A long view of constitution making

The things people first wrote down

by Kumar David-January 23, 2016, 4:42 pm 

Hard determinists say that leaders of the day cannot shape history; they, like the rest of us, are adrift on a sea of titanic waves. This is going too far; to a degree men do make their destiny, though not under conditions of their choosing but under "circumstances existing and transmitted from the past which hang like a nightmare on the brains of the living". Tamil extremists say that RW and MS are no different from Sinhala racists and deep-down do not wish to concede anything to Tamils. This is not true; a rancid cancer eats the soul of racists but it is false to metastasise this to RW/MS. However, neither do I go along with butter-won’t-melt-in-their-mouth liberals who fail to recognise that RW/MS and their ilk are afraid; afraid of a chauvinist backlash and lack the political equipment and confidence in the ability of the people to confront and defeat proto-fascist racism. Mobilisation is the last word in their lexicon.

If national leaders lack the guts to tell racism ‘Four-letter off, or suffer a broken nose’, they will repeatedly retreat in the face of the bigots. Let’s begin with four items that I fear will be built into the new constitution. Secularism will be spurned and Buddhism will facto endure as state religion; the state will continue to be defined as "unitary"; Sinhala-Only with "reasonable squealing" in Tamil will remain the formal norm; devolution will be evaded and federalism eschewed, but to give the devil its due as much regional administrative space as can be smuggled in without wetting pants/national dress will be inserted. There will be needless constraints on the space for the North and East to administer themselves, not because the government is racist, but because it funks racists. This, lovely ladies and kind gentlemen, is the plain unvarnished truth. Now, am I too harsh or are they wisely pragmatic; you decide.

Ministerial cowardice and Cabinet confusion are manifest in a report in the Island of 16 January; "Cabinet spokesman Dr. Rajitha Senaratne reiterated that the process will be a domestic process and not a hybrid process as proposed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights". The PM on the other hand steadfastly assures the world that Lanka will live up to the undertakings it gave in Geneva.

If a majority of the vast majority, meaning most Sinhalese who make up 75% of the population, are moved to spill blood than countenance change in the four die-hard constitutional blots referred to in the previous paragraph, then they won’t be changed. QED! Try making Saudi Arabia or Israel secular and riots and disorder will engulf the land. Tweak the antediluvian monarchy in Thailand and be eviscerated while the populace cheers. So don’t waste time with the undoable; politics as we are so often told is the art of the possible. Though Obama is the most intellectual US president since Woodrow Wilson and the most inspiring orator since Lincoln, his presidency has achieved little. It ran aground on an immovable rock, an elected Congress. The Obama presidency could NOT have achieved much more than it did.

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