-By Virgil
(Lanka-e-News -16.Jan.2025, 10.35 AM) “A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.” ~Thomas Hardy
They were asleep when the Rajapaksas were looting our treasury. They looked the other way when Ranil Wickremasinghe employed the same corrupt politicians as Ministers and allowed them to run the treasury further into debt. They started singing praise of the Wickremasinghe regime for managing the country's economy in a more prudent way than the Rajapaksas did. That management was all thanks to the IMF input, both financially and as an administrative monitor of economic process as well. They willfully enabled the corrupt politicians every step of the way. They went to sleep with their deals under their pillows and women of evening over them.
They were the ultimate masters of this dreadful malignancy called deal-making politics. For them life was a endless and continuing transaction; quid pro quo politics gave way for service of man. They were the henchmen and women of the regimes that corrupted our successive administrations. They entertained the Ministers and Junior and State Ministers; into that lot of the entertained was bunched in the top brass of the bureaucracy. The total governing machinery was on their palm. The private sector, which was once the incorruptible and efficient, which was once honest and target-driven, lost its soul, body and mind.
This one single stakeholder of the country's massive governance system made its masters dance to their tune; multitudes of others, hundreds of thousands of low-level partners of the same economy were crushed; their bleeding never stopped until one day the people who gathered on Galleface Green said enough is enough. Aragalaya-22 saw to it that never will we suffer the shame of being humiliated and subjected to global ridicule.
Instead of the broad masses, it was this class of wrong-doers and masqueraders, this segment of our population that exploited the Covid19-scarcities, whose ruthless exercise of their limited but enormously powerful capital-backed offenses and evil deeds made the country's bankruptcy a reality. However, this class managed to dwell under the radar. Their access to equally evil politicians was their passport to entry into and exit from the rule of law. Even the masses were bewildered by their invisibility and impunity from crime.
These enablers' endless quest for power and money, their inexhaustible avarice and ambition facilitated for the politicians' stay in the seats of power, perceived to be permanent. They never displayed any modicum of morality or ethical conduct, public or private. They, along with their political masters, never observed any obsession with purity in public service. What was known and accepted as a noble profession, politics became an embellishing ornament one would wear around their necks and wrists as a nobler badge. A culture that was totally in conflict with decent and civilized living was being built and worshiped. How can we meander wondering as to its development and brutal trajectory so that an entire society became willing or unwilling victims of that very culture?
The dynamics of a developing social phenomenon slowly but surely caught hold of the day to day living of the average man and woman, until the country became financially bankrupt. A man who was elected to power by an enormous majority of ordinary voters had to leave office in the most shameful and uncivil manner. Still that class of men who operated the system from behind the curtain remained unobserving. They did not demand purity and ethical conduct from their political gurus.
But thanks mainly to Aragalaya-22, the the average man, a vast majority of our citizenry sought an alternative, a way out of the existing and a route into a new reality . A new President and a new Parliament were elected. The mandate endorsed by this vast majority was not limitless, yet it was unequivocal and with unwritten conditions.
Having been influenced by the non-violent and compassionate teachings of Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha, our people have got accustomed to be placid when confronted by cruel and insensitive rulers. Instead of resorting to revenge and demanding their own pound of flesh, they succumb to the demands of the rulers. However, when driven by chauvinistic racial emotions, they have, in the past, indulged in the most heinous crimes against humanity. Multiple incidences of ethnic violence that has erupted since Independence is one example of such mayhem. This is not only among Sinhalese Buddhists, but also has been prevalent amongst Tamils.
Greek philosopher Plato said thus: “One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” He challenged the then prevailing intelligentsia and entreated with them to participate in this great profession of politics, which it once was. More than a millennia hence, politics has become a handy tool amongst the powerful and affluent. Education being made available only to a class that enjoyed excess cash and assets such as land, trade and industry, those who entered politics were members of an exclusive club of men and women whose elitist status provided both shelter and playground for the abuse of power that flows from such political power.
Our punditry fell victim to this bizarre sociopolitical net. Punditry too was entertained and their pockets made full of excessive disposable cash by the same practitioners of politics. Along with the corrupters, the corrupted too resigned themselves to a false reality of comfort and glory. The poor voter who with no access to any disposable income believed what was articulated by the punditry, without questioning the validity and authenticity about what was being disseminated by this punditry class.
While politicos, henchmen and the punditry availed themselves of all the comforts and luxuries that a bankrupt nation could hardly afford, the poor were left to lick their fingers in utter starvation. That is the cruel reality that stared in our face when Aragalaya-22 occurred. That is history now.
The same punditry class is now engaging in an obsession of sort; they are obsessed with 'perfection' in all governmental matters. Whether it's the economy at large, corruption, accountability and everything else, those who chose to close their eyes and ears to the unspoken misery that was brought about by the Rajapaksa/Wickremasinghe combination is now demanding perfection from AKD and the NPP. One cannot shut them down. That is not how a democracy or a free country operates. Allow their viewpoint, but we must willfully choose to hurl legitimate and valid contra points and arguments at them so that the intelligent voter would be able differentiate between those who walk the talk and those who only talked.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
Virgil's Collection
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/21
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by (2025-01-16 05:13:16)
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