailed without bail, are not the right optics for reconciliation. Reconciliation cannot mean turning Sri Lanka’s North and East into a second Tamil Nadu and this country into “the 26th state of India or the playground of the USA” as Vijaya Kumaratunga warned against in his final speech (Campbell Park, 1988). That is the road to radicalisation.

Formal status recognition of the Joint Opposition led by the progressive, eminently democratic nationalist Dinesh Gunawardena—arguably a “Sinhala Sampanthan”-- could have created a moderate nationalist gravitational centre, countervailing and decelerating ultranationalist radicalisation.

For 65 years, the SLFP was always either the party of Government or in the Opposition. The bloodbath of the 1980s and ’90s originated in its displacement from the helm of the Opposition and the disenfranchisement of its leader. Even then it retained, as in 1951-56, an independent Oppositional identity in Parliament. Chandrika’s ‘compradorefication’ ensures that SWRD’s and Sirimavo’s party is/has none of these today.

Disowned by the UNP-SLFP Establishment, blockaded in Parliament, the nationalism of the Sinhala majority will find a new home as with SWRD’s Sinhala Maha Sabha (1937) and SLFP (1951).

The Ranil-CBK axis is not only killing the party that SWRD founded, it has wrecked the two-party system which 1956 brought into being two decades earlier than in India. The two-party system imparted a stable equilibrium to democracy. The goalposts are gone. The game has changed.

Things are out of joint. The present course is unsustainable. We face the awful prospect of culture wars and a clash of civilizations. Only the socially blind cannot read the signs of Sinhala angst; only the politically deaf do not hear the rumblings of Sinhala rage.