Credential inflation and semantic drift

Wednesday 18th December, 2024

A new Speaker was elected unopposed yesterday in Parliament. Dr. Jagath Wickramaratne has succeeded Speaker Asoka Ranwala, who had to resign last week due to his failure to prove his academic credentials. It is popularly said in this country that a person who has been beaten with a firebrand is scared of even fireflies. So, Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya and Leader of the House Bimal Ratnayake carefully avoided referring to Wickramaratne as ‘Dr’ when they proposed his name and seconded it, respectively. They may have done so lest they should provoke heckles from the Opposition members, who are making the most of the doctorate scandal in a bid to recover lost ground.

In the run-up to last month’s general election, the JVP-led NPP paraded the doctorates of its candidates to make them out to be superior to their counterparts fielded by other political parties. Its propagandists extolled their academic and professional achievements to the point of queasiness. Today, the government is wary of calling even a qualified medical practitioner a doctor upon his elevation to the Speaker’s post! Such has been the political cost of credential inflation that some NPP MPs resorted to boost their images.

Sri Lankan politics has not only caused the deterioration of economic, political, social, cultural and legal institutions but also led to the devaluation of concepts, ideas, ideals, and titles. Languages evolve and words acquire new meanings mostly through repeated association, which can be contextual, metaphorical, political, social, cultural or otherwise. We saw how the adjective, ‘righteous’, underwent semantic bleaching and drift due to being subject to sloganeering under the J. R. Jayewardene government, which promised to build a ‘righteous society’. ‘Righteous’ took on the exact opposite of its lexical definition and became synonymous with ‘unrighteous’, paradoxical as it may sound, in the political context in that socio-political milieu. The phrase, ‘righteous society’, evokes one’s dreadful memories of election malpractices, political violence, disproportionate counter terror, cronyism, corruption, etc., which the Jayewardene regime was notorious for. The Mahinda Rajapaksa government promised ‘a bright future’, which became a synonym for ‘pie in the sky’ to all intents and purposes. ‘Good governance’ or ‘yahapalanaya’, became devalued and took on a whole new meaning thanks to the UNP-led UNF, which misused it to dupe the public and capture power in 2015. ‘Prosperity and Splendour’, which the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government promised, eventually became coterminous with ‘bankruptcy and untold hardships’. The word, ‘renaissance’ is undergoing semantic bleaching under the incumbent NPP government as there has been no radical departure from the past either politically or economically, and what we are witnessing is stagnation.

The JVP-led NPP came to power by looking down upon almost everything previous governments had done since Independence. It called Sri Lanka’s post-Independence history a curse, and offered to put the country right and achieve progress. Its devaluation drive led to an unprecedented erosion of public trust in vital institutions, especially Parliament, which it vehemently condemned as a den of thieves. Some NPP MPs’ pretence to academic excellence has caused the public to treat academics and other professionals with suspicion and doubt their credentials. Worse, it is thought in some quarters that the courtesy title, Dr, can be as derogatory as ‘pickpocket’, etc., when used before the names of those who are neither doctorate holders nor medical practitioners! Hence, Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara’s complaint to the CID that there has been a sinister attempt to discredit him by placing the title, Dr, before his name on the parliamentary website.

The NPP sought a mandate to clean the Augean Stables by the Diyawanna lake and ensure that the national legislature would be full of educated, intelligent, patriotic men and women of integrity. It received an unprecedented mandate for that mission. But today it has had to put its own house in order by ridding itself of mountebanks who have been exposed for their fake academic credentials before it carries out its much-advertised clean-up campaign.