Rajapaksa’s Priceless Gift To Sri Lanka: An Opportunity To Reclaim The Nation From The “Impostures Of Pretended Patriotism”

By Jude Fernando –APRIL 21, 2022

Jude Fernando

“One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation, we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.” — Aldous Huxley

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” — Antonio Gramsci

The “vistas of prosperity and splendor” Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s (GR) regime promised are dead. Sri Lankans at home and abroad want members of the current regime to resign, return stolen wealth, and receive jail sentences as reparations for the harms caused to society so that people can regain control over their lives and their land. Despite Rajapaksa’s “empathetic” speech to the nation on April 11th, 2022, protestors remained firm in their demands. They scoffed and were indignant at his statement that he is pleased to see people carrying the national flag and his reminder that his government fought and granted the right for everyone to carry the national flag as they wish. Protesters were also quick to grasp the sinister warning of suppression implicit in his statement that that if protestors undemocratically remove 225 parliamentarians, there would be violence in the country.

GR’s regime has fallen into disarray and isolation as its attempts to seize the invaluable gift it gave to the nation has backfired, provoking protests in every country where Sri Lankans reside. The priceless gift? Creating conditions for unbearable shortages and exorbitant prices of necessities, has caused an unprecedented popular movement to emerge. The movement, targeting the regime and the political culture it represents, is a response to the ethnonationalist bubble that emerged following the defeat of the Tamil Militants, and the subsequent bolstering of it by the 20 0h Amendment to the Constitution which gave unprecedented powers to the president. This bubble provided ideological legitimacy for pitting majority Sinhala against Tamil and Muslim minorities and for the claim that Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s role during the civil war qualifies him as an effective leader capable of guiding the nation to prosperity without compromising the interest of ethnoreligious nationalism.

The dominant ethnonationalist ideology derives its basis from racist interpretations of religion, history, archeology, and land and culture of different communities inhabit it. This, together with the regime’s questionable alliances with foreign lenders, investors, governments, and media, as well as their control over the justice system and the state apparatus, was bolstered by the lies and coercion of voodoo prophets. Religious forces fueled the ethnonationalist bubble and sanctified it. Rather than changing the pre-war nationalism that portrayed select minorities as enemies of the nation, the regime became more complicit with the ethnonationalist forces that continued to racialize the nation’s collective identity. This resulted in ‘Jathiwayaday’ racist nationalism) rather than ‘Jathiikathyawa’ (inclusive nationalism), which has become a powerful force in the country’s political affairs.

Sri Lankan society bestowed exclusive rights on the Rajapaksa regime as the guardians and heirs of the ethnoreligious nationalist bubble, leading the regime to believe it was omnipotent and would be protected in power forever. The regime’s supporters up until now have been living in this bubble, projecting their fears, insecurities, and anxieties on to their imagined enemies withwould safeguarded them from them. People trusted the lies that underpinned the bubble. Those imprisoned by ethnoreligious nationalism exchanged the truth for lies, did not speak truth to power, and failed to empathize with the racialized victims of the narratives. Living in the bubble, they failed to recognize the harsh realities that threatened them. They either believed in the eternal power of the bubble out of fear or refused to accept a society not colonized by ethnoreligious nationalism. The shortage of food and gas, two essentials of everyday life, triggered the unthinkable: all forces that held the bubble together and branded it as holy have begun to unravel and become profane. People across the ethnic divide are “compelled to face with sober senses the real determinants of their lives and their relations with one another.”

The failure of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s (GR) regime illustrates the absurdity of ethnoreligious nationalism and demystifies its influence, which has affected power-swapping between various political parties since Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948. Ethnoreligious nationalism is an evolving ideology, and its roots date back to the Anagarika Dharmapala reforms. It enabled the ruling elites to indigenize their identity and leadership by racially dividing and conquering the nation. The freedom and prosperity that elites promised to the masses resulted in the disenfranchisement of the masses and the deprivation of their right to live in freedom and dignity. Following independence, and particularly after the introduction of open market policies in 1977, ethnoreligious nationalism’s role in “accumulation by dispossession” became more aggressive, expansive, and militant. Reaching an anticlimactic maturity under GR’s regime, ethnoreligious nationalism demonstrated its own internal contradictions and the limits of its influence on politics.

In the period under GR, ethnoreligious nationalist forces expanded their political role, giving the regime, and more particularly GR’s family, enormous power. The public became increasingly convinced that the regime is incompetent and unreliable in fulfilling its promises and discharging its duties while contributing to a widening inequality gap between those few who have built up their wealth and power by dispossessing the masses of the basic means and rights to survive. A demonstration of interethnic unity in the ongoing protests are a response to the existential threats that have disproportionately afflicted minorities for decades and are now threatening all, bringing to light that a political culture free of racism is a prerequisite for socially responsible governance. Demonstrators’ recognition of how ethnonationalist forces racially divided the masses and distracted them from their common experiences of deprivation over the course of a century will also open opportunities for dialogue about the relationship between racism and neoliberalism. Indeed, whichever political party a nation turns to for government, an inclusive political culture must flourish no matter who is elected to power.

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