Sri Lanka’s Future – Three Scenarios

By Razeen Sally –January 27, 2017

We have to ask ourselves some very hard, direct questions. One is this: Sinhala society is very hierarchical. There is historically been a yearning for the “big man” in sinhala society, a dutugamunu character. The political conditions may be right for someone who pretends to be that kind of man. Sinhala habits of the heart as it were. It’s not that long ago that Sinhala mobs not only burnt Tamil shops but also Tamil people. And disgustingly mutilated other Sinhalese in coastal roads and the hill country. It is not that long ago that atrocities equally, if not more worse were committed by the LTTE and other Tamil terrorist groups. Is that really behind us? I’m not that persuaded. I would like to say that it is. But I think Sri Lanka’s foundations are too brittle.

A public lecture by Prof. Razeen Sally in Colombo on the broad theme of “Sri Lanka’s future – Three scenarios” to educate people on Take off the Sri Lankan economy, Drift & Stagnation and the Reversal of Sri Lankan economy organised by Advocata Institute in last December:

I just want to make three points before I get into the hard content of my talk. The first is to reinforce the points that Advocata Institute COO Dhananath made about Advocata.

The time is definitely right for a Think Tank forum to promote limited government, free markets in a genuinely open society here in Sri Lanka. This combination has been very weakly represented. It is a set of beliefs that scattered individuals hold, but it’s time that they were represented collectively; and also to appeal to the young, the dynamic, the aspirational, not just here in Colombo but beyond, in the second tier cities, in the small towns and in particular, among those whose mother tongues are Sinhala and Tamil.

I would hope as Advocata grows, that it does things genuinely differently. There are far too many organizations, including think tanks here in Sri Lanka that are very hierarchical, very stuffy, very bureaucratic, very cautious and which seem to be unable and unwilling to communicate with the public out there in straight plain-talking language. So I’m counting on Advocata people to do things differently to be un- hierarchical, un- stuffy, un- bureaucratic, to speak in plainly and to show that collectively things can be done differently in Sri Lanka to appeal to the kind of audience that I mentioned before — the young, dynamic and the aspirational.

The ideas that people have been faced with in the past have clearly not worked.

It begins with a romantic socialism which still attracts some thinking people. Sri Lanka has had its fair share of revolutionary utopias. They have been refuted by history. We now know the reality of how Russia and China really worked rather than the romantic visions of them going back a generation or two. There are still some people in Sri Lanka who eulogized Fidel Castro when he died just a couple of weeks ago. Well we know, it is documented, that Fidel Castro was a crook, a thug and a murderer on a not insignificant scale. Well he was a saint of course when compared to Stalin and Mao who between them and among them killed scores more than even Hitler. So we should say goodbye to those revolutionary utopians.

I have a quote here from the German poet Friedrich Holderlin who said, “What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven” and we should not try to make heaven on earth because we may end up making a living hell out of it.

Sri Lanka is also seduced by communal socialism of the Tamil variety, and the Sinhala variety and they have torn this country apart. It has been seduced by the crony socialism of the SLFP and who has that benefited? The Bandaranayake’s, then the Rajapaksas and their bootlickers of course. Finally, not least not least Sri Lanka has been seduced by the crony capitalism of the UNP and who has that benefited? a Colombo oligarchy of course, but not nearly enough Sri Lankans outside that circle.

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