Opposition's arrested-development drive

Some wretched quirk of fate it is, that caused the real perpetrators of the school bomb scare of last week to get away, while a poor man who called a school to sell rubber balloons for a school function was tortured to death.

The school bomb scare was hatched in the houses of the Colombo green-ribbon political hierarchy. It was almost a buffoon's lark, but a lark crossed with a strategic political motive, in the minds of these perpetrators.

We can almost envision what went through these dotty minds that day. These people would have got up, and thought, it was as good a day as any to let loose some schoolboy-like madness across the city's landscape.

These are small minds anyway, and these minds contain these retarded thoughts which may have been good in Grade Five, but turn out to be very damaging - and rather pathetic - when they occur in the heads of grown men trying again and again to run a country.

The fact is that when the UNP top rungers thought of hatching this school scare plot, (see our Talking point page 1) they did it in the now discredited chain letter manner. One of you make ten calls, and pass down the same message, under threat of ostracism - that kind of thing.

Before nine hours, their handiwork had kept children out of school, scared parents witless, and weeks later, a man had been tortured to death because of it. This latter case of cruel inhuman and degrading treatment, it need be stressed, is a contemptible act in its own right, but the puerile handiwork of the Colombo plot-hatching political elite is no less contemptible.

It's reasonably clear that this club of political honchos is almost perpetually retarded. Their arrested development is akin to that of the town clown. The townspeople need to live with him. You can laugh at the clown's antics when he is not being dangerous, but when he is being dangerous, he must be retrained.

The UNP's case of political arrested development has been displayed in phases. Sometimes, it has been in the full glare of the public spotlight, as it was during the Presidential elections, when the party's leader showed that he has probably the worst case of it, as he could not resist acting as if he was an overgrown schoolboy. (Chewing gum for farmers, necklaces for boys - a lot that which has now become clich, to typify campaign incompetence.) But, the overgrown schoolboy image when it is passed down from the leader to the troops, could transform from comic material to incendiary material.

The school scare caper has the plot of a Hollywood horror move. Into its script is written the pathology of the maladjusted sociopath wreaking loose havoc on society with one maladroit act of madness.

This is the sick-mind scenario that we have now before us, and to fix it we need not just the good advice of the psychologists, but the power of name and shame. If we name and shame some of the perpetrators of this juvenile rumour mongering, we may have done this society at least one good turn before the next new game of delinquency begins.

List of shame

From analysing and decrying the above described act of socio-pathology we need to move on to another long running aspect of pathology with regard to our Law Enforcement - torture, as a means of extracting confessions.

Reams have been written about it, and reams will be, but what is almost certain is that there is no political will either in the Police department or in Law Enforcement in general to substantially outlaw this primitive, cruel and ineffective method of confession extraction. Mahatma Ghandhi said that a society could be judged by the way it treats it animals but when a society treats its humans worse than its animals we know that it has sick elements within it that never possessed anything close to what can be called a moral compass.

If Law Enforcement cannot root out these ghouls from within their midst, there is no point in having Constitutions and Legal Frameworks which cannot do so. Very soon, there will be social vigilantes that will hound out the breed of cops and prison guards that kill and maim thinking that the law is best administered when taken into their hands.

We have now a long list of killing of innocents who were, in recent times, tortured by the police after being taken-in on mistaken identity. This is our national list of shame. The quicker we do something tangible about this list - the sooner we can come back, gradually, into a state of civilization.