The pandemic and the economic meltdown that followed a year later changed the country. The political landscape underwent a complete transformation. That’s the reality now and is no longer news. But other changes to the social fabric have been ignored in the meantime. These changes aren’t deliberately forgotten. Rather, it’s just that people have not been cued into these transformations and the fact that they have taken place.
The economic tumult brought people together in a way that was never thought possible before. This is a major leap forward in a country that came mostly to be identified with ethnic and religious schisms, and wars and other calamities that resulted. Today, the nation is identified with its natural beauty and its vacation possibilities, as it should be, and not by its reputation for violence.
crisis
This writer has written before about how the economic crisis brought about a collective realisation that the community is better united, than divided. Though it is axiomatic that unity is strength, unfortunately it took the tumult of shortages, and skyrocketing inflation to make people come to the realisation that they were perhaps being exploited by those engaged in the politics of division.
It seems that there is currently, an attempt to set the clock back on this progress. The loss of power and influence is to some, akin to a death blow. That these people would be desperate to claw back and return to power is not surprising.
But that they would choose to revert back to race-baiting so soon was not something expected. But they chose to stir the pot on social media. It is happening in other countries too. Far-right nationalists have resorted to xenophobia in the midst of an immigration crisis in faraway Europe. But we in Sri Lanka do not have an immigration issue, we only have emigration mania. People want to leave our shores; there aren’t people of other nationalities clamouring to come here and start living as locals.
But the drivers of racism and xenophobia are the same. Politicians try to use race-baiting demagoguery to begin amassing political support for themselves. There was an abundance of this type of anti-Muslim sentiment whipped up at various sporadic intervals before the economic meltdown of 2022 put a stop to all that.
In that context, 2022 was the year of the people. It was not because there was an Aragalaya. But, it was due to the people discovering a sense of community in collective helplessness. Some of the rich were helpless, and so were the poor in the face of power cuts and a fuel crisis. Even the rich that had bought generators could not find the fuel most of the time to power these devices.
People in the plantations and in the Northern Province discovered that the Sinhala people were just as subject to the machinations of politicians as they were. Establishment politics became anathema to people.
This writer has been to Haputale where Ambika Samuel the NPP firebrand from the plantations hails from. The ordinary people in this cozy hill country outpost, post-economic meltdown, were intent on wishing demonic curses on every house, and this included their unions that had been led by slick folk that visited them occasionally in Prados.
But three-wheeler drivers in the tea plantations had survived by cultivating backyard vegetable plots during the meltdown. There was no divide during these times between the merchant classes and the labour-folk as both categories had no fuel to cook food, or to power their vehicles.
Now that all this is over, on social media there is an attempt to re-ignite racism by resurrecting racist imagery from the past. It is a very cynical tactic, but there is no appetite for it in the first place from among the ordinary people, no matter their ethnic group.
But the washed out politicians of yesteryear are not about to give up trying. They tried to dig up racist imagery from the immediate post-war time, and attempted to foist their opportunism and bigotry on people who had firmly put these failings behind them.
The worst outcome for them was that they had no traction, and this was exactly what happened. This was to be expected. Ethno-nationalist politics in both the Tamil majority parts and the rest of the country had petered out. Those who tried to coalesce around these types of causes, realised that they only had their base support which was rather negligible.
support
With this base support, they could only manage to literary grab one or two seats here and there at the parliamentary elections. When what they advocate is so out of fashion, it is surprising that they expected to stir up racist divisions so soon after the elections.
It is mostly the utterly cynical lumpen elements of political parties that were trying to whip up these racially motivated sentiments, but these people found to their disappointment that the powder-keg situation that prevailed during the pre-economic-meltdown days does not prevail anymore. They couldn’t light a match and ignite a racist prairie fire try as they might, because there is no flammable material anymore in society.
People are extremely caught up with making a living these days, and the upside to that being, there is very little free time for them to seek entertainment in politics. That used to be a pastime in this country which considered politics to be a sport, perhaps, a bloodsport.
The people are now extremely cynical about politicians seeking to divide communities. They had the Armed Forces and a paramilitary force styling themselves as liberators fighting the war ostensibly on their behalf, during the tense war days. But now they have themselves been in the ‘trenches’ so to say, fighting an economic battle to keep body and soul together. They realised that nobody, no fighting force, is going to fight that battle for them on that score.
It is why they became cynical to the point of bitterness about establishment politicians. This latter rejected breed think they can now bide their time and stage a comeback riding those old tired and threadbare hobby-horse causes exploring ethnic divisions.
But people have found a new kind of entertainment. They don’t want to watch fellow citizens belonging to a different ethnic community squirm for their titillation anymore, but these days they’d rather watch some of those race-baiting politicians of yesteryear squirm instead.
In this way, the tables have turned. The hunters have become the hunted. Definitely, as far as ethnic amity and community cooperation is concerned, this is a very good place for the country to be in. Race-baiters are seen as the boorish elements they are, and what used to be considered their heroics is considered abhorrent these days.
They say, no pain, no gain. If the economic meltdown is the price we have had to pay for the fact that there is national amity, that seems to have been, cynical though it may sound, a price worth paying.
In abundance, even in relative comfort, a community of citizens gets spoilt and temperamental, just as children from rich families sometimes have no anchor and tend to run amok. Today, people are chastened. They realise that if they pander to opportunistic politicians, they would sooner or later have to pay the price.
There are unscrupulous elements looking for fault lines, where they think they can find some even at this late stage. They think they can hone in on enough frustrations among people to make them fall back into their old behavioural patterns of being paranoid about the ‘other’ — people of other races, religions and the like.
But unlike in Europe, where there is still room for demagoguery because the economy never hit rock bottom, we who have experienced that nadir are strong enough to repel the bigots. Xenophobia always finds fuel in a comfort zone. People may be dissatisfied, but if they have just enough or enough and more as they do in Europe, they can be egged onto be xenophobic or racist. But it can no longer be done here in this country, because we have been through the wringer already.
