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| Sunday, 19 June 2005 |
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Mervyn's insights were foresights
Tribute to Mervyn de Silva on his 6th death anniversary which falls on Wednesday June 22 by Kethesh Loganathan When Dayan Jayatilleka asked me to pen down some thoughts on his father Mervyn de Silva on the occasion of his 6th death anniversary, I was flattered. And, then I faltered. I realized that to write about Mervyn de Silva, the doyen of journalism in Sri Lanka and a pundit on Sri Lankan and international political affairs, required more than my personal interactions and impressions of him.
It was then I sat down and read and re-read "Crisis Commentaries - Selected Political Writings of Mervyn de Silva" published by ICES in 2001 and came to the conclusion that I had taken Mervyn for granted and that his insights were not only sharp and incisive, but prophetic, or what could be called foresights. But, first let me begin with my personal interactions with Mervyn de Silva. Those interactions, of course, began as it did for many young intellectuals and activists during the late 70s when Mervyn launched the Lanka Guardian. That was the period when I had returned to Sri Lanka as an "internationalist" after my studies abroad. Through Dayan Jayatilleka, a former comrade, an "interim" adversary and presently and hopefully a "permanent" friend, I had the privilege of interacting with his father Mervyn de Silva and making occasional contributions to the Lanka Guardian. My contacts with Mervyn during the late 70s, when I was a young researcher at Marga Institute and later the Social Scientists' Association, and the early 80s, when I was based in Jaffna working for a consultancy organization started by my late father, continued despite my being propelled into the orbit of the Tamil national movement following July'83 anti-Tamil pogrom. As a political exile in India I had the opportunity of running into Mervyn in New Delhi and Madras on a couple of occasions while he was attending conferences. My frequent trips to Delhi from Madras where I was then based as a spokesperson of EPRLF was more to do with lobbying with the Indian Government, political parties, intelligentsia and media in Delhi, as well as foreign missions and representatives of liberation movements spanning the PLO, ANC, SWAPO, Polisario etc. The chance meetings with Mervyn in Delhi during that turbulent period in the mid 80s gave me the opportunity to glean from him the happenings in the corridors of power in Colombo, while it gave him the opportunity to gather from me the trends and tendencies in the Tamil struggle. The only difference was that while I spoke with typical intensity and passion, he spoke with his typical twinkle in the eye, which spoke volumes. J.R's .adventurist posturing Our discussions would obviously also focus on India's role and the Colombo establishment's aversion towards it. In this context, Mervyn cautioned against the suicidal and adventurist posturing of J.R.Jayawardene and his advisors towards India. In an article titled "Marooned Elite" written a year after the 1983 July anti-Tamil pogrom and India assuming a proactive and interventionist role in Sri Lanka's ethnic imbroglio, he noted, "the weaker and the more vulnerable the individual nation, the greater surely should be the care and intelligence with which choices of action and courses of conduct that incur suspicion and hostility, or are perceived by more powerful neighbours as hostile to their 'self-interest' are followed. It is 'enlightened self-interest' which dictates such commonsense in our approach to our foreign policy problems and options". This absence of "enlightened self-interest" in my opinion, although now largely rectified in relation to Indo-Lanka relations but not necessarily irreversible, continues to dog the Colombo political establishment on other matters relating to the peace process, and has provided the LTTE its very mode of existence. The confusion between engagement and appeasement of the LTTE is a case in point. Another is the failure to forge a southern consensus on the Ethnic Question based on self-rule and shared-rule. Again on the role of India, Mervyn despite his admiration for India turned a sharp critic following the induction of the IPKF, although he was not necessarily opposed to the rationale behind the Indo-Lanka Accord. Perhaps Dayan Jayatilleka who was then an ally of the EPRLF and later distanced himself from it on the IPKF issue and realigned himself with President Premadasa, may have influenced Mervyn's thinking on this matter. Be that as it may, the following argument made by Mervyn in an article titled, "Lessons to be learnt from the IPKF Operations" published in the Times of India in March 1989 is indicative of his critique of India's role, in the context prevailing then: "This intervention does the greatest damage by casting doubts on what remains of modern India's finest diplomatic triumph, its successful reconciliation of Realpolitik with the moral imperative. India has played the world's conscience keeper while pursuing its own national and regional interests - from Kashmir to Bangladesh, Sikkim to Goa and Sri Lanka - with a cold blooded efficiency that has earned the secret respect of the neighbourhood. Until its potential attributes of power were realized, the moral dimension, nonalignment, helped it acquire a world role. In Sri Lanka it lost it balance". Paradoxically, Mervyn's critique of India's role also clearly revealed his deep admiration for India. Now coming to other facets of Mervyn's writings, it is clear that although he is commonly known as a political analyst and commentator, the economy was the foundation on which he based his analysis. In an article on "Sri Lanka and the New Global Environment" which was based on his talks delivered as part of the Teilhard de Chardin seminar in April 1981, he emphasised the economism of international relations. To quote, "Generally speaking, the economic factor is the major factor where vested interests have to be protected or new interests acquired. Nations that have been accustomed to run the world use the military option only in the final analysis. Whatever the degree of visibility, economics is present in their strategic doctrines as core concept". India look elsewhere! Perhaps on the recent decision of the US to sell F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, Mervyn, had he been living, may have argued that the decision was determined more by the economic compulsion to bail out Lockheed which was beginning to cut back on production and lay off personnel, than a conscious policy aimed at altering Indo-Pak balance of power in the region. That the US has offered to sell not only F-16, but the more advanced F-18 fighter jets to India may have been cited by him to substantiate his argument! But as to whether India would take up that offer or look elsewhere is another matter and perhaps Mervyn may have advocated that India looks elsewhere! Again, in an article on the crisis of the welfare state written in 1973, Mervyn de Silva penned, "That result is national economic crisis. What brought it into being was politics, and politics conducted with scant respect for economic considerations or any attention to the hard price, which the future would undeniably extract". Socialism And, in another incisive observation that present day surviving socialism has come to recognize, Mervyn wrote "socialism (in Ceylon) was interpreted as a system of redistribution and scarcely a thought was given to productivity and increasing the nations wealth". ("Sri Lanka: The End of Welfare Politics", South Asian Review, 1973). He was correct in arguing that socialism was more than mere welfarism, although he did recognize that welfarism was driven by a combination of humanitarian response of a ruling class and populism which also served as the "shock absorbers of extremism and violence". The problem however was that welfarism could not be sustained in the absence of economic growth and development, while violence and extremism often tends to assume an existence that is independent of the causes that led to it in the first place. In this context, it is pertinent to refer to an article that I came across written by my late father Chelliah Loganathan, who shared similar views with Mervyn on the subject of the limitations of social welfarism and the challenge of combining growth with equity and justice. In one of his series of lectures broadcast over the National Service of the Ceylon Broadcasting Corporation in October and November 1967 on what came to be known as the "Loganathan Plan", my father observed that , "Democracy (in Asia) can and could survive, and would also be capable of vigorous growth, only in a climate - social, political and economic- that will be conducive to increased national output to meet the modern needs of a fast growing population, and capable of achieving an optimum measure of social justice...The problem is how to bring about a suitable climate that will preserve democracy and at the same time achieve increased output and provide social justice". While exchanging notes with Dayan, it transpired that my father, who while being the Chief Executive of the Bank of Ceylon was then advocating the case for the broad basing of ownership of both the State and private corporate sectors, was having regular discussions on this topic with Mervyn de Silva who was then in the Lake House. This was during the '60s. That the sons ended up having radically different viewpoints with their fathers at a given time and later came to respect those views while perhaps disagreeing with them is perhaps more typical than unique. But then I speak for myself and do not wish to make Dayan a fait accompli! To end my tribute to Mervyn de Silva which I have sought to do by combining my impressions based on my personal interaction with him with a close study of his articles, I am indeed grateful to Dayan that in asking me to write about his father, I ended up thinking about my own father's contribution to some of the concerns expressed by Mervyn de Silva in his writings. But in that I have a tinge of guilt. While Dayan is playing the role of a duty bound son by striving to keep alive his father's memory as well as contributions, I have failed in that regard. Kethesh Loganathan is a member of the Board of Directors of the Centre
for Policy Alternatives and Head of its Peace & Conflict Analysis Unit. |
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