Post-Pāda Yātrā – Punditry & Polemics

By Sarath De Alwis –August 16, 2016

Sarath de Alwis

To say of what is, that it is, or of what is not, that it is not, is true. ~ Aristotle.

Confusing friend and foe with right and wrong is an occupational hazard of partisan commentators. Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka is no exception to the rule. Despite the voluntary stepping on a discursive banana skin, his latest essay ‘Politics Post-Pāda Yātrā: From Here To 2020’, delivers some startlingly uncomfortable home truths to those in power.

As the ideologue of the joint opposition, he has decided to mentor his charges in the role of a Clausewitz and drawn a strategy map for them. It was von Clausewitz who said “Engagements mean fighting. The object of fighting is the destruction or defeat of the enemy.” It was also Clausewitz who warned that theories become infinitely more difficult as soon as ‘they touch the realm of moral values.” Dr. Jayatilleka earns the admiration of this writer for his unvarnished contempt for moral integrity in political combat. He is well informed of the enormity of the crisis that confronts the nation and the government.

We are saddled with an economy sinking under a mountain of debt, a parliament where no meaningful debate is possible and an unprincipled government. The leading English weekend Broadsheet in a recent editorial summed up the crisis of governance by the Sirisena –Wickremesinghe consociation with agonizing clarity. “Politicians, past and present, are playing with fire using the debt card to attack each other as the country slides down the slippery slope of a debt trap. Then, the Government places the future of the country in the hands of a secretive few, some with vested interests, accusing others of destabilising the country’s economy when they are doing just that by themselves.”

The editor of the most widely read English Sunday News Paper was echoing widely held and broadly expressed public disgust.

So, Dr. Dayan Jayatillake does not need to exert himself. With detached calm, he explores the mine field that the government has to traverse in the coming months. He is acutely aware of the malaise, the pain and the cure.

His suggestion is what any general would make on discovery of an open flank on the opposite side. But, he wants a scorched earth policy. He wants the opposition to combine economic disruption and ethnic discord as their primary targets. He makes it abundantly clear to all that the sole purpose of the Pāda Yātrā was to restore Rajapaksa rule and or to thwart investigations into their barefaced frauds and outright embezzlements.

He offers options. “.. The more you resort to economic cut backs the less you can concede on either accountability or ethnic autonomy, because you are dealing with growing numbers of disaffected people from the majority community.” Then he twists the blade. “Indeed the more you push economic shock therapy together with ethnic devolution, the more you risk a backlash. The more you combine economic shock therapy, ethnic devolution and wartime accountability into a cocktail and shake it, the more likely it is to become incendiary.”

Dr. Dayan Jayatillake is undoubtedly a bright political scientist. He is adequately versed in Foucault’s theory of subtle and stealthy power to know the difference between the stratocracy that ended on 8th January 2015 and the faulty democracy that replaced it.

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