Sri Lanka’s Worst Ailment: Lack Of Visionary & Selfless Leadership

By Vishwamithra –APRIL 6, 2021

“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.” ~ Aristotle

That is precisely where our current leadership and the preceding ones have failed so miserably.

History bears witness that on each and every occasion our nation was confronted by an unprecedented conundrum, a unique kind of ‘come or go, Chicago’ situation, whenever she was challenged by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, either on the socioeconomic front or in the political sphere, she always tapped into her inner strength, garnered support for herself by rallying the masses, may not be around an alien ideology, but around a set of tangible goals and purposes. The people may not have really followed a set of ideas and ideals. They followed those who were so skillful in articulating such easily understandable and relatable ideas and ideals.

Architecture of an ideology comprises of the very foundation on which the basic structures of that ideology stands. Each stratum of the structure needs to be buttressed and any extra ounce of strength that is inserted into the bones and marrow of that structure needs to be based on science and science alone. And never on superstition and religious mayhem.

Yet we Ceylonese, as human beings scattered all over this green globe, are very susceptible and  prone to acceptance of quick solutions. Our adaptation to superstitious fidelities, just as much we swear allegiance to the existence of unseen and inscrutable gods that seem not to mind ill-gotten wealth and comforts of all those impostors cum swindlers, compels us to pursue the same faulty paths that have been trodden by our forefathers.

Indian writer, Sarojini Naidu wrote: “When there is oppression, the only self-respecting thing is to rise and say this shall cease today, because my right is justice…” Why the current stream of Sri Lankan men and women who had been exposed to such sublime teachings of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha on Enlightenment and supreme velour of mind, have apparently chosen to be comfortable with mere placidity and apathy in the face of injustice, corruption and nepotism is just mind-boggling. Of Sarojini Naidu wrote our own D B Dhanapala: ‘She has fought for woman’s right for room of her own as for the nation’s right for a kingdom of her own. And she fought with charm, laughter, tears and flights of poetry’. (Source: Eminent Indians, page 60). Where do such women and men come from? They certainly have not come from Ceylon. 

That is precisely where our current leadership and the preceding ones have failed so miserably. Their collective blindness to reality coupled with stoical commitment to power and fame have taken the country to an abyss of ruin and social debauchery. Their pursuits have been undeterred and unopposed by the circumstance they themselves had been instrumental in creating with wicked intentions. “The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.” So wrote Herodotus, the father of History. In the absence of the usual infrastructure and teachers in our system, education and knowledge being made available to those who wielded power and money, the general populace is literally kept in illiteracy. As a cruel consequence of this warped system of education, we have been producing bookworms with degrees instead of men and women of wisdom and intellectual stature.

The leaders that this flawed system threw out were the same. Lacking in empathetic values, heavily pregnant with their own egoistical superiority, these leaders led all of us into corners from which we find hard to extricate ourselves from. The so-called leaders have failed the country, their ideals and themselves, lock, stock and barrel, to use the much abused cliché!

They clung on to dated theories of Indian expansionism into Ceylon; to notions of hill country Tamils devouring the rest of the hinterland from the center; to their perennial fear of being squeezed by Tamil Nadu, the Tamilian State of India. The term Kalla-Toni became an attractive slander against a much depressed class of people whose lifestyles were more akin to those of refugees in a foreign land expending their labor for a meager wage of less than a domestic in a Sinhalese household, or for that matter, Tamil dwellings in the Northern peninsula.