The Rajpal Abeynayake Column: 

What has Buddha gazing got to do with fighting the Tiger?

You wouldn’t be able to take your toothpaste and hair gel on the next flight to London, which is something that might help the British economy.

A flying Londoner spending his money here in Colombo to buy S. R. toothpaste might help our economy marginally also.
But, all this seems to have some layered relationship with the Buddhu Res phenomenon of last week, which was basically a case of ‘never before had so many spent so many hours, to look at so much clay and concrete.’

What is the connection? It’s an old word in the English dictionary called ‘’obscurantism.’’ Regular attacks on airplanes by the Osama group revealed the obscurantist side of the Islamic-resistance to Western interference in Islamic countries.

The Webster English dictionary defines obscurantism in this way: ‘Opposition to the spread of knowledge: a policy of withholding knowledge from the general public’.

What connects the obscurantism of gazing at Buddha statues for a glimpse of luminous rays, to the hair gel and toothpaste scare on aircraft, is that both conditions are a result of obscurantism. It seems to be getting clearer now that the Islamist backlash against Western incursions into Islamic states, was partly at least, accomplished by making use of Islamic fervour.

Bin Laden and others didn’t explain to the foot-soldiers in the campaign about the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics. On the contrary, they roused the obscurantist jihadist feelings of fundamentalist Islamism among Muslims from Morocco to Afghanistan, and fomented an Islamic jihadist movement.

His foot soldiers may have fought because they felt they could go to heaven and meet seven virgins if they wage jihad against the infidel. But, it appears that the Islamic resistance movement was predicated upon more geopolitical concerns and less spiritual concerns. As Tariq Ali explains, the current Islamic movement was borne out of a need to resist Western incursions into Islamic territories, for purely exploitative purposes.

But then, the obscurantism of religion, used to recruit the foot soldier seemed to take over from the original cause, and the movement deteriorated into counter-productive terror. Getting toothpaste and hair gel banned at airports, however inconsequential to those except supermodels, may not help the Islamic cause in general.

Gazing at Buddha statues in the hope of seeing luminous rays is the kind of frenzy that would probably massage the obscurantism used sometimes in Sri Lanka for marshalling forces against the Liberation Tigers.
Let’s face the facts squarely.
The Liberation Tigers have displayed extremist terrorist tendencies, and the campaign of the LTTE had therefore to be met with a fire-meets-fire kind of resolve.

This was hardly the time for nicety. Religious obscurantism and nationalist obscurantism was used as a means to marshal forces for this fight. The reference to Sinhalathva therefore was not with a view to defeat the Tigers in the ideological space.
It was for the practical and expedient task of massing the forces to take the fight to the Tigers. If that was to be done by rousing the forces of Sinhala jingoism, so be it, was the rationale behind the recruitment exercise.

But, when a practical fighting effort makes use of an obscurantist fringe for the primary purpose of making up the numbers, the risk that’s run is that at some point, the obscurantism will begin to show more prominently than the fighting force.

That’s the risk that’s run by the Sri Lankan polity at this time when there is some effort to beat back the Tigers at least to a manageable situation, where LTTE extremism — characterized by butchering bayoneting and bombing — could be brought under some kind of control. The Buddha gazing unfortunately made it appear as if the country had lapsed into obscurantism; it was similar to hair gel coming to characterize last week, what began as a considered Islamic resistance. The obscurantism seemed to have obscured the cause.

Sri Lanka doesn’t want to be seen as a nation of navel gazers of sorts, who are shelling the Tigers back to the stone age because of some stone age hang-up in the Sri Lankan psyche ( Naval gazing, luminous ray gazing and all that are probably safely categorized as manifestations of stone age practice.(!))

The fact is that the Sri Lankan forces are not bombing anybody back to the Stone Age. There is a resistance borne out of a need for containment. Contain the Tiger, before the Tiger extremism enlarges into an unmanageable commodity. It’s a task not to be sidetracked by or confused with Buddha gazing naval gazing or any such holier than thou idiocy.