How We Came To This Pass – II

By Sachithanandam Sathananthan –JUNE 27, 2019

Dr. Sachithanandam Sathananthan

Missing the Singapore Moments

The shattering impact of April 21, 2019 and May anti-Muslim Pogromswe discussed in Part 1[1]has triggered the Sinhalese intelligentsia’s recurrent breast beating: why hasn’t Sri Lanka emulated (if not superseded) Singapore’s success? One writer lamented, “it is ironic that Lee Kwan Yu, in an early visit declared that Singapore should consider Ceylon as a role model. See where we stand now – the tables have turned!”[2]

In fact Lee Kwan Yu had wisely abandoned that role model early on. During our visit to Singapore in 1972, he was repeatedly quoted exemplifying Ceylon as a case beyond redemption of how NOT to run a country. That, however, did not prevent the Sinhalese political class from conjuring up placebo effects of supposed Singapore Miracles.

We have often heard Lanka’s critical intellectuals moan that the country missed several of its “Singapore Moments”. The list varies with each analyst though the conclusion is same: where did Ceylon/Lanka go wrong?

Many have questioned the relevance of Singapore Island’s experience to other, especially larger societies. China’s late leader Deng Xiaoping, who admired Singapore, had reportedly said: “If I had only Shanghai, I too might be able to change Shanghai as quickly (as Singapore). But I have the whole of China.”[3]

Nevertheless, according to Lee Kuan Yew, Deng Xiaoping duringa meeting with him had picked up a few tips from Singapore’s experience.[4]So the island of Ceylon/Sri Lanka could not be an exception; and comparisons are worth exploring.

The passing of each Singapore Moment induced a transient lucidity. A group of twinkle toed Liberals [5]discovered the wheel: “There is a growing and disturbing environment of mistrust and intolerance in our diverse communities”, after April 21. “Looking back at 71 years of independence”, reflected another, “it is evident that those who wielded the reins of power have not had the foresight, the qualities of leadership or the political commitment needed to ensure lasting peace”.[6]

If so, whatever happened to the much-flaunted “vibrant democracy” that hapless Liberals fantasize they diligently learnt at the feet of their colonial master on those ever so infrequent occasions he took time off from looting and raping our land?

Does the current “Plunder Of Public Property By Rulers”[7]merely proves that hyenas dominating the Era of the Common Man are, after a delicate decade-long interregnum following Independence, putting into practice the art of unbridled pillage they imbibed at the feet of the same colonial master?

Why did “the people”, who pride themselves about an educational system that ensured almost 100% literacy, choose virtually bankrupt leaderships election after election who are utterly incapable of creatively building upon the fortuitously advantageous remnants of colonial structures, as Singapore’s leaders have so impressively done?

Do Singaporean bureaucrats plod along futilely rewriting history by the cosmetic replacement of most Colonial street and place names with those of Chinese icons?

OR did the Lankan leaderships in fact have the “foresight” to nurture and entrench that which they perceived as in their own interests, both personal and class-wise? And did they have those “qualities of leadership” to bamboozle the people that most everything done was in their, public interest? We think so.

(a) Defending feudalist interests

An enduring myth in Sri Lanka is that the first Prime Minister, D.S.Senanayake (ethnically Sinhalese) had thought up the State-assisted land colonisation schemes, implemented under his 1935 Land Development Ordinance (LDO).

On the floor of the State Council in the 1940s, the budding Sinhalese political class boomed the distribution of State land under the Ordinance as a great patriotic venture to reclaim the fabled Tank Irrigation Civilisation, allegedly vitiated by foreigners (take your pick – Cholas/Portuguese/Dutch/British/all together).

But the colonial administration’s Government Agent C.V.Brayne [8]in fact had dreamed up the idea much earlier, in1920. He envisaged a peasant proprietor system in which State land would be distributed to growing numbers of landless farmers under a form of inheritable but protected tenure, which disallowed sub-division as well as trading of alienated State land.

His twin aims were to arrest the process of proletarianisation that was (a) throwing up an expanding and potentially subversive agrarian working class and (b) destabilising the economy by disrupting paddy cultivation.

The concept did not find many takers until D.S.Senanayake and his cohorts, steeped in feudalist values, laid their hands on it. They found Brayne’s idea fascinating for several reasons.

First,universal franchise introduced under the 1931 Donoughmore Constitution, almost overnight, essentially transformed subjects into citizens/voters. Brayne’s peasant proprietorship system offered mouth-watering scope to create electoral vote banks by alienating State land at no cost to the politicians and with virtual certainty to buy them votes.

Second,the economic crisis of the early 1930s (in wake of the 1929 Depression) pushed up unemployment. Senanayake’s administration characterized it as “landlessness”, which term prompted and justified distribution of State land as a quick fix and also to pre-empt agitation by the unemployed.

Third,State-subsidised land alienation could be manipulated to weaken the Left’s popular base by arresting the growth of landless rural workers. The proposed protected tenure would tie them down to land and restrict their out-migration that could swell the urban workforce, large sections of whom were seen to dangerously lean towards the Left – the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP).

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