Sri Lanka crisis & the 5 fatal flaws

 

Yesterday, I drew parallels between the Sri Lanka crisis and the Malaysian situation in detailing some of the major issues that have led Sri Lanka to the precipice of bankruptcy. I also mentioned some of the lessons to be drawn from the fall of “paradise”.

Today, I wish to write about the foundational flaws that exist in both Sri Lanka and Malaysia and how these brought Sri Lanka to its knees, and which are undermining Malaysia’s own growth and prosperity.

Perhaps I’ll talk about all the fundamental flaws that exist in Malaysia in a later column, but for now I wish to draw attention to five flaws that dragged Sri Lanka down so that we can learn from it.

These flaws were well explained by Asoka N I Ekanayaka, a professor emeritus, in The Colombo Telegraph of March 21.

He put the blame for Sri Lanka’s sorry state squarely on the shoulders of the voters. They had, he said in no uncertain terms, enthusiastically voted for their own destruction by electing the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government.

“That millions would of their own volition invite a cataclysm that might spell ruination for themselves and their families for generations to come is amazing. It is tantamount to an act of collective national suicide bordering on madness rarely seen in the history of nations,” he wrote.

Those who made the “fatal choice”, he said, came from every stratum of society. They included the well-educated, the semi-literate, the rich, the poor, learned professionals, “pampered government officials wallowing in the perks and privileges of high office”, “unlearned monolingual masses”, and “sanctimonious Buddhist monks, pastors and priests who habitually pay lip service to truth and justice” and the millions of their simple-minded adherents.

Ekanayaka accused most of the voting population, in particular the majority Sinhala Buddhists, of being fundamentally racist, indifferent to corruption, inherently selfish, basically foolish though imagining themselves to be wise, and being “afflicted with a malignant distorted religiosity”.

“Firstly, there is the indisputable ingrained racism of the Sinhala Buddhist masses of this country amidst a chauvinistic attitude to minorities that seems to cut across the entire social spectrum. Admittedly these days such attitudes are subtle and well disguised.”

He said this racism did not, for instance, manifest in “burning Tamils alive (as occurred in 1983), arson and looting of Tamil shops and homes at regular intervals (from 1956 onwards)”, and defacing Tamil name boards in Colombo as before. The racist attitude towards minorities today, he noted, was reflected, for instance, in the complete absence of any moral outrage about such atrocities.

“The Americans may have elected a black man as president a mere 150 years after the abolition of slavery. But in Sinhala Buddhist Sri Lanka a Tamil or Muslim cannot dream of being elected to that office for another 1,000 years! That is the basic racist mindset of the 69 lahks (6.9 million) voters who now groan with discontent amidst a catastrophe which they themselves asked for.”

Saying Sri Lanka was rife with corruption, Ekanayaka added: “It is surely unrealistic to expect a corrupt population to vote for an honest government that might abolish corruption.”

Talking about corruption, Sri Lanka had a score of 37 out of 100 in Transparency International’s 2021 corruption perception index, where zero means highly corrupt and 100 means cleanest. Malaysia fared better, with a score of 48 but that’s not exactly a huge difference, and certainly not something to be proud about.

Corruption has damaged Sri Lanka badly and we have to learn from it. Most Malaysians do not believe the government is doing enough, especially when it comes to people in power. I fear corruption has become part and parcel of Malaysian life, especially in politics and the civil service.

Businessmen have said that things don’t move unless “incentives” are offered. Some corporations even set aside money for “cost of doing business” in Malaysia.

The government would do well to urgently adopt measures proposed by Transparency International-Malaysia and other anti-graft NGOs, especially the call to make the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission independent and answerable to Parliament.

Ekanayaka wrote that another attribute of the majority of Sri Lankan voters was selfishness and a lack of compassion for the suffering of the minority races and the injustices done to them over the years.

“Hundreds of weeping women may be pining for their husbands and sons who disappeared and were probably murdered years ago. But they were not my relations, so who cares? That’s the attitude.”

Another attribute of the Sri Lankans, according to Ekanayaka, is that they are “basically foolish though imagining themselves to be wise”. They demonstrated this by voting for the present “family oligarchy of very modest intelligence to rule over them with the absolute power of a constitutional tyranny”.

He said it was the public’s naivety that enabled politicians to “spit in the face of the population with impunity every night on TV with blatant lies, deceptions and double speak, a fraction of which would damn their political career instantly in a more intelligent society”.

Is this the case also in Malaysia? I wouldn’t use the strong words that Ekanayaka uses but lies, deceptions and double speak are part of the routine of almost all our politicians.

For instance, they’ll promise you all manner of things in their manifesto and after winning say they can’t fulfil everything because they never expected to win. For instance, they’ll deny the existence of a scandal and then later, when found out, act as if they did no wrong and try to charm you into forgiving them. For instance, they’ll talk a lot about multiracial unity and about everyone being part of one family but then initiate programmes that benefit their own race or vote bank.

Are Malaysian voters naïve? Are they selfish? Reluctantly, I have to say that many Malaysian voters are naïve and to some extent selfish.

Ekanayaka claimed that Sinhala Buddhists, who form the majority of the population, were defined by a “primitive distorted religiosity that makes a mockery of true religion”, adding that these were the “docile millions who are regularly manipulated by a rapacious militant nationalistic Buddhist establishment. They constitute the base of a Sinhala Buddhist government which proudly panders to them and cares for no one else”.

Writing in the same newspaper, on Jan 28, Dr Ameer Ali of the School of Business & Governance, Murdoch University, Western Australia, said: “Overall, the prevailing economic disaster is the cumulative effect of Sri Lanka’s majoritarian democracy, which failed to incorporate the synergy of the nation’s ethnic and cultural heterogeneity in the struggle for economic growth, a factor sadly ignored by local economic experts and development advisers.”

He went on to say: “Although political Buddhism in the immediate aftermath of independence arose as a legitimate response to nearly 450 years of political and cultural subjugation of Buddhists by three Western Christian powers, it blossomed thereafter and metamorphosed into an aggressive ethno-religious ideology aiming not only to claim total ownership of the country but also to deny equal citizenship to members of local minority communities.

“Today’s authoritarian GR (Gotabaya Rajapaksa) regime, brought to power by a coalition of Sinhala-Buddhist supremacists, represents the epitome of that ideology, which has made other ethnic and religious minorities composing nearly 30% of the country’s population disconnected to the regime’s so called development efforts.”

Ameer added: “From the 1948 disenfranchisement of Indian Tamils through to the 1956 Sinhala Only Bill, the 1972 constitution elevating Buddhism alone to the foremost place followed by a series of state initiated pro-majoritarian policies under different governments on education, public administration and land distribution, and right down to the current agenda of legal homogenisation under a controversial One Country One Law task force headed by a militant Buddhist monk, has left the ethnic and religious minorities experience the tyranny of Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarianism.”

Noting that Sri Lanka would continue to suffer until measures were taken “to reconnect the disconnected with the struggle for economic growth”, Ameer ended by saying that there was “nothing more valuable as productive assets than a country’s people”.

I agree. The more any nation is able to involve all its citizens actively in nation building, the better progress it will make. To do this, it must have an inclusive attitude and implement inclusive policies and programmes, not divisive ones.

An effective or sane government will get all its citizens on board and chart a direction in which everyone happily plays a role and where everyone shares equally in the benefits.

Are Malaysia’s leaders prepared to do this? Are they matured enough for such a promising adventure?

I don’t know if it’s too late for Sri Lanka, but Malaysia can certainly learn and return to better times. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.