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| Sunday, 28 July 2002 |
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Will the real Dr. Sarath Amunugama please stand up? Sunday Essay by AJITH SAMARANAYAKE Part political tract and part autobiography Dr. Sarath Amunugama's new book 'Anthima Satana' is primarily a social democratic manifesto. After wading into the murky waters of party politics following a distinguished career in the Administrative Service Amunugama has sported many political labels. He has been in the relatively short-lived Democratic United National Front of Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake followed by the UNP and now sits on the SLFP benches in Parliament. Has the SLFP then embraced social democracy as its chosen credo? While this is perhaps a question which should be answered by Mr. Amunugama himself wearing his other hat as the SLFP's (or is it the PA's?) official media spokesman what this book brings out is the ambivalence between the intellectual and the politician in public life. For apart from being an administrator (he belonged to the last batch of the Ceylon Civil Service) Amunugama is also a sociologist. He studied under the legendary Prof. Ralph Peiris and assisted in the two path-breaking studies undertaken by Edmund Leach and Gananath Obeysekere of the Sinhala village. He also studied at the University of Paris and Harward University collecting his doctorate from the former. He is therefore one of the very few politicians who can afford to call himself an intellectual without inviting a sneer. But what of Amunugama the politician? He says that he had given up a career in academia (he was a lecturer at Peradeniya when he sat for the CCS exam) at the behest of his father who had urged on him that here was a way of serving his country. On the same token after reaching the zenith of his administrative service career (he retired as Secretary to the Ministry of State) he had taken to politics, Amunugama says, because real power lay there and not with the Administrative Service which had progressively become a tool of the politicians. But the point is that in our day and time effective political power does not lie with an MP or even with a Cabinet Minister or perhaps even with the Prime Minister as the present tug-of-war between the President and the Cabinet demonstrates. It resides at the very heart of the Executive Presidency. This book is a fascinating, if somewhat repetitive, exposition of political ideas which derives an added flavour from the anecdotal touch which the author introduces. Amunugama has been everywhere and met everybody. He has read everything and here he sums up for the Sinhala reader the distillation of his thinking. In that sense it is a valuable contribution to an impoverished Sinhala political literature and should come as a much-needed tonic to Sinhala readers and the politically-conscious youth starved of new thinking. In spite of his feudal background Amunugama is by instinct and conditioning not a conservative. In spite of his respect for Marxism and some of Sri Lanka's senior Marxist leaders he is repelled by the authoritarian structures built on the base of ideological Communism. He is attracted to Liberalism but cannot quite sympathise with a liberalism which sees the world purely in terms of individual freedom and private enterprise. That is why he expounds the credo of social democracy combining civil rights, social welfare and a dynamic economic growth which however does not deteriorate into unbridled capitalism. He is particularly enthusiastic about the Third Way expounded by Tony Blair among others. Sri Lanka's politics Amunugama sees in terms of the decline of liberal parliamentary democracy. He sees the reigns of Prime Ministers D. S. Senanayake, Dudley Senanayake and S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike as the golden age of liberal democracy. He admires the LSSP and the CP and their individual leaders for the struggle they waged to bring about welfare legislation and improve the quality of life but deplores their doctrinaire squabbling and mania for nationalisation and central planning. He is dismayed by the decay of agriculture and the consequent disintegration of the village. He laments the dissonance between an education system emphasising pure book-learning and an economic system demanding workers with particular skills. He deplores the politicisation of the bureaucracy. What then is the way out? Amunugama sees this in terms of rapid economic development combining industrialisation and large-scale commercial agriculture within the framework of a social democracy encouraging a meritocracy and based on an education system powered by technology. Needless to say these are ideas to which most reasonable politicians should be able to subscribe in a world where the differences between the Left and the Right are becoming steadily obliterated and ideological Communism has crumbled to the dust. However what Amunugama does not make quite clear is the distinction between capitalism and social democracy. How does the path of development pursued by the UNP for example or the UNF differ from that pursued by the SLFP or the PA? While social democracy might be a valid doctrine for the advanced countries of Europe how do we apply the standards of social democracy in an under-developed Third World country such as Sri Lanka which has to listen to the dictates of the international lending agencies whose only panacea is the very unbridled capitalism and the attack on social welfare which Dr. Amunugama denounces? While these ideas are no doubt commendable they will remain mere concepts if one lacks the political power to implement them. This might be one reason why Dr. Amunugama crossed over from the UNP to the PA some time ago and remained for a short while as a Cabinet Minister but even if we overlook that the more important question is how one gains political power. Politics in Sri Lanka today has become so warped, distorted and polluted that it is well-nigh impossible for a man of any respectability to think of taking to politics although Minister Milinda Moragoda might think otherwise. Amunugama himself is harsh about those who politicised the public service and when he writes of a photograph circulated by an international news agency of a young public servant helplessly gnashing his teeth at the sight of some thugs stuffing a ballot box in his polling station somewhere in Mawatagama during the Wayamba Provincial Council Election (remember it?) this looks almost like a cartoon of a schizophrenic ex-SLAS official Amunugama pointing an accusing finger at the politician Amunugama. Sometimes Sarath Amunugama the writer seems to have forgotten that he is also a politician. In spite of this Janus-faced posture this is a stimulating book but we are still left with the riddle. How does one obtain political power by fair means and given the near impossibility of doing this was it worth the candle for Dr. Sarath Amunugama to have taken to politics? And by extension do intellectuals have any useful role to play in a politics polluted by chicanery, opportunism and thuggery in what appears chillingly to be the twilight of liberal democracy? |
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