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| Sunday, 19 June 2005 |
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Features |
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News Business Features
Editorial
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Minority upstages majority by Ranga Jayasuriya They say people are against the joint mechanism, now popularly known as the Post Tsunami Operational Management Structure (P-TOMS). But where are the people? We only saw a microscopic minority of the population going berserk on the streets. Of course, people in this country cannot be equalised to by 400 buddhist monks or 3,000 undergrads who took to the streets protesting the P-TOMS. People of Sri Lanka, in its true definition encompass 19 million. Those who took to the streets last week were a highly articulate minority, well organized to make their voice heard over that of the majority. The vast majority of this country is silent, perhaps because they knew little about the P-TOMS. But their silence has helped an articulate minority - whose opinion sometimes borders chauvinism on most issues relating to the peace process - to take the majority populace hostage, I mean in literary terms. The past two weeks were full of high drama. And we saw how a minority opinion could be propped up to make it the public opinion. A crowd of undergraduates, clueless of the content of the P-TOMS, running over barricades, facing water cannon and then to be dispersed by the riot police firing tear gas. A young monk threatening to immolate himself in front of a barricade. And a monk threatening to fast unto death, but on the fifth day of his protest to be taken to hospital by the police facing only a token protest from fellow monks. Understandably, the entire campaign against the P-TOMS was aimed at arousing the emotions of a wider public and dragging them to an ultra-nationalist platform. One would argue that the series of anti-P-TOMS protests spearheaded by Buddhist monks are a repetition of history from the abortive Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam pact to the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord. History repeats itself, but the country is turning a blind eye to the lessons of history. Furthermore, despite having experienced the bitter lessons of political opportunism, the majority people tend to enjoy the latest drama staged on the ultra-nationalist platform. The greater worry of the people is about the traffic jams created by angry protestors. A few would think of the adverse impact these protests would have on an already fragile peace process and ethnic reconciliation process. Protests and counter protests. This is the order of the day. A day after the undergraduates of the Inter-University Students Federation took to the streets, a group of NGO wallahs, the Tamil National Alliance along with Wickremabahu Karunaratne took to the streets demanding the setting up of P-TOMS. The objective of the pro-P-TOMS protesters was to convey the message that it is not only the religious right or the ultra-nationalists that could send its followers to take over the streets. But, again we saw only a few hundred people, pro-peace activists, standing on the road, blocking rush hour traffic. And in the Jaffna peninsula, there were a series of counter hunger strikes in Thenmarachchi. Undergraduates of Jaffna University, a bastion of LTTE propaganda work went on to counter their counterparts in the South, taking to the streets and holding a mock funeral of Sinhala ultra-nationalism, only a few days after the Inter-University Students Federation took to the streets of Colombo protesting the P-TOMS. These are days of protests and counter protests, some of which are a true demonstration of how public opinion could be distorted or manipulated by a minority of protestors, whether pro or anti- P-TOMS. Working public, forced to be on the streets for a longer time than usual in packed public transport locked in a traffic jam due to the unfolding protests would not know whom to blame - whether it is protesters, police, government or themselves.
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Editorial | Security | Produced by Lake House |
