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| Sunday, 6 February 2005 |
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Struck by a tsunami of freedom Light Refractions by Lucien Rajakarunanayake 'The road of Providence is uneven and unpredictable - yet we know where it leads: It leads to freedom'. U.S. President George W Bush, concluding his State of the Union address February 2, 2005.
The guns have boomed their salute to the nation. The armed services have marched in a show of strength and national pride. Yet, what has the uneven and unpredictable road of providence, which has lasted through 57 years of independence, really brought to us? As we commemorate the birth of freedom after nearly 500 years of colonial rule, what freedoms do we really enjoy? We are a democracy, in the sense that the people elect their representatives time and again. We will boast that we have the basic freedoms of thought, speech, publication, assembly, religious belief and worship. All very good to know, but do we really enjoy any of these in the full democratic sense of freedom? We do have freedom of thought and freedom of speech, coupled with the freedom to be threatened or even killed for our thoughts, our speech or writings. Just think of the number of Tamils who have been killed in the past year alone, only for thinking differently from the LTTE. We do have the freedom of publication, often controlled by the interests of advertisers, or the agenda of media owners, be they of the State or the private sector. We also have the freedom of the wild ass, where the freedom of speech and publication are grossly abused, with the least sense of responsibility to society. We have hate speech in plenty, and unverified reportage in large measure. We are indeed making great strides in keyhole journalism of the voyeur at its worst. As any democratic state would have it, we too have a police service, to protect the rights of the people. The citizen has every right to go to the police with a complaint. But somehow our freedom to complain is mixed with a dread of violent or even fatal repercussions. We must be ranking high among functioning democracies, for the number of persons found dead in police custody in any one year. Does anyone speak of the freedom to die and how? At elections we have a record of having very high turnouts at the polls. The elections are keenly contested, but worryingly enough both vice and violence still play a major role in the conduct of our free and fair elections. The best example of the success of violence at the polls is the 22 members of the TNA now in parliament, in an election condemned as being the result of violence, threats of violence and vote ringing, by every polls observer from here and abroad. Our freedom is so abundant that with all this evidence against them, they are still free to claim themselves to be the sole representatives of the Tamil people. Nowhere else has political freedom been so vibrant and rewarding as it is in Sri Lanka today. With the maturity of 57 years of freedom we have an electoral system, which is a joke to those who are elected by it too, as none other than the Speaker Vee. Ja. Mu, himself said at a seminar the last weekend. He said he feels ashamed to admit being elected by this system. But our freedom is such that we are in a gridlock as to how we can change such an abominable electoral system. So too the near Herculean task of changing the Executive Presidency, which is a bastardising of the Westminster system, cross fertilised by powers of the French and U. S. Presidencies, without the checks and balances that those countries have. We are so free that the very mention of changing this system, through the power of the people is thought by those who yearn for that position as blasphemy of the Temple of Democracy. What ranks highest in our society today is the freedom of the elected politician. Responsible to none but those who paid for his or her election campaign, this is the manifestation of the political animal in the human at its nadir. They are untouched by the traditional restraints of shame and fear at the core of civilised Sri Lankan society. Shameless and unrestrained, responsible to none, the vast majority of them wallow in profit gained mainly through corrupt means and unjust enrichment at a cost to the people. While other vibrant democracies such as our neighbour India hold fast to the tradition of secular and pluralist politics, we use our freedom to descend to the depths of intolerance, be it religious or communal, with pluralism being threatened by the search for conformity and the absence of diversity. We have been struck by such a tsunami of freedom, that the loudest of voices are raised to give the police a free hand in what is said to be a campaign to eradicate underworld crime. Knowing well how much the police is connected with the underworld, are we certain that those being killed are not those who the police fear would squeal about such contacts? Have these underworld elements already eliminated have any such connections with the police that required hiding, and will there be such hiding done in the name of law and order in the future too? How much is the freedom of all threatened by this pooja at the altar of Law and Order? What we face today is a tsunami of freedom, not for the people but for the corrupt and the corruptible; huge waves of intolerance and conformity. The Tigers have clamped down on all freedoms where their roar is the writ. Can we really believe that beyond the roar of the tiger, we have strengthened or seriously advanced any of the freedoms that we won with independence? With all our freedom have we not already forgotten the lesson of unity that came with the tsunami waves? Else, are we not making a collective joke about what freedom is all about? |
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| Produced by Lake House |
Hold on I'm not a born again American Republican. I do not share the
Bush view of freedom. It's just that I was intrigued by this concluding
comment in his State of the Union address. Having just marked the 57th
anniversary of our own freedom from colonial rule, many would make an
amendment to this conclusion, to say: "The road of providence is
uneven and unpredictable yet we know where it leads: It leads to a
tsunami".
