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| Sunday, 3 October 2004 |
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Rajini Rajasinghan Thiranagama's death anniversary : Space for all voices! by SYDNEY KNIGHT Death is a certainty. However, as we keep the 15th anniversary of Rajini Rajasinghan Thiranagama's assassination, on September 21, 1989, one ought to reflect on her tragic death. Walking through the corridors of time, one can picture the Sri Lanka of 1989. Violent Lanka is perhaps an apt description. A few days before Rajini died, Gladys Jayewardena was gunned down. She was also very vulnerable. To quote Charles Diskens, "Those were the days". It was gun culture: the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Only "man was vile". In a reflection like this, one has to ask a number of questions. Primarily: when we human beings are not the source of life, although theologically we are considered to be co-partners of creation in a sense, can any of us terminate anybody's life? What right have we? Rajini in my estimation belongs to the category of persons who must be classified with Dietrich Bonhoeffer of Hitler's Germany. Bonhoeffer, in his classic "The Cost of Discipleship", says that if a mad man is driving a vehicle, that vehicle must be stopped and the driver removed from the seat. Bonhoeffer, like Rajini after him, refused to leave Germany and at the age of 44 was a victim of Hitler's wrath. Rajini could have stayed in the UK but she opted to come back to Jaffna and teach in the new Medical Faculty there. In "The Broken Palmyrah" that Rajini co-authored, there was a sense of hope. I read the manuscript before the book was published and in 1989 was full of hope that we Sri Lankans would soon solve our problem. For in that book one sees the author's saying: since we are part of the problem, in us is the solution. There was the hope that we could solve our problems. At the meeting we had at the Fort to celebrate Rajini's death, there was the commitment to carry on the struggle to solve our problems as tribute to Rajini. What happened to all that? Thanks to the University Teachers for human rights, UTHR Jaffna we have a body of persons critiquing the brokenness and realities of today's Sri Lanka In fifteen years, we seem to have in a sense forgotten the death of Rajini. Has life become so cheap? And death of this type so frequent that one could become cynical. I do not think Rajini died in vain. She has given us the courage to critique. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. The world will never ever forget Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, called the Mahathma, for he chose Ahimsa and paid the price for it. He was able to organise the Quit India campaign. Martin Luther King found space in the US for the descendants of the African slaves who initially worked in the cotton fields of the Southern United States. King too was killed. But King said that the evil of our times is the silence of the majority. If we are part of the "silent majority", we cannot honour the life of Rajini. Rajini's father, now a widower for his wife Mahila died in August, Nirmala in the UK and Sumathy and Vasuki in the field of University education like Rajini, and Rajini's husband and children, can rest assured that Rajini did not die in vain. For she, with others, began and continued the process to create the space for the spirit of a plural society. We must, all of us in Sri Lanka, together work for a society where every voice is heard without fear or favour. One cannot always be in a tunnel. The light should come. May it come soon, so that we can continue to be thankful for lives like Rajini's. |
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