by Dr D. Chandraratna
It will be hard to find any other country among modern nations where the politicians treat citizens with condescension. Partly they deserve such treatment for they elect them time after time knowing very well their DNA makeup and then cry foul when they do not deliver. It is sad but true that we are a battered and bruised nation radiating little hope.
None seems worried that the warning lights are flashing all around us; our public policies on any subject common to nations who lean on science to enrich human life are non-existent. Instead we lean on mystics and shamans to deliver. The most popular public discussions are on whether the Buddha was born in Sri Lanka or the truth behind Ravana's escapades in the hills. Practically every other aspect is a fiasco. Be it the energy policy, education, economy or national debt there is hardly any worthwhile dialogue for change at the national level.
Business and finance are in disarray and in the opinion of the Prime Minister the economy he built up over three and a half years has crashed in 51 days since the October event. What it suggests to intelligent people is the fragility of the economy to crash due to the lowering of taxes of a few consumer items. We know of no other scam done by Mr Rajapaksa in that time period. But we are used to this kind of rhetoric without facts, figures and trends and as usual they think that masses are asses. In progressive nations when politicians talk of the economy they talk of economic growth or recession in percentage terms, buttressed by statistics on job growth, corporate investment, deficits, debt ratios and the like.
The political culture is fractured as the PM has recently pointed out which was obvious to us from a long time. We also knew that the institutions, which hold our democracy steady, are damaged and broken and public confidence low. There is an entrenched hostility towards the politicians in general.
The politicians are held in such disdain that it is not beyond the realms of possibility that democracy can ever function in this country. If the price is right any local or foreign power can destroy a government for around 10-15 million dollars at the asking prices today. The issue as evidenced in the past few months is whether this kind of political dysfunction is our new norm and more seriously whether we will sink into further malaise. The narrative of political dysfunction is hard to capture.
We cannot see what political parties stand for. As usual they venerate personalities and not policies. None can tell whether they are to the left, centre or right and these ideological terms, which had enormous policy sense in the past, are just political claptrap. The only characteristic that a political analyst can see is how despotic and oligarchic their organizations are and when in action how they end up as one man shows. Public disillusionment with politics is rife. We are really running on borrowed time. And to top it up we keep writing about our pain knowing that it is all in vain.
A sensible analysis cannot discount the possibility of increased volatility in the public sphere in the years ahead. It is not an unlikely event that the hapless poor in poverty who comprise a whopping 60-precent of the population will bear the torment for far too long. For decades the top end of town has neglected their entrenched disadvantage.
The socialists and trickle down liberals alike have no policies that we know of to eliminate this disadvantage although the political rhetoric is on equity and welfare for the poor. Our poor are disadvantaged on two counts, poverty and ethnicity. The identity politics see only their poor but not the other poor. The greater inequality prevalent in the rural poor demands in my opinion greater redistribution as well as increased production in the rural sector. You may talk global economy till cows come home but nothing will succeed if the global is not sensitive to the local. It is about time that our new liberals understood this basic fact.
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